The Heart of Football: Why the Small College Game Matters

By Phil Maas

Hugo House Publishers

Phil Maas loves just about everything about football and the coaching profession.

That shines through in his book, “The Heart of Football,” which focuses on what he believes are the merits of the sport, in particular at the lower levels.

Maas, 75, lives in Weed, Calif., a town of about 3,000 situated at the base of Mount Shasta, just an hour south of Ashland. A high school and junior college coach for 50 years, he still coaches running backs at College of the Siskiyous, a member of the California Community College Athletic Association located in Weed. Chris Knudsen, the well-respected long-time coach at Gresham’s Centennial High, says Maas is a bit of a legend in coaching circles.

“As a very young coach, he got in on the ‘fly’ offense and had huge success with it,” says Knudsen, who retired in 2018 after 32 years coaching the Eagles. “He’s kind of the inventor of that system that so many coaches have picked up through the years.”

Maas says he played freshman football at Washington in 1963 and has been enamored of the game ever since. “The Heart of Football” is a love letter to the sport, a combination of a motivational/instructional book and a telling of life stories.

Phil Maas

I skipped through the motivational segments — “How to be a Winner,” “Building Men of Strength, Character and Honor” — but had interest in Maas’ stories about individuals he has come across through his extensive coaching career. There is mention of some of Oregon’s great prep coaches, including men I know and respect such as Steve Coury, Faustin Riley and Knudsen. (Knudsen’s son, Tyler, is now head coach at College of the Siskiyous, where Maas works. The younger Knudsen played at Western Oregon and coached at Centennial and Benson before arriving at Siskiyous.)

There is mention of ex-Willamette University coach Mark Speckman and Jay Locey, the latter the former Linfield coach now at Lewis & Clark. I have deep respect for many of the coaches at our Northwest Conference schools, including Locey and Chris Casey at George Fox. There are longer segments with Jim Nagel, the long-time coach at Ashland High who also served on the staffs at Linfield and L-C, and Craig Howard, who coached many years at Southern Oregon. There is an extensive section on Ad Rutschman, the legendary Hall-of-Fame coach at Linfield and one of my favorite people.

Maas also features Matt Retzlaff, a former standout wide receiver at South Medford High who helped lead Southern Oregon to the 2014 NAIA national championship. Retzlaff is the grandson of another legendary coach — former Medford Black Tornado mentor Fred Spiegelberg — who is the father of Scott Spiegelberg, the ex-Oregon State quarterback who worked in the OSU athletic department for many years and I’m lucky enough to call a good friend.

Matt is the son of Scott’s sister, Shawn Retzlaff, and a young man who has made a name for himself playing professionally in Sweden. As a receiver/return specialist for the Stockholm Mean Machine, Matt was named MVP in leading his team to the league championship in 2018. Pressed into duty at quarterback for the final three games this season, Retzlaff led the Mean Machine back to the championship game. Stockholm lost to the Orebro Black Knights, but Matt was honored as his team’s MVP in the title contest. Amazingly, the 27-year-old Retzlaff — who also served as the team’s offensive coordinator this season — had never played QB before.

“Matt says he has greater appreciation for his two uncles (Scott and Barry Spiegelberg, the latter whom played QB at Willamette University) and cousin Joey (a former QB at Corvallis High),” Scott tells me. “He says, ‘Everybody has an opinion in the huddle on what the next play should be.’ I told him, ‘Welcome to a quarterback’s world.’ ”

At times, Maas ventures off on tangents, turning to subjects such as his bike ride from California to Washington DC in the summer of 1989, the great number of Nobel Prize winners who are Jews (22 percent, despite only one percent of the population being Jewish) and the success of East Indians in American society.

There are misspelled names (Brett Elliott, Pete Carroll), punctuation mistakes (“There are no Jack Tatum’s and Ronnie Lott’s roaming the defensive backfields …”) and factual errors (he writes that Billy Hunter “currently represents the NBA Players Association.” Hunter was fired as executive director of the NBAPA in 2013.).

Still, Maas puts a lot of effort into this book. In a late chapter, he makes a strong case that the benefits outweigh the physical risks in football, a stipulation with which I wholeheartedly agree. He offers statistical data and facts that support his assertion that though the game is violent and head injuries are possible, it’s more safe than it has ever been because of improvement in equipment and changes in rules, tackling and blocking techniques and practice requirements. Maas is also a proponent of flag football in youth football, which I’m in favor of.

The motivational stuff Maas emphasizes in this book may resonate with younger people, especially those interested in or already getting their feet wet in the coaching industry. He notes that college football recently celebrated its 150th anniversary and hopes “150 will become 300.” On that note, we also agree.

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