Interlake didn’t waste any time in its hiring of a new football coach to replace the departed Jason Rimkus, who is now the head man at Redmond after four years with the Saints.
Athletic director Art Kuehn announced David Myers, most recently at Garfield, will be the new coach in 2013 and he hopes for many years beyond.
“I think he will do a great job,” Kuehn said. “I’m just excited to have him here.”
Myers was pushed into the head coaching role for the Bulldogs during the 2011 season after then-head coach Kelvin Goliday was suspended after pulling his team off the field during the season-opening game against Lake Washington. Goliday was in his first year and eventually had his position terminated, leaving Myers to lead the program, which he did for the past two seasons.
“Anyone who is pushed into that situation and handled it the way he did, it said a lot about his character and his ability to deal with people,” Kuehn said. “He fits right in with the Interlake population and will really embrace it.”
It wasn’t the first time Myers faced a unique staffing situation.
A local product, Myers played quarterback for Roosevelt as a prep before spending time at Menlo College in California playing basketball and football. A transfer took him to the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, a Division III school where he did not play but instead began a coaching career with an inauspicious beginning.
The staff Myers joined at Lincoln High School was set for the fall, with him as a coach on the freshmen team staff, when a sudden resignation left only he and one other coach for the fast-approaching fall.
“Me and the other guy were sitting in a room,” Myers recalled. “He goes, ‘Well, I guess you have the offense and I have the defense.”
The staff was eventually solidified, with Myers playing a prominent role as the offensive coordinator, and the Abes made the playoffs that year and the next. Myers, a special education teacher, also spent time at Foster before landing at Garfield and now, as the next head coach for an Interlake program hoping to revitalize itself after moving back to Class 3A last year.
With a knowledge of the conference that spans back to his own playing days, Myers was anything but uncertain of the most important factor in building a KingCo title contender.
“Weight room is always number one in this league,” he said. “You have a lot of teams where this is a full-time deal for them. If you don’t lift weights, it is really easy to get physically outmatched.”
Interlake is also the only high school on the Greater Eastside that shares a youth feeder program, the Bellevue Bears, some of which will become Sammamish Totems by natural district boundaries and Myers said he hopes to build some connections to that group as well.
The new and former Interlake coaches will get a first-hand look at one another when the Saints meet Redmond and coach Jason Rimkus in a non-conference game early in the year, and Myers knows what he wants the on-field product to look like when the fall rolls around.
“I want them to know they can compete with anybody,” he said. “If we do things in the offseason, results start taking care of themselves.”
