Another season on the sideline for Gilbertson

KIRKLAND — For 34 years, Keith Gilbertson had a season to prepare for, practices to script, offenses to construct, defenses to attack.

For 34 years his biological clock always told him when it was time for college spring practices, or NFL minicamps. There always was another team to coach, another season on the sideline to anticipate.

Just like his father before him, Keith Gilbertson was a football coach. For as long as he can remember, he thought the game, taught the game, played it, coached it.

Growing up in Snohomish, football was talked about at the dinner table. Formations were drawn on napkins. Games were replayed from one meal to the next, one season to the next.

And since 1971, Gilbertson always had a team to coach. Name the job and he had done it. Graduate assistant at Idaho State, Western Washington and Washington. Offensive coordinator at Utah State and Idaho.

Assistant coach of the USFL's Los Angeles Express. Offensive coordinator at Washington, tight-ends coach and defensive assistant for the Seahawks. Head coach at Idaho, California, Washington.

He never was much for titles, though. Gilbertson just wanted the chalk.

But this spring, after he was fired two years into his reign at Washington, Gilbertson, for the first time in his adult life, was a coach without a team.

His clock was telling him it was time to get ready for another season. But reality told him there was no team and no season for him.

"It's like when you're a little kid and you went around to all your buddies' houses to see if they could come out and play football or basketball or baseball, and everybody had something to do and you didn't," Gilbertson said earlier this week. "It's like everybody had something to do, but you."

But as the weather warmed and his new hip improved, Gilbertson wanted to go back to work. It was time to coach. Time for the chalk.

"Once spring came, I was thinking, 'It's spring-football time, and I'm not doing anything,' " Gilbertson said. "Or, 'It's minicamp time and I'm not doing anything.' So you find other ways to fill up your time. I played some golf, but except for doing my crossword puzzles, I didn't really have a daily routine. Coaching is as much passion as it is anything, and when you don't have that, sometimes it's pretty hard to fill in your time."

Gilbertson was coming off two difficult seasons as head coach at Washington. Those seasons were filled with too much non-football stuff, too many meetings with lawyers discussing former coach Rick Neuheisel's lawsuit, too much time away from the game, too much time without the chalk.

He had hoped to have enough time to return to Washington the success it had enjoyed in the halcyon days when he was offensive coordinator. He never got the chance. The Huskies were 7-16 in Gilbertson's two seasons.

"It wasn't a dream situation, obviously," he said. "It was just such an odd set of circumstances. Crazy, crazy craziness."

But as difficult as those seasons were, Gilbertson never lost the passion for his profession. He still wanted to coach.

"I'd never been in this situation before. I'd always known where the next stop, the next step was going to be," he said. "And I was never a guy who was always looking for the next job. I've never shopped for a job. But I pretty much thought I wasn't going to have anything to do this fall. I pretty much resigned myself to that.

"It was kind of new territory, but every coach is going to have to go through it, where he sits at home and the phone doesn't ring. I kind of found out what that was like, but I just wasn't ready to not work."

Gilbertson even briefly thought that, for the first time in 34 years, he might have to consider a career change.

"I got to April and May and kind of looked around and thought, 'Well, maybe by next winter, I'll have to be making another career choice,' " said Gilbertson, 57. "I really had no idea what that would have been. I don't know what I would have been attracted to, or if anything would be attracted to me. Sometimes it's not what you want to do, but who wants you to do it. I was faced with that. Trust me, I thought about it."

In June, he sent a letter to Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren, telling Holmgren the hip was fine and he was wondering if there was any job he could do to help the Seahawks.

"There've been a couple of instances up here [Seattle] where, shoot, I thought I'd be a coach without a team," Holmgren said Tuesday. "I've never been in that situation before, but I don't like the thought of it. But at the same time, I wasn't giving Keith a handout.

"It's pretty much acknowledged that he's a really good football coach, and I knew I could find something for him to do. I wanted to make sure, heck, here he'd been a head coach, now he was going to be doing something with less responsibility. I put together a little job description and I wanted to make sure he was OK with it."

Holmgren created the position of offensive consultant. It is Gilbertson's job to look at tape of the defenses of the Seahawks' upcoming opponents and suggest ways to beat them.

"He's done way more than the job description I gave him," Holmgren said. "He's a really good football coach. He's good for me. I get pretty wound up sometimes, and I use Keith sometimes as a sounding board on stuff that no one else in the building knows about.

"He's pretty even-keeled, and I appreciate his counsel. He's really helped us. He's a good evaluator, a good film-study guy, and every week he brings me about a half a dozen things that he thinks are really good things after his film study. It's a little special project I have him working on, aside from what they're doing as a staff. I've used those suggestions in games, and most of the time they've worked."

Gilbertson downplays his role. He was reluctant to do this interview. "There are so many great coaches here and they're making a bigger contribution than me," he said.

This gig is exactly what the coach needed. It gave him some chalk, gave him a team, gave him another season of games to prepare for.

"For me, it's been a good stop. I'm really glad I have someplace to go and some great people to be around on a daily basis," he said. "The people you coach with, that's the essence of this whole experience for me. The camaraderie, the game planning and preparation, thinking about how to attack an opponent, you really miss those when you're out of the game."

Thirty-five years now and counting, the coach has a team and a game and another season to sustain him.

Steve Kelley: 206-464-2176 or skelley@seattletimes.com