This fall, for the first time in two decades, Bear River High sought a new football head coach.

Earlier this week, the Bears found that coach a couple states away. The school announced Friday that Trampis Waite will be the Bears’ next head coach.

Waite currently teaches and coaches football at Eagle Point High School in Eagle Point, Oregon, a city of roughly 9,500 people northeast of Medford in southern Oregon. He’s a history teacher by trade and likely will teach that subject at BRHS.

A lot of Waite’s plans for the Bear River football team, which he spoke about in a phone interview with the Standard-Examiner on Friday, involve outreach to the youth football teams that feed into BRHS so players and coaches are familiar (not that they weren’t already) with the coaching staff.

“I want to build up those youth programs, I want to work with all those coaches at the youth level and middle school and, ultimately, I want to create some excitement going into Bear River,” Waite said. “Hopefully that will build some numbers, and with numbers comes depth and you need depth to win some football games, so hopefully that will start to build.”

Waite will do a meet-and-greet at 5:30 p.m. Monday, Dec. 20, in Bear River High’s gymnasium.

He replaces Chris Wise, Bear River’s all-time winningest coach, who the school removed as head coach earlier this fall after 20 seasons at the helm.

Waite graduated from Ontario High in eastern Oregon, then played quarterback at Eastern Oregon University, an NAIA school in La Grande, and coached there for two seasons (2016-17) after an injury ended his playing career.

He graduated from EOU with a bachelor’s degree in history and got his master’s degree in teaching from EOU as well.

Waite said he doesn’t have a ton of connections in Utah, but got a call from a friend who’s an assistant coach at Ridgeline High (in the same region as Bear River) who told Waite a little about BRHS.

“My dad was actually in Rigby, Idaho, for quite awhile so not too far from the area, so I was a little bit familiar with it. But once I got down there and saw the facilities and did the interview, I was like, this is a good spot,” Waite said.

His dad, Randy, is a longtime football coach in Idaho and Oregon, so Trampis grew up as a coach’s son and knew what he wanted to do from an early age.

“Even when I was playing still at Eastern (Oregon), I went to coaches clinics with him, I’d skip some workouts and get it approved and go to coaching clinics with my dad,” Waite said.

As for the name “Trampis,” no, he hasn’t met anyone else with the same name. Older folks hear the name and think he’s named after the main villain, which is spelled Trampas, from the 1960s Western TV show “The Virginian.”

“But then I have to tell them, no my dad just had a really good running back at one point, and his name was Trampis and he thought it was cool, so he named me Trampis,” Waite said. “But he cursed me. I can’t order anything at restaurants or anything because then they’re like, ‘are you sure? Are you sure that’s your name?’ Yeah, it is.”

Waite won’t be at BRHS full-time until early June, he said, but plans to make a couple trips to Utah in the spring to help oversee offseason activities at times.

Scheme-wise, Bear River’s been a few different things recently, with different types of spread and power run formations on offense.

“This past year (at Eagle Point) we ran a traditional spread, the year before we did a spread with kind of just a wing-back most of the time. We were a down blocking scheme for the most part, so we ran a lot of power, trap, counter, all those things. And in the passing game, a lot of it came from what I learned at Eastern, so it’s like a run and shoot offense a little bit,” Waite said.

He added he’d like to be more of a spread offense and zone blocking team — of course, any scheme is completely dependent on the athletes a given team has.

A lot will happen between now and Bear River taking the field for the season opener next August.

Waite’s wife, Jessica, is expecting the couple’s first child in January, Waite has to figure out the rest of the coaching staff, finish out his teaching contract in Oregon and then move to Utah to try and turn around a program that’s hit a rough patch the last four seasons.

“I’m just really excited about the community and how much they’re invested in the athletics program, really excited about leading the program,” Waite said. “It’s going to be tough, but I’m really excited to meet the players and start putting my own stamp on it and getting that thing started.”

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