Slightly more than eight months before competition begins, West Field High School has head coaches for three fall sports. Earlier this month, Jantzen Smith Ryan was named the volleyball head coach.

This week, the school announced it hired Mike Knight as its new football head coach and Cade Miller as its girls soccer coach.

The school will hold a meet-and-greet at 5 p.m. Monday, Dec. 11, at Rocky Mountain Junior High for people interested in meeting all three coaches.

West Field, in the western Weber County locale of Taylor, is scheduled to open for the 2024-25 school year. The school’s boundaries draw from current Fremont and Roy high school boundaries.

Knight has been Syracuse High’s football head coach for seven seasons after nine years as an assistant coach. He’s taught at Syracuse for 16 years.

“It’s very bittersweet. I’m really excited to get up there and really put my stamp on something and work with new people and have an opportunity to really make something grassroots, make something grow from scratch, you know,” Knight told the Standard-Examiner. “But on the other end of it, I came here 23 years old, right out of college and I’ve been here 16 years and it’s been — I have so many awesome memories here.”

Knight previously worked with West Field athletic director Mike Russell for two years while Russell was Syracuse’s boys basketball coach. Knight, who has a 46-33 head-coaching record with two region titles at SHS, said he was looking for a change.

“6A football is really, really competitive, and not that I don’t love the competition, but I was able to see what some of those other schools in 5A did and I feel like that could be duplicated there and be consistent at a new school like this,” Knight said. “I’ve felt like we’ve had some really, really good football teams here and the early exits (from the playoffs) have been discouraging.”

On the soccer side, Miller is a longtime club coach with stints at Wasatch, Forza and Avalanche soccer clubs, and has been an assistant boys soccer coach at Viewmont High, his alma mater, since 2016.

Miller and his family have lived in West Haven for several years and he’ll have two children attending West Field.

“I always said the only reason I wouldn’t coach at Viewmont is to coach there in the community in which I live, with the people I see every day. So when this came up, it was a no-brainer,” said Miller, who works in cybersecurity for Google.

Both coaches will start a long process of building programs from the ground up, which includes assembling assistant coaches, ordering equipment and more.

There’s a ton of work involved with starting new sports programs, which fits one of Miller’s coaching tenets.

“My biggest motto is we welcome the work — I say we because I include myself in that. We’ll train hard, we’ll practice hard, then we have a lot of fun,” Miller told the Standard-Examiner.

Regarding athletic eligibility at the affected Weber County high schools, transfer students will be immediately eligible next school year if they transfer in the following ways by May 1, 2024: from Weber to Fremont, Fremont to Weber, Fremont to West Field, and Roy to West Field.

Knight’s move from Syracuse to West Field is the latest in a turbulent offseason for coaching changes.

There were two long-expected football openings with West Field and Box Elder, then changes also came at Clearfield and Fremont.

Fremont and Box Elder are almost done hiring. The Clearfield position remains posted on the Davis district website and the Syracuse job isn’t posted yet.

There have also been girls soccer head coach openings at Weber, Bonneville and Davis this offseason.

Connect with reporter Patrick Carr via email at pcarr@standard.net, Twitter @patrickcarr_ and Instagram @standardexaminersports.

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