Thanking family, friends and mentors Tuesday evening at Stewart Stadium’s Youngberg Football Center, Kjar spoke as the 13th head coach in Weber State’s football history.

“There’s been so much support and everybody’s been great through this process,” Kjar said while thanking university brass, and while taking a beat to talk through some emotion. “The hiring committee believing in a high school guy from a small town, it’s a dream come true for me. I’m not going to waste any time considering that; I’m going to get to work in a hurry and what I need to do here to build this program up.

“I can’t thank that group enough. It’s a big leap by them. That’s not lost on me, for sure. I get the importance of that, and it’s important to me to prove them right.”

The native of Kemmerer, Wyoming, and juggernaut builder of high school dominance in the suburbs of Salt Lake’s southern valley that drew national attention and produced two first-round NFL quarterbacks, was announced earlier in the morning as WSU’s hire and it’s pedal to the metal from here as Kjar puts together a coaching staff and preps for the never-ending calendar of college football.

CONNER BECKER, Standard-Examiner

“It’s been a little bit of a whirlwind over the last couple weeks,” he said.

At 6-foot-4, Kjar towered over the lectern placed at the front of the team auditorium with an audience that included his wife and children, which include current WSU wide receiver Noah Kjar, interim university president Leslie Durham, and several members of the hiring committee, including athletic director Tim Crompton, vice president Mark Halverson and faculty athletics representative Bryant Thompson.

Thompson had family there, too: father Fred Thompson, one of the godfathers of high school sports coaching in Northern Utah, and brother Erik Thompson, recently retired as teacher and football coach at Ogden High School. Big Sky Conference commissioner Tom Wistrcill and Ogden School District superintendent Luke Rasmussen, the latter once a starting center for WSU football, joined the room, too.

Kjar mentioned Erik Thompson a few times when describing how, though absent a college coaching résumé, his experience running high school programs will translate to Division I football.

It’s all about the work ethic.

“A high school head coach … you’re the strength and conditioning coach,” Kjar said. “Developing all that for your players, that takes a while just to be able to do that. Then you’re doing all your scheme stuff, your game planning, your personnel management … and developing those aspects of it, working on weaknesses and analyzing that.

“I worked my butt off,” he continued. “A typical day maybe in the spring for me was get there at six in the morning and run a 2-hour lifting session with our high school football kids, then go teach four periods a day with a 30-minute window in between there, and then go out to track practice for two hours. And if I’m not at track that day, I’m jumping into a driver’s ed car for a couple more hours after that.

“The work ethic side of it isn’t going to be that much of a change, it’s just that now … I get to focus more on football, I get to work on our kids, work on our young men here and figure out better ways to serve them and build up this program.”

After a patently absurd 181-39 record as head coach of nine seasons at Corner Canyon and eight before that at Jordan High, with seven state championships between them — and with tenure as a public school teacher — why Weber and why now?

WSU’s most successful head football coach in Jay Hill, now BYU’s associate head coach, stood in the back of the room, alongside most, if not all, those currently working as assistant coaches at Weber State. And he’s one of the reasons Kjar wanted the job.

“There is something special, I believe, about Weber State,” Kjar said. “There’s been good coaches here before but I really think what Coach Hill was able to do here, how special that was — really show how competitive and how good you can be here, and how you can build it with local athletes. He really built this place to be special with Utah kids and really established that well, and I feel like I can do the same thing.

“It felt like this is a hot commodity for a coaching job,” he continued. “It might not come open, if I didn’t jump at it this time, for a long time. … It felt right. It felt like that because this is such a special place, there are so many good people up here. The university does want to put a good product out there and build something special.”

His presence, Hill said, was simply to show full support for Weber State football.

“I love Weber State, I support Weber State and I want them to know I support Weber State. I love this place.” Hill said. “Eric Kjar knows football, and he knows recruiting the state of Utah. … He’ll do a great job motivating these young men and they’ll be lucky to have him as head coach.”

Hill said he’s also there to help.

“I want these guys to be successful, so if he has questions or there’s anything I can help with, absolutely,” Hill said.

So what are Kjar’s key tenets?

Toughness, for one. Kjar said that’s built through strength and conditioning, and through how he paces practice.

“Toughness, discipline and teams that execute really well — that’s what our teams, we want to look like,” Kjar said.

He said schematically, he wants aggressive players who can win all three phases of the game, especially defense. He knows Corner Canyon’s reputation was built on high-octane offense and top-level QB play but that defense was really the foundation of his repeated success.

“They’ve been really good here over the course of the years and they’ve had good coaches across the board, even up until just recently,” Kjar said about Weber State’s defense. “They’ve been really good on that side of the ball so we’ll continue to try to build in that tradition and return to some of those Coach Hill days where Weber State was one of the top teams in the country defensively.”

Otherwise, it’s about fun. He’ll have 255 more days before the 2026 season opener to make his mark.

“We try to tempo up a little bit and try to have the kids have fun,” he said. “It’s a grind, it’s a tough job, and they’re getting their education. So they need to enjoy what they’re doing. We need to have fun. It’s going to be tough and disciplined, but they’re going to have while they do it. That’s my goal.”