How Saguaro football's Cole Topham is helping create a national brand

Cole Topham’s road to the world of football is an unconventional one.

At 22 years old, he is an offensive analyst for Scottsdale Saguaro High School – one of the most storied football programs in Arizona with 13 state championships – and also serves as the creative director.

Topham, who just graduated last spring from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, helps in the film room for the Sabercats. He gets the tape ready for the coaches and athletes to break down after games and practices and tags certain plays that need to be highlighted. Topham is studying coach Zak Hill's playbook daily to get it down completely.

As the creative director, Topham runs all the social media brand accounts for the football team as he tries to establish a digital footprint in the current era of high school football. He takes photos, puts together videos, creates graphic art in Adobe Creative Office and posts the content online to spread the Saguaro "S" all over the internet.

The role of creative director is relatively new as society shifts to a world of Instagram likes.

“It’s extremely important because especially of open enrollment,” Hill said. “Kids can kinda go where they want to go, obviously there’s some consequences with all that. From an AIA standpoint, we can’t recruit as coaches. Having a social media presence, having our brand out there, having videos and pictures on these platforms that high school kids are on is big for getting more kids involved in your school and football program.”

All of this for Topham is in pursuit of working his way up in the world of football, whether that be on the personnel side as a coach, on the athlete-management side as a player agent, or wherever it may lead him.

How he got there to this point is nontraditional, to say the least.

“I grew up in Utah, not a huge football state by any means,” Topham said. “I joke with my girlfriend all the time about why I love football so much, and how improbable it is that I do love it so much because when you look at me – I barely weigh 140 pounds, never had the ideal football figure. I went to a small private school in Salt Lake City.  Basically, my only exposure to football was the Utah Utes and the NFL, and we didn’t even have an NFL team. I didn’t even grow up in a football town, and yet somehow, I grew to love the game.”

And he’s starting to make a career out of it.

He began in classical music playing the piano. While he didn’t become as talented as his twin brother, Austin, who eventually took over as the concertmaster of the Utah Youth Symphony, he can still sit down to this day and play Moonlight Sonata by Ludwig van Beethoven.

He then became an avid rock climber and ended up morphing into an elite one. In his senior year of high school, he was invited to the USA Climbing Sport and Speed National Championships in Philadelphia.

While attending Rowland Hall High School in Utah, his school was school so small that it didn’t even field a football team. Topham’s graduating class was about 80 kids.

So, how did he become an offensive analyst for one of the top high school football programs in the state?

In a tale built for the modern age, it all started with fantasy football and the platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

As a freshman at Rowland Hall, Topham started up an anonymous Twitter account to follow along for fantasy football purposes. He quickly realized how much he enjoyed the sport.

Soon, at 15 years old, he was answering questions from adults posed to the top analysts, like Matthew Berry and Field Yates, who were too busy to respond. As a teenager, he built a following doing this.

At the moment, Topham has 12,500 followers on Twitter.

“It was the right time, right place, where I came in with a surge of a bunch of other accounts like that,” Topham said.

Topham eventually got into draft analysis and began to dip his toes in the scouting world, doing his best to understand the language used by insiders of the game – all before he could legally drive a car.

Instead of going the sports management route, Topham decided that attending the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication was the best option for him. Topham wanted to improve his writing and research skills to work in the world of football.

Studying the game at ASU

While at the Cronkite School, Topham covered Arizona State football from an analytical angle. He would do weekly film breakdowns. It was there, in 2021, that he began to study the scheme of ASU offensive coordinator Zak Hill, who is now the head coach at Saguaro.

During his final semester of school, while covering spring practice and the next phase of his life looming on the horizon, Topham was trying to decide what to do next after graduating. While he had been studying the game, Topham felt there was room to grow.

“I felt like the only way to do that was to get on a staff, actually go through the motions of learning the playbook, communicating with the kids and coaches, being in those game-planning sessions, being in the film room seeing where I see stuff corrected and I’m able to learn first-hand,” Topham said. “Basically, I sent an email to a bunch of Open division schools. Zak emailed me back literally the next morning asking me if I could come in.”

After that, everything came together pretty quickly.

For Hill, it was a chance to take advantage of a skillset and fill a void in the program.

“He’s a hard worker,” Hill said. “That goes a long way. He loves football, wants to learn and be involved with what we’re doing, understand the operations of things and how they work behind the scenes in high school football. He’s interested in that. He’s breaking down film, inputting our data into Hudl (recruiting site) and being involved with that.”

Age wasn’t a concern at all, Hill said. If anything, it’s a bonus. Not far removed from graduating high school himself, Topham is able to relate to players on the team.

Topham's main duties as an offensive analyst for Saguaro are off the field. He’s still studying Hill’s playbook to get it down all the way.

“I think the biggest role I play as an offensive analyst is making sure that our players have the right tools in order to succeed when they’re watching film,” Topham said. “Whether that’s tagging our plays at practice, they know what the play call is. It just makes it easier for them to correct themselves and make the proper adjustments they need to improve as a football player.”

But that doesn’t mean Topham is just tucked away in a dark room.

He’s at every practice, waking up at 5 a.m. each morning, is on the sideline for all the games and even suits up when called upon.

“I’m also helping with quarterbacks in practice, being that receiver when everyone else is out on special teams and I’m just a body they can throw to,” Topham said. “Coach (Juston) Wood, who’s worked with Zak for several years, he’s running our quarterbacks and he’s been a great mentor to me, taking me under his wing.”

He’s not even a full year into the job, but Topham has already found the experience very rewarding. He achieved his goal of working out in football right out of college.

“I’m just getting my feet wet,” Topham said. “I’m a very small cog in a very large wheel and hopefully I’ll take on more responsibilities as I get more confident in myself and as a coach.”

Creating a national brand

Topham also serves as the creative director for Saguaro. That means he is in control of the team’s social media accounts and spearheads their digital platforms. He takes photos and does videos for the team that he then posts to social media platforms like X and Instagram.

It is part of the new landscape of high school football as programs try to make themselves as presentable and relatable as possible to the next wave of athletes coming in.

“The next goal is, we don’t want to just be the best brand in the state,” Topham said. “We want to be one of the best national brands, period. That’s my role from a social media and creative director. How do we elevate this, where we’re being taken seriously with Mater Dei, St. John Bosco, IMG, and all those other programs? Let’s actually put Saguaro on the map from a social media perspective.”

High school football in Arizona can feel a bit like the Wild West with players transferring left and right, so being relevant in the digital world is a must. Topham filled that need.

"He's got a ton of background in the media world," Hill said. "We needed someone that could do graphics, wanted to take pictures. We wanted to get our branding out there on our social media platforms, someone to take it and run with it. And he's done that. He's done an amazing job getting our guys' stuff out there, our logo. He has improved our Twitter and Instagram presence. He's been attacking it."

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: How Saguaro football's Cole Topham is helping create a national brand