'He wakes up ready to go': Walden brings passion, energy to UTEP football

Yes, Scotty Walden always has that much energy, and no, all that jumping around is not an act.

UTEP's 27th head football coach made quite a splash when he was introduced to a packed house in Memorial Gym in December, where the 34-year-old literally dropped the mic so he could better exhort 3,200 fans into a hopping-up-and-down frenzy to match his own.

That first impression was not a show. That is the Miners' new football coach.

Always been this way

"He wakes up ready to go," his wife of 10 years Callie Walden said. "He's always been that way."

Ask anyone who has known him for any length of time and the words that emerge are "high energy" and "genuine". Those are attributes that define Walden.

That's how, when he was a 22-year-old graduate assistant at Sul Ross, he picked up the title of offensive coordinator. That's how he became the youngest head coach in the NCAA four years later at East Texas Baptist, then the youngest coach in Division I in 2020 at Austin Peay and now the second youngest coach in the FBS (Arizona State's Kenny Dillingham is five months younger).

Walden covers a lot of ground in not much time, which happens when someone's foot is always on the gas pedal.

"Scotty is wired, he has tons of energy and he's the same guy every day," said Josh Eargle, a former head coach at East Texas Baptist who hired Walden as his offensive coordinator in 2013 (Eargle is currently an assistant at Florida International).

"When he wakes up in the morning he hits the ground running. It doesn't matter if it's off-season, in-season, practice, a game, he's going to be floating in that stadium."

"Everything at all times," said UTEP receiver Trey Goodman, who followed Walden from Peay. "It's extremely consistent, it's not just a front. Whether it's 4:30 in the morning, 10 p.m. at night, it doesn't matter what time it is, he's always intense, active and energetic. It's consistent."

"He's all in," said Wayne Schroeder, the former Sul Ross head coach who thought to make his graduate assistant a coordinator a decade ago. "It's not like on Monday and Tuesday he's high energy, he brings that same intensity to every practice and every preparation."

"Genuine," said Phil Young, his high school coach at Cleburne in the Fort Worth area. "He's one of those rare finds you get, he's never too big for you."

That comes naturally for Walden. He was born excited.

"That's who I am," he said. "Whatever type of energy you bring, be you. I wish I could come in and be a little calmer, but that's not who I am.

"Recruits, parents will ask, 'Is he always like that?' Sorry, I am. My wife will be like, 'I'm sorry, he is, I've tried, trust me.' It's part of my personality, the other part is I love what I do. I'm passionate about it, I couldn't see myself doing anything else."

The rise

As his 34 years indicate, his path to UTEP wasn't a long one as coaching lifespans are measured, it was a straight, short line, but it was busy.

There were two high schools and three colleges as a player, then four college coaching gigs before UTEP. They all set Walden on a path to El Paso. He took ideas from each stop, collected mentors and did it all knowing he wanted to spend his life around football.

His high school coach Young, who Walden calls a father figure in his life (Walden had a good relationship with his own father growing up, he still does, but it was a long-distance one), remembers meeting Walden in 2006.

A quarterback in Hurst LD Bell's program as a sophomore (Walden grew up watching Euless Trinity's Trevor Vittatoe play quarterback; Vittatoe is now UTEP's all-time passing leader), Walden knew he was transferring to Cleburne over the summer for his junior year and introduced himself to Young.

Walden wanted to know what he needed to do to in the spring at Bell to prepare for his junior year in a new program. Young gave him the hardest task he could think of.

"If you want to have a chance to compete I want you to get on the track team and run the quarter mile," Young recalled. "The quarter mile will show me if you're really committed and it will make you a better player.

"It's the toughest event, the toughest thing you can do in the spring. Everybody wants to get out and throw the ball around, but if you want to be a tougher, more competitive, never-back-down type of guy, run the quarter mile."

The next time Young saw Walden he had a better idea of the quality of person he was picking up.

"Two months later, right before the semester ended, he came up, 'Here are my times in the quarter,'" Young recalled. "I said, 'You actually did it?' 'Heck yeah, you asked me to.'

"I knew right then, wow — there were no eyes on him, I asked him to do one thing like that, it was really difficult. I never checked on him, called on him, and he did it. I felt like then, 'I've got a guy who really wants to win.'

"He has leadership qualities you can't pour in to someone, they have to be innate. Right then I felt like this guy is going to be a good leader."

With so many coaches in his life, Walden drew inspiration for each of them and that started with Young.

"He was very demanding, but a phenomenal Christian," Walden said. "He knew how to turn it on, turn it off, be a hard-nosed coach, but also what it looked like to be a Christian father and a Christian husband.

"I went to his house, he'd invite me over, and seeing that interaction between him and his family, I wanted to be a football coach. There was no doubt in my mind when I met him."

Homecoming King

Walden was at Cleburne for two seasons, where he helped turn the program around as a quarterback and was elected Homecoming King. About the only thing he wasn't a natural at was math, so he asked "the pretty girl in front of me" for help in Algebra class.

That, of course, was Callie Phelps, now the mother of 3-year-old Luca and Maverick, who is due on Feb. 17.

"Everyone took to him very fast," Callie Walden said of his arrival at Cleburne. "He was the same Scotty Walden (El Paso) has gotten to know, are getting to know. People are drawn to him. He came in and everyone loved him almost instantly."

Despite his obvious leadership qualities, colleges weren't high on a 5-foot-9 quarterback, so he took his only scholarship offer, to NAIA Dordt University in Iowa.

That ended up being too far from Callie (she went to Tarleton State out of high school before graduating from North Texas; Callie and Scotty didn't live in the same town, even in high school, until their marriage in 2014) and too cold for a son of Texas, so Walden ended up at Hardin-Simmons in Abilene in 2010.

Making it in Alpine

He enjoyed his time there but didn't play much as a quarterback and when he saw that the Hardin-Simmons staff was eying him as a safety for his 2011 senior season, he transferred to Sul Ross State in Alpine. That's a remote stop by most measures but it was a perfect fit for a football junkie.

"I loved Alpine, it's like a smaller version of El Paso," Walden said. "It was ball and school, a really cool experience."

It was cool for Sul Ross as well.

"He had an immediate impact on our team," said Schroeder, who is now at Alpine High School. "We didn't win a lot more games that year, but we were so much more competitive. As a coach I knew we'd turned the corner. We got better.

"He did a great job in being the leader of our team. He made a real impression on coaches and his teammates right off the bat. That doesn't always happen when someone comes in from the outside."

Schroeder jumped at the chance to add Walden as a graduate assistant that spring; Walden was thinking it would look good on a resumé to get him into high school coaching, perhaps with Young. What happened next is not something that often happens.

Schroeder was watching a spring practice, standing next to a donor, and that donor commented on how impressed he was with Walden's energy and coaching. Schroeder agreed and offered the job of coordinator to his graduate assistant.

Walden knew he had to take that offer but wasn't really sure what to do next, other than get to work.

"I remember immediately going to the library, the quietest place on campus, getting on a whiteboard and hashing it out," Walden said. "I wrote 0 to 99, I labelled the plays: Zero through 10, 11 through 20. Some of that stuff, the core of it is still in our system.

"It was a cool time. I didn't have a chance to learn from anybody, I threw together what I knew, what I thought."

He did send out "about 100 e-mails" to Division I coaches all over Texas asking if he could pick their brains, and he got two responses: Texas A&M offensive coordinator Kliff Kingsbury and Texas State offensive line coach Dennis Darnell. Walden met with them and is forever grateful to both.

"The biggest thing I took (from Darnell), 'You're 22-years-old, you're going to be dealing with kids your age or older,'" Walden recalled. "I was. I had a couple of receivers who were 24, my running back was 25, my quarterback was 23.

"Dennis said, 'You're going to have to draw the line. You are going to have to make it clear you're not their buddy, you're their coach.' I'll never forget that. I'm forever indebted to those guys for helping me on my journey."

Through the ranks

That season Sul Ross averaged 581.9 yards per game under its graduate assistant/coordinator to lead Division III in total offense, and Walden took a job as offensive coordinator at East Texas Baptist in Marshall under Eargle.

"We were trying to fix a program that didn't have a lot of momentum in different areas: talent pool, previous wins, previous seasons," Eargle said. "I had a philosophy about how we were going to do it.

"For me, on offense, Scotty was the answer. You talk to him, he had a passion for Xs and Os, but he really put a focus on who that X and who that O really was. Who the people were was important to him.

"He needed an opportunity to work out kinks and put all of his thoughts and passions out there on the football field. It didn't take long for it to take off."

After three years as offensive coordinator, Walden was promoted to head coach of East Texas Baptist in 2016 at age 26 where he was the youngest coach in the NCAA. After leading the Tigers to a 7-3 mark, he took a job as the receivers coach at Southern Miss in Conference USA.

"When I got into the college game I fell in love with it — the competitiveness, the recruiting," Walden said. "I still remember my first recruiting call, outside the gym at Sul Ross. I called a defensive player, I remember it vividly. I wanted to coach at the highest level.

"I kept those goals. When I got the job at East Texas Baptist those goals got stronger. I literally wake up every day and I feel like I'm living out a dream."

To the big time

After two years as Southern Miss' receivers coach he was promoted to co-offensive coordinator and held that into the 2020 season, the COVID year. One game into the season head coach Jay Hopson abruptly resigned and the 29-year-old Walden was promoted to interim head coach.

"There was a team meeting at 4; at 3:40 the AD offered me the job," Walden said. "I had 20 minutes to go gather myself, then go talk to the team.

"That was a challenging year. I wanted to do well, my first time getting an FBC coaching job, but it was such a volatile situation. That experience shaped me a lot, molded me a lot. I coached three games there, we were losing players left and right. I learned a lot of things about myself."

After three games as the interim at Southern Miss in October, Austin Peay, which like most schools in the shuttered FCS was preparing for a spring COVID season, came calling.

Walden said he hated leaving Southern Miss mid-season with the COVID mess at its peak, he would have been a candidate for the full-time job, but given the opportunity at Austin Peay, he and Southern Miss made a mutual decision that it was best for him to take that job.

Walden inherited a good Austin Peay program and sustained that success, winning back-to-back conference championships in 2022 and '23.

Along the way, even though he was usually the youngest coach among his peers, he quit feeling young. There is a part of Walden that's an old soul.

"Early on it was really cool; now I feel like an old guy," Walden said. "I feel like it's old news now. People ask me, 'Sul Ross when you're 22, how'd you connect with your players?' I've always kind of been — square, nerdy — I was a ball guy. I was a ball junkie.

"I wasn't a big go-out guy. I'm not saying I never did, but I wanted to watch film. I wanted to throw routes on air. I pushed those guys. I remember yelling at those receivers, I wanted to throw routes, they wanted to go inside.

"It was almost like a natural fit into a coaching role. I think about character and actions. That matters more to me than age."

At time, though, his youth shows.

"When we were in Clarksville (Tenn. at Austin Peay), we'd have the players over to our house as a hangout spot," Callie said. "One of the first times we had the players over, they were playing a video game and they kept beating him. Scotty wouldn't let them leave until he finally won. 'Y'all can go now.'

"He's the most competitive guy I've ever met, but he's humble about it. He's not going to talk a lot, he's going to go out and be competitive with everything he does."

"He's fun," his receiver Goodman said. "If coach Walden was my age we'd be really good friends. He's really energetic, a lot of fun, high energy. He's a guy that rewards you for doing what you're supposed to do.

"All you can ask for in a coach is someone who helps you love the game as much as he does."

To UTEP

The success at Austin Peay gave Walden the chance to come home to Texas. While UTEP flies under most radars, Walden followed the Miners growing up when Vittatoe was playing here in the late 2000s and occasionally played as UTEP on EA Sports college football game's dynasty mode.

"Man, they are a Texas school, they are underrated, let's build them up," Walden recalled. "I remember vividly doing that."

He represents a different kind of hire for UTEP football. Of his three predecessors, Mike Price's first move in 2004 was to hire his sons as assistant coaches. Sean Kugler in 2013 missed out on that, as his oldest son was an offensive lineman at Purdue and his youngest son had just signed with Michigan.

Upon his hiring in 2018, previous coach Dana Dimel gave his graduate son a scholarship to play fullback.

Luca Walden turns 4 on March 11 (he was born the day America began careening toward the COVID shutdown). There are prospects for the future.

"Daddy let's play football!" Scotty Walden relates. "I'm a quarterback, let's throw it around. 'Daddy, I don't want to catch, I want to tackle.' He'd sprint, throw me the ball, I'd catch it, he'd run up and wrap my leg up. I had to do this 30 minutes per day. He's on my leg. Let's throw it around. 'I don't want to catch, I want to tackle.'"

Said Callie: "Luca is a copy-paste version of Scotty, through and through. The energy, the competitiveness."

The future

Scotty Walden takes over a Miner program that hasn't had back-to-back winning seasons since 2004-05, one that had rebuilt its talent under Dimel but lost much of that to the transfer portal during this coaching change.

How will Walden get this going?

"You believe," Walden said. "You have to believe in where you're at. If you don't believe in where you're at, if you don't believe in the infrastructure that's in place, you don't have a chance.

"I don't care what job it is, but especially this one: Any job, you can find a million reasons you can't get it done, but you better be focused on million reasons you can get it done. We're going to focus on why we can get it done.

"There is a perception of El Paso outside the city limits that we have to overcome because it's not true. This is a phenomenal town with a real school, a real stadium, real facilities. We have sunshine 320 days of the year.

"Why can't this place be a winner?"

Walden gets a chance to answer that question in the years to come. It's a question he'll attack with the trademark energy that forged his path to El Paso.

Bret Bloomquist can be reached at bbloomquist@elpasotimes.com; @Bretbloomquist on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on El Paso Times: Scotty Walden brings energy to UTEP Miners football