We’re Talking Sports Ep. 11 - Roland Youngling

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**Will** (1:00)
All right, good morning. Welcome to another edition of We're Talking Sports with Will and Ron.

**Ron** (1:06)
Good morning.

**Will** (1:06)
Good morning, bud. How are you?

**Ron** (1:07)
I'm doing well. How are you doing?

**Will** (1:09)
Doing good, man. Good show you had earlier.

**Ron** (1:10)
Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

**Will** (1:12)
I'll have to go back and listen to the rest of it. I think it's good to see all of that. But yeah, good, good guests.

**Ron** (1:17)
Yeah, thank you.

**Will** (1:18)
Yeah, appreciate it. Absolutely, man. So we've got a great guest for us today.

**Ron** (1:22)
We do.

**Will** (1:23)
Yeah, coach, head coach, not just any coach. He's the head coach.

**Ron** (1:27)
Head coach.

**Will** (1:28)
Yeah, he's the one that used to remember when we had a head coach back in high school. Yeah, we hate to make us run sprints.

**Ron** (1:35)
Right. Stadiums and.

**Will** (1:37)
Stadiums and not letting us have a water break. I think they have to do that now.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:41)
They have to do that now.

**Ron** (1:42)
But yeah, after enough of us died, then.

**Will** (1:44)
Right. I miss those guys, right?
Yeah. So yeah, we've got coach Roland Youngling from Cholla High School. Welcome, coach.

**Roland Youngling** (1:55)
Welcome. Thanks for having me.

**Will** (1:56)
Yeah, no, absolutely. So tell us a little bit about your story here. How did you get into coaching?

**Roland Youngling** (2:02)
Well, of course, like you guys, I was talking with you earlier, playing football. And then, yeah, even when you're playing, you're like, why would you coach?
Why? Some of us are like, I think they do it just to make us run and get joy out of it. No, but played ball. And so was it throughout school, like college, taking teacher classes. And they're like, you know, I thought about it. I was like, yeah, you know, still be a part of the game. You know, we all want to still be a part of it, especially when it ends. And so I'm in college classes and they're always like, you know, teach your courses. Wait, you know, do your first couple of years before you start coaching and, you know, get your feet under your first. And I said, okay, I'll do that. And so show up to, what is it?
Oh, hell, I forgot what it's called now. Anyway, when you're not the teacher yet, but you go and you do the shadowing, whatever. Yeah, I forgot.

**SPEAKER_9** (2:54)
I can't think almost like an internship.

**Roland Youngling** (2:55)
Yeah, there you go. Right. And so student teacher. There you go. Student teacher. They took me a second.
And the first day I walk into the meeting and a guy that I actually went to school because I actually graduated from MFI. And so I stood and taught there as well. Oh, OK. And so I walk in the first day and a guy I went to high school with. He was teaching there still is Brandon Kuhn. He's the baseball coach over there. Cool. And he's like, oh, hey, good to see you. Blah, blah. Let me introduce you to the coach. It was Jorge Mendivy, been around a long time.
And so I go up and, hey, coach. And he's like, you want to coach? And I was like, all right, sure. And so he was looking for an O-line D-line coach. I said, yeah, I know that. And so I got into it. So I actually been coaching longer than technically been teaching. But wow. And so that's how I got into it. And just fell in love with it and stayed with it. So that's kind of the story.

**Will** (3:45)
Cool. Cool. And you're telling me you did play a little bit of college ball, right?

**Roland Youngling** (3:48)
Yeah. So when they had a team here at Pima, I was a long snapper, nothing glorious. And Coach Nugent, Pat Nugent, he was the coach there. So played for him.
Yeah. Good guy. Good guy. Yeah, he's somebody else. Because I know he's retired now, semi-retired. But he's retired from football. He'd be a good guy to talk to. He's probably way more knowledgeable than me.

**Will** (4:13)
Well, that's cool. So getting into Cholla football, how did you end up going from MFY to...

**Roland Youngling** (4:20)
So, Horham and DV retired. And so, you know, I was looking through and I was like, you know, I kind of want to start doing my own thing. You know, I want to now take on that role. And I had some of the guys, because we had a good group of coaches. And that's one thing I've learned is if you get a bad staff and, you know, they're fighting each other, it's not going to work out. So we had a good group. We were all friends. We'd hang out and, you know, outside of just coaching and things like that. And so some of us. Anyway, we always said whenever, because we played Cholla often, we always said they had a lot of people, they got talent, you know, they just hadn't put it together for whatever reason. Right. And so we were hearing, you know, rumors, you know, hey, Cholla is going to open up. And so I actually applied there. Amphi too, because they were tired. So I applied for both jobs, I was interviewed for both.