Mike Van Diest excited to return to coaching

As the biggest hire in the Frontier Conference football offseason, Mike Van Diest hopes to lead the Montana State University-Northern defense to success in his first year as their new defensive coordinator. Van Diest is an NAIA legend as he led Carroll College to six national championships and 14 Frontier Conference championships during his 19 years as the head coach. After a few years away from college football, he is excited to be back.

"It's a blast. I had a great time last year at Helena High but I missed the college-age group," Van Diest said. "I missed grinding film with the coaches, I missed the different things that we get to do as a staff and then be out here kids at this age group."

Coming into the fall camp, Van Diest will replace last season's defensive coordinator Rich Stubler, who took a job in the Canadian Football League. As he gets to know his new players, Van Diest is grateful that the Lights played in the spring to give him more recent tape to review.

"I had a chance to watch these guys from a few months back and they're all back," Van Diest said. "You got a real recent evaluation of these guys. Now, with new coaches on our staff, our job is to evaluate them again for the first four or five practices and see what guys can fit into what piece of the puzzle."

After watching last season's film, Van Diest already knows some players who can help lead the defense this season. Van Diest hopes that second-team all-conference linebacker Dylan Wampler can continue making an impact as he led the conference with 50 total tackles this past spring. Other second-team all-conference players returning from last season that Van Diest looks forward to working with include defensive lineman Pat Hammond and defensive back Joshua Rose. Van Diest also believes that safety Hunter Riley could be a leader for them this season, but if not, there are plenty of other players on the roster that can step to the plate.

"It's too hard to pick three or four guys because I think there might be seven or eight guys that can step up. We just got to see how this unfolds," Van Diest said.

Early on, Van Diest has focused on the returning players to lead the team to success on defense this fall. However, he has made sure to get the defense's newcomers some reps as he tries to find out their role on the team.

"We're trying to get them some reps. I'm hoping after six or seven practices, we can get our starters pretty well set," Van Diest said. "Maybe after nine or ten practices, (see) who are the key backups that can rotate into there."

With only a few days of fall camp in the books, Van Diest is yet to decide what scheme his defensive players will use. For much of his career, Van Diest has run a defense with a 3-4 scheme. In their first few practices, the Lights' defense has practiced in a 3-4 scheme to see how his players gel with the scheme. Regardless of what defense he runs, Van Diest wants his players to come together as one unit and become close.

"I want them to just play as a team. I think they got to count on each other. It's very important that they hang out together off the field," Van Diest said.

With his defense being coached by an NAIA legend, MSU-N head coach Andrew Rolin will need to make sure the rest of his team will be improved by the time they start their season. The next step in their preparation for the upcoming season took place on Saturday as they practiced in pads for the first time this fall. While he has already seen progress over the first three days of camp, he still sees room to grow.

"We still have a lot of improvement. I'm going to say that, every day, we're always looking to improve, but some great execution on both sides of the ball," Rolin said. "A couple things we need to clean up defensively. We added some more defensively on their plate so that's going to happen. Mistakes are going to be made so we got to correct those mistakes on film and our kids are going to have to be coachable and be better than they were yesterday."

With the pads now on, the physicality in practice went up a notch. In their first competition drill of the day, the Lights ran one-on-one drills to knock the cobwebs off. Later in the day, the Lights ran seven-on-seven drills in their most game-like drill so far this camp. During the drills, Rolin gave all four of his quarterbacks a chance to run the offense. While the offense did not execute as well as he would have hoped, Rolin noticed improvement from the first few practices.

"Offensively, we're making great progress. We had a period today in seven-on-seven that was sloppy but other than that, much better execution in our team periods," Rolin said. "It's details, we're playing hard, we're playing physical. It just comes down to alignment, assignment and execution and playing with great technique and so we're playing with unbelievable effort right now."

Rolin and the Lights hope to take the next step forward this season after they went 0-4 in the shortened spring season. With the addition of Van Diest to their coaching staff, they now have championship experience to help them to reach those goals.