Cal football today announced the addition of four new staffers to the progam in Offensive QC Kenny Hill, Defensive QC Allen Brown, Defensive GA Austin Taylor and Director of Recruiting Ops Ben Gaus.
Gaus returns to Cal after spending time at the University of Washington and St. Mary’s College with a strong background in compliance. Gaus will take over for Derek Haithcock, handling logistics, budgets, transcript eval, housing and more from a recruiting standpoint in his role as Director of Recruiting Operations. Haithcock took a posiion with the Denver Broncos as an assistant to head coach Nathaniel Hackett.
Hill comes to Cal from TCU. He started his career at Texas A&M at quarterback, breaking Johnny Manziel's single game passing record in his first start before transferring to TCU, eventually moving into the role of QB coach in a fulltime staffrole there after graduating. He'll work with quarterbacks in his offensive quality control capacitty. Hill took over for former offensive quality control staffer Will Heck who helped coach the offensive line. Heck moved to his alma mater Linfield as full time offensive line coach. The charismatic Hill could potentially give the Bears a nice boost on the recruiting front.
Brown has been on campus for a couple weeks. He previously played for and coached with former Cal OC Beau Baldwin at Eastern Washington and has a strong familiarity with the Cal staff having come to campus a few times in prior seasons to work with and learn from the staff. Here’s a clip of Brown mic’d up at EWU. He’ll be working with with Cal DB coaches Tre Watson and Terrance Brown.. He’ll be replacing Ryan Conry, who become a QC under former Cal DC Tim DeRuyter at Texas Tech.
Taylor comes to Cal as a grad assistant from Washington, where he also served as a grad assistant. He’ll be working with linebackers at Cal and is replacing Mike Bruno, who was named inside linebackers coach at UNLV.
Already on board is former Cal center Michael Saffell as an offensive graduate assistant, working with the offensive line. The popular Saffell took over for former offensive grad assistan JaKori Ford, who previously worked with QBs in his role as offensive grad assistant.
Along with the new additions came some expansion of responsibilities for several positions.
Director of Player Personnel Marshall Cherrington essentially takes over in an expanded role for former Director of Recruiting Communications, Brendan McInerney, who moved into the private sector. Cher ringtone will also assume some responsibilities from former Director of Player Personnel Zac Bocian in a reformulated role with more emphasis on recruiting contact from the Player Personnel position. Cherrington returned to Cal after a successful stint at his alma mater, USC. Cherrington also adds player evaluation responsibilities to the recruiting element in his new role, sharing primary eval duties with Bocian.
In his new role as Senior Director, Football Affairs, Bocian will continue in his evaluation of players but will also take over some responsibilities from Ron Coccimiglio, working in student athlete career development and well-being, also integrating with the Cameron Institute after three years as Director of Player Personnel. He will be working his 20th season in either the NFL or collegiate ranks in 2022.
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