Saturday, October 21, 2006 1:17 AM CDT
What ever happened to Al Molde
Molde got quite a kick out of EIU days
By BRIAN NIELSEN, Sports Editor
bnielsen@jg-tc.com
ST. PETER, Minn. -- Sometime looking out at the lake near his home after a less-pressure-to-win but still challenging NCAA Division III athletics director day, Al Molde probably still sees Rich Ehmke’s kick.
Ehmke’s 58-yard field goal that provided the 31-30 Gateway Conference win over Northern Iowa 20 years later stands as both an Eastern Illinois football record and a vivid memory for Molde, the former Panthers coach who since then experienced a Mid-American Conference championship, school record number of wins and a firing at Western Michigan as well as 10 years as athletics director at Gustavus Adolphus College.
Also not forgotten, unfortunately, is the controversial call in Eastern Kentucky’s 24-22 playoff win ending EIU’s Sean Payton-to-Roy Banks passing era and as it turned out the Molde’s four-year coaching stint with the Panthers.
Then again Molde also can hardly forget the early days replacing EIU coach Darrell Mudra and EIU’s 1983 “players strike” that probably drew more national media attention than Payton’s 10,298 passing yards.
“That was huge,” Molde said of the revolt that had some players missing a couple of days of practice. “I can’t even recall who might have led that strike. There were seniors that were upset that we decided to bus them to Western Kentucky rather than fly. Apparently Mudra had promised them a flight. By Wednesday most of them were back practicing. The seniors came in and thought they were promised that by Darrell.
“I knew nothing about the strike. They just weren’t there on Monday. From what I recall too, those players got a lot of heat on campus from girlfriends, professors and fans.”
That was not the only adjustment at the program as Molde was hired to continue the winning ways of Mudra, who transformed a longtime losing EIU program into an instant 1978 NCAA Division II national champion, but also to clean up some on- and off-the-field problems with the football Panthers.
“I had to change the culture is a good way to put it,” Molde said. “There were some tough times, too. Some of the players got in a mini-brawl at the Akron game on the road.
“We had some really tough kids. Darrell had handled them differently. The fact that I wouldn’t come down and bail them out was different. I got a call late at night: ‘Will you come and bail this guy out?’ No, I won’t come in the middle of the night. If he belongs in jail, he can stay there. It took a while. That first year was a tough year to coach.”
Molde managed a 9-3 record and NCAA I-AA playoff berth that turbulent transition EIU season n including a 34-14 win at Western Kentucky the week of the player revolt n two 6-5 seasons and then the 11-2 season in 1986 when the Panthers reached the second round of the playoffs.
The 1986 midseason win over Mudra’s Northern Iowa team on Ehmke’s 58-yard field goal is remembered by most as the highlight to the Molde EIU era.
“Payton set that up with a couple of passes,” Molde said. “He got it to (Calvin) Pierce and 41-yard line. I had Rich Ehmhe. I remember looking him square in the eye and said ‘can you make this kick?’ and he said something like ‘damn right.’ I remember people on the phones saying ‘oh, no,’ when I sent him out there but it was that or a Hail Mary.
“Ehmke’s kick was pretty good. He would be the first to say that would be a sweet kick. I remember that ball. It wasn’t rotating rapidly, almost like it was slow motion.”
Eventually, the O’Brien Stadium Homecoming crowd saw the ball go through the uprights and the Panthers celebrate.
This highlighted Eastern’s NCAA I-AA quarterfinal season that landed Molde a I-A job at Western Michigan.
At the I-A school Molde set a coaching record for wins at Western Michigan going 62-47-2 in 10 years.
But after a 2-7 season that had begun with seven straight losses the school’s winningest football coach was fired by a new university president.
“You know, you understand there’s always that possibility in coaching,” Molde said. “This happened at a time in my life when I was probably at the end of my coaching days anyway. I was about 53 years old. I was extremely disappointed with how it ended. I looked at some coaching options, but when this position opened at my alma mater, I asked Ingrid ‘what do you think of going back to Minnesota?’ ”
He and his wife, Ingrid, moved to St. Peter, Minn., where he took the Gustavus athletics director job he still holds.
Called by Payton, now the New Orleans Saints head coach, as an offensive mind ahead of his time, Molde as athletics director now has to watch someone else call the plays for his football team.
“It is difficult at times,” said the man who finished his coaching career with a 168-104-8 record. “I miss the strategy of the game. I miss the involvement of players on a day-to-day basis, but early on I decided I was going to keep my mouth shut. People ask ‘what do you think of that call.’ I say ‘the coach made it. It must be the right call.’ Now I’ll talk to him afterward like I do all of our coaches. I have to worry about 25 sports here.”
While not drawing plays for a game plan for football Saturday, Molde can tell you he has a new stadium to be ready for Gustavas next season and that nearly 30 percent of the 2,700 students are involved in one of the school’s sports.
“It’s totally different from the standpoint where the priority is on the participant,” he said. “It’s not so much on the entertainment for spectators. Typically, we won’t have the crowds we did at Eastern. But the game itself, the athletes compete as hard. We just don’t have the people in the stands but the rest of it is the same. We have some really exciting games.”
That is enough to keep him from wanting headphones and the pressures of what to call on fourth-and-4.
“Really, right now I like my life a lot between our job in the college and our lake home in Minnesota,” Molde said. “When I was a seven-day-a-week football coach Ingrid was raising our kids.
“I would like to say we have very fond memories of our years there at Charleston. It’s where our kids got the start their education.”
Contact Brian Nielsen at bnielsen@jg-tc.com or 238-6856.
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 (EIU Sports Information)
With coach Al Molde (left) calling the plays, Sean Payton set Eastern Illinois passing records that still stand 20 years later.
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Angie Miley wrote on Jul 17, 2006 8:05 PM: