Zach Niusulu: more questions and more answers
December 10th, 2007, 11:37 pm · Post a Comment · posted by barstowsports
Zach Niusulu was a little wary of playing for a coach who never recruited him. Dirk Koetter was fired as the head football coach at Arizona State and replaced by Dennis Erickson in early 2007. Niusulu, a redshirt sophomore and Barstow native, had his fears eased once he got to talking with Erickson during spring practices. Erickson looked at his roster and noticed Niusulu was from Barstow and remembered one of his other players who once shared the 92311 zip code — T.J. Houshmandzadeh.
“He figured out T.J. was from Barstow, and that’s how we connected,” Zach said. “That was a nice little ice breaker with my head coach.”
Erickson coached T.J. and Bengals teammate Chad Johnson at Oregon State in 2000 when the Beavers finished ranked No. 4 in the AP Top 25 College Football Poll.
“He told me about T.J. I told him, I remember watching T.J. play growing up, but I never really knew who he was because he wasn’t that type of receiver in high school. That kind of helped out the process of me taking in the process of my coach getting fired.”
Look later in the week for more questions and answers from Zach.
