He built a Utah high school football dynasty. Now he’s upping the stakes

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Eric Kjar has been waking up at 4 every morning to commute from his home in Draper to the Weber State football field in Ogden, where he oversees fall camp. A few months ago, he made the rare jump from head coach of a high school team to head coach of a Division I football team, and there’s much work to do. Not only did he take the big step up to the college game, but he’s brought more than 70 new players into a program that has won a total of 10 games the last three seasons.

As he drives north toward Ogden, Kjar might be conspicuous, driving a large purple Hummer with “Weber State Football” emblazoned on the side, but it’s dark at that hour. The Hummer came with the job, and for a man who is decidedly unpretentious — his previous ride was an old Dodge pickup — he’s self-conscious about the vehicle.

Kjar doesn’t return home until 8 p.m. It’s a long day made longer by the commute, but this was what he chose. He will wait for his youngest son to graduate from Corner Canyon before he moves to Ogden.

Ask him about the daunting task of taking on a Division I job, he shrugs it off.

“It’s not that bad,” he says.

His wife Andrea is more expansive: “He approaches it the same way he’s always approached it — head down, work hard, discipline. It’s pretty familiar. Except NIL and recruiting.”

Kjar’s move (say it “Care,” not “Ka-jar”) directly from high school to Division I is highly unusual and bold, for both Weber State and Kjar. Few prep coaches have made that leap — it’s not as if there’s a shortage of qualified college assistants hoping for such an opportunity — and those who have done it didn’t fare well.

Gerry Faust famously made that move in 1981, going from a Cincinnati high school to Notre Dame, of all places. If the manager of a local IHOP became CEO of Apple, the move wouldn’t have been more audacious. Faust was 30-26-1 before he was shown the door.

Bob Comings, a high school coach in Ohio, actually campaigned for the head coaching job at Iowa in 1974. Speaking at a rally, he said, “I feel I can win at Iowa.” He couldn’t — 18-37 in five seasons.

Todd Dodge moved from a Texas high school to head coach of North Texas in 2007. He was 6-37 in five seasons.

Tony Sanchez left Bishop Gorman High in Las Vegas in 2015 — where he was 85-5 — to take over the local D-I team, the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. He was 20-40 in five seasons before he was let go (in 2024, he became the head coach at New Mexico State, where he’s 4-12 so far).

Trent Dilfer, the former NFL quarterback, left a high school job in Nashville to become the head coach at Alabama-Birmingham. He was 9-21 in three seasons.

Now comes the 47-year-old Kjar, a high school coach for 22 years, 17 as a head coach, first at Jordan High, then Corner Canyon. His Corner Canyon football teams won six state championships in eight years (he won another one at Jordan High, leaving him one short of the state record). During one stretch, his teams won 48 consecutive games. His record: 112-10.

Kjar made it de rigueur for football players to sprint for the track team and they were the reason that Corner Canyon won five state team championships in six years (they probably would’ve won six if the 2020 season hadn’t been canceled by the pandemic) and the girls championship in 2018, setting all-classification state records in the boys 4×100, 4×200, 4×400 relays and the 100- and 200-meter dashes, as well as the girls 4×100 relay.

Kjar had been courted previously by other D-I football programs as an offensive assistant, but he turned them down because he wanted to finish coaching his four children at Corner Canyon. Noah and Tate, both all-state wide receivers, and Addie, a state placer in the 400-meter dash, have graduated, but Carter has one more school year.

Kjar had hoped to coach Carter through high school, but then Weber offered the head coaching job and he couldn’t refuse. He more than doubled his pay and no longer has to work three jobs — head coach, teacher, driver’s ed.

Since taking the job at Weber State, Kjar has sought the advice of Jay Hill, BYU’s defensive coordinator before accepting the same position at Michigan in the offseason. Hill is one of the few coaches who succeeded at Weber State, compiling a record of 68-39 in nine seasons as head coach (2014-22) and finishing in the national FCS rankings six times, four of them in the top six. Kjar picked his brain in the offseason to see how he did it.

“What coach Hill was able to do here … was show how competitive and how good you can be here, and how you can build it with local athletes,” Kjar told the Ogden Standard-Examiner. “He really built this place to be special with Utah kids and really established that well, and I feel like I can do the same thing.”

Said Hill, “Eric Kjar knows football … they’ll be lucky to have him as head coach.”

The hallmark of Kjar’s teams has been offense — more specifically, pass offense and quarterback play. Kjar’s quarterbacks thrived. Jaxson Dart (2025) and Zach Wilson (2021) were selected in the first round of the NFL draft. Devin Brown was a starter briefly at Ohio State until he was injured. Isaac Wilson is listed as the backup quarterback at Colorado, and Cole Hagen is a backup at BYU. Austin Kafentzis, Kjar’s quarterback at Jordan High, ranks second all-time nationally in career total offense (20,021 yards). Alex Hart, another Jordan quarterback for Kjar, is the state’s all-time leader in average passing yards per game, 370.2.

Players everywhere wanted to transfer there for the winning, the prolific offense, a higher recruiting profile and to be coached by Kjar. Transfers are a sore subject in high school, but it’s become routine, and, predictably, as Corner Canyon grew into a power, more transfers arrived (so did the recruiters — there was hardly a school day in the spring and winter when a coach from a major football program wasn’t at the school).

Even other coaches have sent players to Kjar. After receiving a commitment from Brown, an Arizona prep at the time, USC coaches told him he should transfer to Corner Canyon for his senior year after the quarterback was declared ineligible for a recruiting violation.

Dart, the New York Giants quarterback, was urged by his own coach at Roy High to transfer to Corner to receive better coaching. It is revealing that Dart had attracted zero interest from college recruiters in three years at Roy, but as soon as it was known that he was transferring to Corner Canyon, he received a handful of offers.

It was the Kjar factor. After the first game, Dart had about 45 offers. Corner Canyon alumni have played for Ohio State, Boise State, Colorado, Cal, Stanford, Iowa State, Oregon, Texas A&M, Utah, BYU, Utah State, among many others, and three currently play in the NFL (Dart, Wilson, Jackson Powers-Johnson).

Kjar’s rep has already paid off big at Weber State. Brown, the former Ohio State and Cal quarterback, reportedly received lucrative offers during the offseason from Indiana, Boston College, Washington and BYU (as a backup), among other schools. Some offered NIL deals worth $800,000. Brown chose Weber State — actually, Kjar — for just $2,000 (Kjar says that number has since been increased).

“I want to go back and have fun and play football and do what I did last time I played for coach Kjar,” Brown said at the time.

He’s not alone. More than a dozen Corner Canyon players have signed with Weber State (some will serve church missions this year). The roster also will include Kjar’s sons, Noah and Tate, and his nephew, Landon Kjar.

Kjar, a charismatic, wise-cracking native of Kemmerer, Wyoming, inspires fierce loyalty and affection from his players. He has a gift for bantering and bonding with them. He is at turns hilarious, sarcastic, teasing, caring (or Kjaring) and intense.

It’s something to see him work a crowd of players. He teases them mercilessly — about clothes, girlfriends, eyebrows, anything he can find — and the players eat up the attention. He also can go off on a blistering tirade without warning. An outsider might be shocked at times — “We’re not out here (expletive) around!! We’re not going through the motions! We’re trying to get better!” he scolded the track team one day — but his style works magically.

If he’s a tough man, he’s also the same guy who spent his own money to buy shoes or other equipment for players who lack the means, or gone out of his way to chop it up with a less-talented athlete who needs some love and attention.

In the end, no one is immune to the Kjar charisma. As he hung out between events on the infield at weekend track meets, athletes, coaches and parents from various teams gathered around him like he was the Dalai Lama, just to enjoy the banter and humor.

At 6-foot-4, 250 pounds, he’s easy to find in a crowd. He looks like he could play inside linebacker for Weber State. You’d never guess he has multiple sclerosis. He was diagnosed with the disease in 2010 after he lost feeling from the pelvis down to his feet. He struggled just to walk. Doctors’ offered him a wheelchair and then a cane, but he refused, preferring instead to lean on his 5-foot wife to get around.

Kjar tends to take a cerebral approach to most challenges. He reads and studies books and magazines, talks to experts, searches the internet, reviews scientific papers, etc. Ask Kjar about weight training, sprint training, offensive football concepts, supplements, plyometrics, exercise, etc., etc., he can talk about them knowledgeably at length.

“He’s always been a student of everything,” says Andrea.

He did the same thing when confronted with MS. He read and studied everything he could find on the disease and its possible treatments. In addition to taking prescribed medications and consulting his doctor regularly, he takes a handful of supplements daily.

“It’s awesome,” says Andrea of his recovery. “You never know. It runs the gamut. But he hasn’t had a severe flare-up since 2010. He had a minor flare-up in about 2016. His feet are still numb — they’ve never returned to normal. But he’s doing well.”

Besides supplements, Kjar also discovered the power of exercise in treating the disease — in his case, lifting weights, which he did at 6 every morning with his high school players and now with his Weber State players. “I can feel the difference when I don’t lift,” he says. “I think the synapses start to close (because of MS).”

His response has been so remarkable that others with the disease, or those who have friends or relatives with the disease, have sought him out to learn what he does.

Healthy and strong, he’s turned his quiet, steely determination to his latest challenge, D-I football. He’s been putting in long days to build the program from the ground up, but he’s accustomed to this. At Corner Canyon, his day started at dawn with a strength and conditioning program, which required considerable preparation to design and implement for more than 100 players. Then he had to find time to design schemes, develop a game plan, manage player personnel, plan practice, implement practice, analyze video. This was in addition to teaching classes and riding with driver’s ed students.

“I worked my butt off,” he told the Examiner. “A typical day in the spring for me was to get there at six in the morning and run a two-hour lifting session with our football kids, then go teach four periods a day with a 30-minute window in between, and then go out to track practice for two hours. And if I’m not at track that day, I’m jumping into a driver’s ed car for a couple more hours after that.”

Given that, maybe the new Weber State gig and D-I football isn’t asking all that much after all.

Editor’s note:The author coached with Kjar at Corner Canyon for four years right up until the latter left for Weber State.

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