Coach Fuller ready to tackle 2022 season

It’s a career that has spanned five decades in two states with the opportunity to coach a Pro Football Hall of Famer.

Libby head football coach Neil Fuller is entering his 20th year coaching the Loggers and it will likely be his last.

While he hasn’t completely committed to ending his coaching and teaching careers, Fuller has 37 years under his belt.

“Libby is a great community and I love it here,” Fuller said during a recent interview with The Western News. “I’ve been blessed here, I love the people here and I feel fortunate to have this life here.”

Watching Fuller at a recent practice leaves no doubt to the desire he still has to coach and work with young people.

“I love it and thoroughly enjoy it, but I’d like to enjoy more time hunting, hiking and fishing,” he said.

The Shelby native began his coaching and teaching careers in 1985 in Lodge Grass on the Crow Indian Reservation in southeastern Montana.

He spent four years there before taking a position at Roseburg, Oregon, where he coached football and track and field at the middle school.

Not surprisingly, Fuller missed his native state and he returned to coach basketball and track on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in northern Montana.

But when a high school in Douglas County, Oregon, received what Fuller called a “huge grant” to build a new science center, the lure was too hard to pass up.

“The school and the area was about the same size as Libby, so being able to live in a small community has always been important to me,” Fuller said.

Living in a smaller, and safer, community meant a lot to Fuller. Living in a safer community also meant a great deal to Suila Polamalu.

She is the mother of Pittsburgh Steelers legend and Pro Football Hall of Fame football player Troy Polamalu. He is a native Californian who lived in Santa Ana. Suila was concerned about negative influences in nearby Los Angeles.

Troy had vacationed in Tenmile, Oregon, with his aunt and uncle. His desire to live in the state and Suila’s desire to keep her son safe led her to allow him to move in with his uncle’s family. The uncle, Salu Polamalu, played college football at Oregon State a few hours north of Winston.

Fuller, who taught and coached at Douglas High School from 1995 to 2003, was in his first year there when Troy was a freshman.

“He wasn’t big, 135 or 140 pounds, but you could tell he was special,” Fuller said. “He was fun to coach, humble and a great teammate.”

Fuller said Polamalu could have transferred to neighboring Roseburg for his senior year, but he preferred to stay with his friends.

“In the homecoming game, he was on his way to scoring a touchdown on a big play, but he flipped the ball to a teammate so he could score,” Fuller said. “That’s just the kinda kid he is.”

A falling out at Douglas after the school board didn’t want to pay Fuller’s assistant coaches led him to look around.

“This job came open and when I went for the interview, the weather was lousy and I wondered a little bit about what I was doing,” Fuller said. “But I moved here with my two sons, Jordan and Joel, in June 2003 and it’s just a great community.”

After leading the Loggers to two semifinal appearances in the state football playoffs, Joel was a two-time All-Big Sky safety for the Montana State Bobcats.

Coach Fuller has fond memories of his first year at Libby in 2003.

“We didn’t get the coaching staff filled until the first week of practice and Keevin Burleson was our only returning lineman and just one of four returning seniors out of the five we had on the team,” Fuller said. “I told Keevin ‘You’re gonna be a fullback.’”

That Loggers wasn’t very big, but the kids were tough. “We had Ryan Rios, Cole Spencer, Justin Winn, Travis Hjort and Brandon Vincent playing on the offensive and defensive lines,” Fuller said. “We won the league and lost in the state quarters to Havre.”

In Fuller’s second year, an early rout of Bonners Ferry left everyone with a feeling of confidence, but a shutout loss to Great Falls the week after brought the team back to a point where it realized it had to keep working hard.

“The third week, we went to Frenchtown and beat them for their first home loss in 15 years,” Fuller said.

The Loggers lost in the state semifinals that year and the next few years were ones of success before back-to-back seasons of missing the playoffs were followed by two years of making the postseason.

From 2012-18, the Loggers had a bad stretch of not many wins and a lot of losses.

“We lobbied to allow the fifth- and sixth-grade kids to play in pads and play tackle,” Fuller said. “Most of the other teams were doing it and we were falling behind.”

Fuller credits the efforts of men such as Josh Patterson, Joe McElmurry and Scott Beagle for helping advance the cause for younger players in pads.

In 2018, their efforts started to pay off as the Loggers were second in the conference and beat Whitefish, but lost out on a playoff spot to the Bulldogs on a tiebreaker.

The 2019 squad started 6-0 and reached the quarterfinals of the state playoffs before falling to Laurel.

In 2021, the Loggers made the state playoffs and lost in the first round.

“It was probably the most adversity we’ve dealt with,” Fuller said of the ’21 season. “We had a lot of injuries and Kyle (assistant coach Hannah) battled cancer.

“But the kids stuck together and I’m excited for this year,” Fuller said. “We don’t have a lot of depth up front, but if we play disciplined, this team can do some good things.”

The Loggers open the season at 7 p.m. Friday at home against East Helena.