PULLMAN, Wash. — You can go ahead and add ‘Professor Leach’ to the list of nicknames for Washington State University’s head football coach.
We’re used to hearing him impart some wisdom at press conferences, now students will get a front row seat.
Forty selected students will take the inaugural class co-led by Leach on Wednesday.
It’s a class unlike any other currently offered at WSU. Coach Leach is teaching a noncredit seminar with former Washington State Senator and current Spokane County Treasurer Michael Baumgartner.
“Insurgent revolutionaries are essentially underdogs and they have to turn strategic disadvantage into advantage over more powerful conventional opponents,” Baumgartner said.
The class is called ‘Leadership Lessons in Insurgent Warfare and Football Strategies,’ the course is a course students are voluntarily taking and so are the instructors. The five week course on the Pullman campus is hosted by WSU Academic Outreach and Innovation as well as WSU Athletics.
During the seminar, Leach and Baumgartner will cover a wide-range of topics on leadership strategy.
The teaching duo stopped short of comparing football to warfare but say there are parallels.
“I think when it comes to mobilizing a group of people, or a number of people towards a goal or a cause and trying to utilize your resources to get it accomplished and maximize capabilities, I think there’s some similarities there,” Leach said.
Students will be asked to choose what’s most important when evading capture behind enemy lines.
Leach estimates some 47,000 expressed interest through an informal poll on Twitter. The lucky few will get to watch game film and hear from a new speaker each week.
We asked Leach, he doesn’t expect students to call him professor.
“They pretty much call me whatever they want depending on what mood they’re in and typically positive but not 100% of the time," he said.
If you didn’t get into his class this time around, the final class on April 23 will be streamed online.