Courtesy of Bottineau Courant

The search is over. Dakota College at Bottineau has a new football coach. After accepting applications for several weeks, and interviewing six candidates last week, the search committee sent their recommendation to Dr. Ken Grosz, DCB's college dean. On Sunday morning, Dr. Grosz conducted his personal interview before offering the position to long time Rolette High School football coach, Tim Pfeifer. Pfeifer, who graduated from Cooperstown High School and Valley City State College, has expressed his desire to head up the Lumberjack football program since the position was vacated with the resignation of previous coach, Darwin Routledge, is excited about his new job and plans to begin his recruiting immediately, even though he won't officially take control of the program for two to six weeks. Pfeifer said he will have to talk to the school officials at Turtle Mountain High School in Belcourt where he is currently employed as a math teacher, then it will be determined if he will start his college coaching career on December 1 or January 1. However, his recruiting will start immediately. "I will start recruiting tonight, and there will be letters in the mail this week," said Pfeifer during a Sunday morning interview with the Courant. Pfeifer, who was the head football coach at Rolette High School for 23 years, compiled a record of 152 wins and just 43 losses. During his tenure at RHS, his Comets won a state 9-man football championship in 1990 and were runner-up in 1997. Under his leadership, the Comets advanced to the play-offs 14 times advancing as far as the semi-finals seven times. Pfeifer plans to concentrate on recruiting North Dakota athletes, but plans to take advantage of several contacts he has out of state. "I am going to recruit North Dakota kids hard, as well as kids out of Canada," said Pfeifer. But I also have a good contact in Washington and a couple out of Illinois," said the new coach. Pfeifer said he is well acquainted with the Seattle Seahawks defensive coordinator, and noted that most of the coaches at Southern Illinois are from North Dakota, including head coach Dale Lennon. As for the style of football coach Pfeifer plans to implement at DCB, he was quick to say, "This is North Dakota and we plan to be a running team. But we will also use a spread offense, there is no doubt about that." There were a total of 41 applicants for the position. Four were from North Dakota while the other 37 came from states as far away as California, New York and Florida. The six finalists in addition to Pfeifer included Andre Mooney (Bottineau), Josh Kittel (Garrison), Ricky Coon (Iowa), Chris Snider (California) and Mike Mari (California). Search Committee chairman Scott Johnson, Athletic Director at DCB, said the football program has a very big impact on the enrollment at the local college so the committee did a lengthy screening process going through the applications and interviews before making their recommendation to the college dean.