HELENA — Zach Spiroff grew up in Helena loving the sport of football.
After his outstanding career on both sides of the ball for the Helena High Bengals and being named to the 2019 Badlands Bowl and the 2019 Montana East-West Shrine Game, Spiroff played college football at Carroll College and helped the Saints to a Frontier Conference crown last year.
In 32 games played for Carroll, Spiroff notched 136 total tackles with a couple of forced fumbles, five interceptions and nearly 30 pass breakups as a starting defensive back.
“It’s been special, Helena is a special place to me, Carroll is a special place, all together it’s been a great time," Spiroff said.
Spiroff graduated from Carroll last spring before fulfilling his new role off the field. You can now find him on the sidelines as the Saints' new new defensive backs coach. He will also take on special teams responsibilities as an assistant on Troy Purcell's staff.
“We’ve got a lot of guys with a lot of experience here and guys that I’ve been fortunate enough to play under and now I’ll be able to be on the same staff now as well, and their wealth of knowledge is unreal. They have so much (knowledge) that if you can pick up even a fraction of it, it just makes you better as coach,” stated Spiroff.
As for the upcoming season, Spiroff said: “We’re young especially at cornerback, we graduated myself and Micah (Ans) so we don’t have a ton of experience on the back end right there, but we expect our safeties to step up, and we expect to continue to get better.
“We’ve got plenty of leaders on the defensive side of the ball, guys that we expect a lot out of. We return a lot of guys on the back end with Tug Smith, Thomas McGree, Kaden Gardner, those are the guys we expect to step up and be the voice in their room, they’re high quality guys, high character guys (that) always come and they bring their A game every day.”
The phrase "Coach Spiroff" seems to have a good ring to it and his players have already responded, such as Smith.
“We all know how good he was as a player, how he was a leader, and I mean, we listen to him, he is our coach and we love it that way. He’s very knowledgeable about the game and like I said, everything he says I listen to,” said Smith.
Although they may be young on the corners, these Saints will still have leaders ready to step up this season, just as Spiroff did during his four-year Carroll career.
