Ex-Coeur d'Alene High football coach dies

Herb Criner hasn’t coached football in North Idaho in more than 30 years.

But news of the former Coeur d’Alene High football coach’s passing on Saturday quickly spread through the area.

“I’m overwhelmed with the people from the Coeur d’Alene area that have contacted me and us, and all the well-wishes,” said Dave Middle-ton, director of football operations at Rocky Mountain High in Meridian, where Criner served as a volunteer assistant under his son, head coach Scott Criner, the past three seasons. “I’m so deeply impressed with the people up North.”

Criner, 81, died Saturday morning at University Hospital in Salt Lake City. He developed complications following successful heart surgery there on March 25.

Criner left California and came to Coeur d’Alene High in 1980. He coached the Vikings for five seasons, compiling an overall record of 43-14. In 1982, he guided Coeur d’Alene to the program’s first state title. The Vikings went 12-0, beating eventual Washington state champion Gonzaga Prep along the way.

“He was a player’s coach, and a coach’s coach,” recalled Larry Schwenke, an assistant under Criner for all five seasons in Coeur d’Alene. “The kids just had immense respect for him, as did the coaches. He could have stayed here as long as he wanted, and everybody would have loved that, but he had an opportunity to go to Boise State, and that was a tough decision for him, but ... we were lucky to have him. It was an amazing experience.”

Schwenke said Criner helped elevate Coeur d’Alene High football in part by being a stickler for preperation and through offseason work, taking his teams to camps where his teams would be exposed to teams from elsewhere in the West.

Criner left Coeur d’Alene after the 1984 season to take an assistant football coaching job at Boise State. He coached with the Broncos for four seasons, then worked in the Boise State athletic department as an adminstrator until retiring in 2005.

When his son, Scott, was named head coach at Rocky Mountain in 2013, Herb joined the staff as a volunteer assistant.

“He started out helping out on the defensive side of the ball, and last year he coached our kickers, and he had a first-team all-state kicker and punter,” Middleton said in a phone interview Saturday from Salt Lake City. “We had a saying among the coaches, ‘If you wanted to fix it, let coach Herb Criner coach it.’ He taught a lot of people how to be men. The young men that we had, he made a huge impact on them.”

A video posted Saturday on Twitter shows Herb Criner, in his ninth decade on earth, dancing in the locker room following a Rocky Mountain victory earlier in the 2015 season. Rocky went on to win the state 5A title last fall.

In lieu of a funeral service, Middleton said a celebration of life would likely be held in June, in the Meridian area. There’s also been talk of a similar gathering in North Idaho, as he is still widely remembered here.

Part of it, Schwenke said, is that he brought Coeur d’Alene its first state football title. Part of it is the Criner name, well-known in these parts, as his brother, Jim, was a former Boise State head coach and his nephew, Mark, was formerly an assistant at Idaho.

“And plus, he had that folksy, down-home language from the south, and it endeared him to people. Just kind of an unforgetable character,” Schwenke said. “It was an honor to coach with him, it was an honor to know him.”