The Montezuma-Cortez football team is under new direction.<\/p>\n
Dave Wagner was named the new head coach this summer and has been installing his system to prepare for the 2015 season.<\/p>\n
A San Diego native, Wagner spent 13 years in the Navy before getting into coaching.<\/p>\n
Along with his high school coaching experience, Wagner has been an offensive line coach at the college level and coached semi-professional football in the Arizona Football League.<\/p>\n
As a high school head coach, Wagner has compiled a 52-18 record and has taken his teams to the playoffs in all but one season. The one lone year a Wagner-led squad did not make the playoffs was the year he began the football program at Apache Trail (Ariz.) High School and went 1-8. However, the following year, the team went 11-1 and won the state title.<\/p>\n
Joining Wagner\u2019s staff for the first year are assistant coaches Stephen Fenlason, Keith Mikhail and Elijah Lansing.<\/p>\n
After coaching the line at Air Academy High School in Colorado Springs, Fenlason will be instructing the offensive and defensive lines.<\/p>\n
Mikhail has been named defensive coordinator. Mikhail graduated from Durango High School and played college football at Western State Colorado University before moving on to arena football and a year playing professionally in Germany.<\/p>\n
Lansing is new to the coaching staff, but not to M-CHS. Lansing was a 2014 all-conference honorable mention selection as an offensive and defensive lineman, and after graduating, he is staying on as an assistant coach.<\/p>\n
Wagner, Fenlason, Mikhail and Lansing are joined by returning assistant coaches Scott Conklin, Kirby Case and Tim Robinson.<\/p>\n
Wager is excited about the new opportunity, but he\u2019s also been open about his affection for the community.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople here wave, and I say hello to everybody,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd people say hello back and don\u2019t look at you like you\u2019re strange.<\/p>\n
\u201cI should have moved here 20 years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fenlason, Mikhail join Dave Wagner<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5770],"tags":[21],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-110063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-high-school-sports","tag-cortez"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110063\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110063"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=110063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}