When Braves manager Walt Weiss was a high school football coach

Before he mulled batting-order adjustments and pitching changes, Walt Weiss used to dive deep into strategies of a different kind — shotgun vs. under center and which pre-snap motions would best bamboozle defenses.

You likely know Weiss as the first-year manager of the National League East champion Braves. A community in Colorado remembers him as a dedicated youth and high school football coach.

“He was fantastic,” Mark Nolan, the former head coach at Regis Jesuit High School in Aurora, Colorado, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “He did a great job calling a game. He did a great job coaching the fundamentals of the quarterback position.”

In a phone interview, Nolan was even brought to tears speaking of his former assistant.

“I have nothing but adoration and love for Walt Weiss,” said Nolan, now coaching at a high school in Mission Viejo, California.

That’s a gracious evaluation for a coach who, against Nolan’s preference, sneaked in as much shotgun as he could into Regis Jesuit junior varsity games.

“He wanted the quarterback under center,” Weiss told the AJC recently, mischief in his voice. “I liked to do both, so we ran a lot more shotgun plays (in the JV games). I was always looking around making sure (Nolan wasn’t there)” — and here, Weiss offered a pantomime of a skittish assistant coach.

In 2009, Weiss was well into his retirement from his major league playing career, living in the Denver area where he had played for the Colorado Rockies and then served as a special assistant to the general manager. The father of four boys, he was already coaching youth football, putting to use the knowledge he had gained as a high school option quarterback in Suffern, New York.

In that role, he coached his second-eldest son Brody’s youth team for eight years, he said, ultimately winning a national championship in the group’s last season together. It is his favorite memory of his football-coaching years. As he recalled, the championship game was against a team from Sacramento, California.

“We saw them warming up and I was looking at my coaches, I said, ‘We’re in trouble,’” Weiss said. “Because they were enormous.”

Weiss’ team won handily.

“Those were good times,” Weiss said. “I loved it. I loved the football thing, just trying to conceptually put together plays.”

He obsessively watched college games, looking for plays and ideas he could borrow.

“My wife would get all over me because I’d have all these pieces of paper and I would just make up plays, and there’d be papers all over the kitchen and I’d just be trying to draw up plays,” he said.

When Nolan was hired at Regis Jesuit in 2009, Weiss was recommended to him by the athletic director. Nolan made Weiss his quarterbacks coach and the JV head coach and offensive coordinator. Weiss also was an assistant coach and later the head coach for the Raiders baseball team.

With Weiss’ help, Regis Jesuit made the playoffs all four of his seasons (2009-12), reaching the Class 5A quarterfinals in 2009 and the state finals the next year.

While Weiss did not flaunt his baseball career, one of Nolan’s favorite memories of his QB coach did evoke it. It was a practice held in blizzard conditions. As the coaches huddled up after practice, Raiders players pelted them with snowballs, prompting the coaches to respond in kind.

“But Walt goes full-on, like, Buddy the Elf from the movie ‘Elf,’” Nolan said. “And he’s launching missiles at kids and they quickly had enough and the snowball fight ended. He was beaning kids and we were all like, ‘That’s what a major-league baseball player can do.’”

Listening to Weiss talk about that chapter of his life and the challenge of the job, the hold it had on him is obvious.

“I loved coaching football,” he said.

If not for the Rockies hiring Weiss as their manager after the 2012 baseball season — Weiss had to duck out of a few practices to interview for the job — Nolan believes Weiss could have been a successful high school coach.

“It’s possible I would still be doing that,” Weiss said. “I learned a lot from coach Nolan.”

Coaching football did help prepare Weiss for the dugout, though. Managing requires a constant state of anticipation and adjustment of strategy, not unlike what an offensive coordinator does.