Former Georgia QB enjoys life at Wake Forest

“Coming here and being able to help out – hands-on – with the tight ends has been a huge experience for me,” said Tereshinski, whose Demon Deacons play at Georgia Tech Saturday. “I’ve enjoyed working with them and they’ve worked hard every single day.”

After his playing days ended in 2006 with the emergence of future No. 1 NFL draftee Matthew Stafford, Tereshinski didn’t feel the immediate compulsion to stay in the game. His dad Joe was going on a quarter-century as a strength coach at Georgia and younger brother John was helping Wake win its first ACC championship in 36 years. But the real world was beckoning.

“At the time, I was thinking that I had been in football all my life and I was going to try something new,” he said.

He took a job with Protiviti as a specialist in helping companies comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the landmark legislation that overhauled financial reporting in the aftermath of the Enron scandal. The work took him to Charleston, S.C., Austin, Texas and Philadelphia, among other places. It was stimulating and rewarding.

But it wasn’t football and eventually, that started to matter.

“After I got off the field from college, I was driving my wife [Jillian] nuts,” Tereshinski said, “because you never watch a game the same. You start yelling out blitzes. You yell about protections. And she’s getting mad at me. She’s leaving the room.”

Tereshinski recalled a 2007 conversation he had had with Wake defensive coordinator Brad Lambert, a former UGA assistant.

“When you get tired of the business world,” Lambert had said, “give me a call.”

The phone rang early this year. Tereshinski’s last day at Protiviti was March 4. He was here on March 5 and thinking about spring practice.

“With the name Tereshinski, we know they’re tough as pine nuts and that they love football,” Wake coach Jim Grobe said.

Grobe figured he’d have the new guy work with the tight ends. Joseph Peter Tereshinski Sr., the patriarch of the football family who played for two Bulldog SEC championship teams in the 1940s, had manned the position. Ditto for John and for uncle Wally, who helped UGA to the league title in 1976. What wasn’t certain was how much Joseph Peter Tereshinski III would coach and how much he’d observe.

The original plan was to have tight ends in meetings with quarterbacks and the offensive line. Offensive coordinator Steed Lobotzke moved for a change of venue almost immediately.

“After that first day,” Tereshinski recalled, “Coach Lobo said, ‘You’ve got ’em.'”

“We felt we couldn’t go wrong with Joe,” Grobe said. “He has turned out to be everything we expected and maybe a little more. We turned the tight ends over to Joe and we just don’t do that with GAs. But he’s so good that he has those guys to himself.”

Tereshinski was prepared because he had spent hours discussing the tight end’s role in the Wake offense with brother John, who caught 28 passes for the 2007 Deacons and spent time in training camp with two NFL teams. He also knew what makes for a good receiver from throwing the ball for so long.

Tereshinski’s work week still seems complex as financial audits. Every Sunday, he’s breaking down film of the upcoming opponent for the assistants and making sure all the relevant statistics have been entered into the computer system for the purpose of predicting trends. Game-planning meetings flow from that work and they consume most of Monday and Tuesday.

Tereshinski is also a student. He’s taking two graduate courses in media studies while determining how his guys should help in keeping various Yellow Jackets away from Deacon quarterbacks Tanner Price, Ted Stachitas and Chattahoochee High School graduate Brendan Cross. Although tight ends caught only two passes in the process, the Demon Deacons have scored 131 points in their first three games.

Getting used to a new environment and a new offense is still part of the deal for Tereshinski, but the road has been smoothed by the family ties to a stable program in an often itinerant business.

“When I first stepped on the field, these guys treated me with respect and I hope to do the same back to them,” Tereshinski said of his players and comrades. “We’re demanding and we want to get better every day.”