As the 2016 Edmonton Eskimos gather for training camp, there are two important things they should know about their new head coach.

One is something most can’t relate to. The other is the reason they can expect him to relate to them likely as well as any coach they ever had.

First there was the single day that most affected the life of Jason Maas.

“I lost my dad at age 10. He was a police officer who was killed in the line of duty back on April 9, 1986,” the first-year head coach began.

Eleven seasons Maas played without many people knowing that.

“My dad was the first police officer in Yuma killed in the line of duty. He was responding to a call at a bus station as a result of a disturbance involving a couple of gentlemen that were on their way from San Diego into Yuma. When he arrived he realized the two had been wanted for killing an air force guy from Idaho. He was starting to handcuff one of them when the other one started to shoot at him. He ended up returning fire and killing one. The other is serving a multiple life sentence in a prison in Arizona.”

Maas, at age 10, had to develop the inner strength to deal with it.

“It made me a determined kid. I feel like I grew up pretty fast. I thought about him every day. I still think about him every day. The biggest thing I kept telling myself was that I had 10 years with him. Right away when it happened I tried to remember as many things as I could so I would never forget it.

“All the little things he ever taught me or said to me at games or how I was as a kid, I always took to heart. I remembered those things. He was a hard worker himself. He was really focused on physical training from being a marine. That’s where his background came from. I understood real early what work ethic was like and that you were only going to be good at something if you really put yourself into it. I learned at a very young age to be passionate about what you do, love what you do and work very hard to what you do to be the best you could be at it.”

Not many players, obviously, are likely to identify with having a policeman father killed in the line of duty when they were a 10-year-old kid. But the Edmonton Eskimos heading to training camp Sunday at Commonwealth Stadium are not likely to have had a head coach before who could claim to identify with just about every player in every circumstance on the team.

Maas had an 11-year CFL career despite circumstances that may have killed the passion in a lot of players.

In both college and pro, Maas had earned a starting job only to suffer injury and not be able to get it back due a ridiculous success story authored by his replacement.

With Oregon in college, the other quarterback was Akili Smith, who became the No. 3 pick in the NFL draft in 1999. In Edmonton in the CFL, it was Ricky Ray.

“In my junior year we split time,” he said of Smith. “In my senior year I hurt my back in training camp and he took over and had a great career and I didn’t play after that, obviously.”

Maas looks back at his time as quarterbacking partner with Ray here and said it was crazy the way it worked.

“In all the time we were together here, we were never healthy together at the same time. In 2002 when he got here, I got hurt and he was very good from the beginning. When he left in 2004, I was healthy again. I ended up having to get surgery at the end of the year and he came back the following for training camp and I wasn’t healthy yet.”

Jason Maas played 11 years and didn’t really make a name for himself in the CFL. But those 11 years were like a masters program toward becoming a head coach.

“The experiences I had as a football player definitely gave me insight. I probably dealt with just about everything you could deal with in football as a player. Starting. Not starting. Being benched. Being pulled. Fighting for a job in camp. Being hurt. Everything.

“I was also fortunate to play with about six different coaches, so I had to learn a lot of different systems and understand how to prepare and things like that. I also was fortunate to have a lot of coaches, like Danny Maciocia for instance, who asked a lot of questions, who wanted some input, who didn’t just say, ‘It’s my way or the highway.’ I was able to come up with schemes and come up with plays. I was able to watch film and talk football with somebody who valued my opinion. That helped me want to be a coach and made me feel like I could do it if I was ever afforded the opportunity.

“My 11-year career gave me a lot of knowledge on a lot of things. It gave me an opportunity to become a better football mind. I parlayed that into a coaching career.”

terry.jones@sunmedia.ca

@sunterryjones