Mark Wiedmer

As local businessman Phil Smartt was introducing second-year Brigham Young University football coach Kalani Sitake to the Chattanooga Hamilton Place Rotary Club on Wednesday afternoon, he asked those in attendance to consider something.

"BYU students can't smoke or drink or be involved in premarital sex," Smartt said. "How'd you like to recruit to that?"

To which every parent of an elite high school football player should reply, "Where do we sign on the dotted line?"

If you don't already know about Sitake and his mission to, in his words, "teach young men how to be better people," you need to learn more about him and the general blueprint for the BYU football program, which went 9-4 in Sitake's first season, those four losses by a combined eight points.

"The only college team I ever cheered for was BYU," said the Tonga-born, Hawaii-raised coach of his dream job. "I knew the two-deep (depth chart) for the 1984 team (that won the national championship)."

But what he really knows about BYU and its Mormon heritage is the kind of student-athlete who can adapt to its honor code, its traditions, its demands for clean and honorable living and its academic standards, given the average high school GPA of its incoming students is 3.8 and the average ACT score is 29 (out of a possible 36).

"I think it's OK to promote good behavior," Sitake said. "Looking for people with good Christian values is No. 1. And if you can't honor your father and mother, I won't recruit you. I want to see how they act around their parents, what kind of respect they show their parents."

He demands similar respect for the other team.

"I believe in sportsmanship," Sitake said.

To prove his point, he recalled last season's narrow 35-32 loss to West Virginia in Washington, D.C. Before the game, as he does every game, Sitake reminded the Cougars to help an opposing player up any time that player was knocked to the turf.

"Our players started coming up to me and saying, 'They're just slapping our hands away.'" he said. "I told them to keep doing it anyway. By the end of the game, not only were the West Virginia players taking our players' hands, they were starting to help our guys up when they knocked us down."

Mountaineers coach Dana Holgorsen approached the 41-year-old Sitake after the game and said of the Cougars' sportsmanship, "I've never seen a team with so much class."

Sitake's mentors have come from all corners, beginning with his parents. With emotion filling his voice, he said, "I'm the product of hard work, love and the sacrifice of others."

He also proudly recalled his childhood in Hawaii, surrounded by fellow Polynesians, both family and friends.

"I was raised by a village," he said. "Everyone took care of you. You look at the Polynesians who have come here, and they've become judges, doctors, lawyers. It's the American dream."

When it comes to coaching, his list of mentors begins with the late Lavell Edwards, whom Sitake rightly calls "the father of BYU football."

Sitake was a captain on Edwards' final Cougars squad in 2000. Sitake also was an assistant on current Oregon State coach Gary Anderson's staff at Southern Utah for "$8,000 a year. I took a pay cut from graduate school."

Why did he leave his defensive coordinator's post at Utah — Sitake helped mastermind the Utes' Sugar Bowl win over Alabama a few years back — for a similar gig under Anderson at Oregon State?

"Gary told my wife I'd be home for dinner every night," said Sitake, mindful that Timberly is more than happy to have him help with their three children each evening.

So how does Sitake treat his staff?

"We don't work on the Sabbath (Sunday) and the coaches all eat dinner at home every night," he said. "It makes for a happier father and husband."

As for the two-year Mormon missionary requirement many Cougars often fulfill early in their careers — thus creating rosters that are two years older across the board than most of their competitors — Sitake sees positives and negatives.

"The idea that it helps them athletically is wrong," he said. "If it did, don't you think Alabama would be doing it? Wouldn't everybody do it? The reality is they're out there for two years eating bad diets, not being able to work out more than once a week, preaching the Gospel, trying to change people's lives.

"But where it does help is what it teaches them. Now they know what it is to serve others. They learn how to be a good teammate. They're committed to something bigger than themselves."

The rest of the college football world will get to see how such a mindset works against the Southeastern Conference on Sept. 2 at Houston's NRG Stadium, where the Cougars will take on LSU. Sitake has no idea how his team will play, but he thinks he knows how BYU will approach the game mentally and emotionally.

"They've lived in foreign lands and learned different languages," he said of players, 75 percent of whom have gone on two-year missions. "They're not going to be intimidated."

But if they listen closely to their coach, they might be enlightened to something that might make the rest of their lives less intimidating when their football careers end.

"We won't let the results of a game dictate who we are," Sitake said. "There are more important things in life than football."

And that's when it becomes a good thing that BYU is his dream job, because a broadminded statement such as that would get you fired in the SEC.

Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.