Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1165179
coach spotlight Since then, he's been a major factor behind Northwestern's football resurgence. Last year, en route to a Big Ten West title, his unit led the country with the fewest penalties, one of the surest signs of great coaching. The year prior, his defense was ranked third in the country in rushing defense, 10th in red-zone defense, and 20th in points allowed, a near-impenetrable wall that season. Those are points of pride, but Hankwitz is more pleased that he could repay the university, the athletic department, coaching staff, students, and fans who have made him feel like family over the past 11 years with success on the field. In Evanston, he found a home unlike anywhere else he'd been throughout the course of his storied career, and he wants to finish it here. "The academics make it unique because we can't recruit just anybody," he says, talking about why coaching at Northwestern is an interesting test of his skills. "You can do one of two things when you're in a place like this: You can say, 'Well, we can't recruit the same guys as Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State, so how are we going to beat them?' You subtly give yourself an excuse. Or, you can do what Coach Fitzgerald does. He says, 'There are enough good players out there who want to get a great education and want to win, and we'll find them, we'll coach them, we'll develop them, and we can still beat those other teams.'" Hankwitz bought into that approach from day one and it shows in the numerous players he's coached to All-Big Ten honors and NFL careers. This year, two of his defenses standouts – Paddy Fisher and Joe Gaziano – are expected to be among the most impactful in the country. At this point, thirty minutes have long passed and we're still going strong, talking history, one of Hankwitz's main interests outside football. He's not one to look backwards and bask in his own accomplishments, but he'll spend hours studying the great battles of World War II or reading about how logging barons shaped his home state of Michigan in the nineteenth century. He and I have both stopped looking at the clock. I'm playing with house money, so I ask him one last question: What do you still have to prove? Despite my relative lack of football knowledge, he looks at me for the first time during our interview like I might actually be hopelessly clueless. "Win a Big Ten championship game here," he says, raising an eyebrow. Well, duh, is what he really wanted to say. Sorry coach, but I had to ask. Bringing a Big Ten title to Northwestern would be one of the greatest accomplishments of his career. At his age, he takes it one season at a time, but it sure would be nice to do that before he retires, he says. With that, Hankwitz stands. He's said about all he can say and he's anxious to get up to his place in Western Michigan for a quiet weekend away with his wife, Cathy, and their son, Jake, the two people who have supported him the most through the ups and downs and twists and turns of coaching. He'll turn off the football part of his brain and just be a dad and a husband for few days. Then he'll be back at it, doing the same job he's done for the past 50 autumns. He loves it today as much as he did back in 1970, only now he's wiser, with a half century's worth of tricks up his sleeve. "When you start, you never think you'll still be doing this in 50 years," says Hankwitz when I ask him how it feels to be so admired after these many decades in football. "But I don't want to be thought of as an 'elder statesman'; I just want to keep winning."