Eyeing the Tigers, Andrew Aurich Prepares for Battle Against Alma Mater

Long before Harvard football’s Head Coach Andrew Aurich arrived in Cambridge, he started his collegiate coaching career at Albright College, making $168 a week after tax plus housing and a meal plan.

Dave Szelingowski, Aurich’s former roommate and fellow Princeton offensive lineman, reminisced about Aurich’s frugal lifestyle back then, when he would travel for recruiting trips and lacked the budget for a hotel room.

“I remember back to the days when he was recruiting for Albright in Reading, Pennsylvania,” Szelingowski recalled. “And Andy would be in town recruiting local high schools and couch surfing and just grinding.”

But for Aurich, who at that point knew that coaching football was his passion, the long hours and unglamorous work didn’t feel so difficult.

“It never felt like a grind, especially in those early years,” Aurich said. “It was just so much fun. I was like, ‘This is great.’”

‘The Most Important Thing’

Aurich grew up in St. Paul, Minn., in a family with three older brothers and a father who coached the football team — in addition to serving as vice principal and a history teacher — at a small Lutheran high school. The whole family would spend Saturdays watching college ball and Sundays watching the Broncos.

“That was always the most important thing in our household, was football,” Aurich said.

From a young age, Aurich was out on the football field in the summer helping his dad with equipment during conditioning.

“I didn’t know how it would affect me later on, but I could see the relationships that he was building with his players, and the impact he was having on his players,” Aurich said. “It led to, ultimately, where I am today.”

By seven, Aurich was playing tackle ball as a signal caller, a position that wouldn't hold his attention for very long.

“I started as quarterback, and then we got a Nintendo — original Nintendo — and I all the sudden was not as active, and I became an offensive lineman when it was all said and done,” Aurich said.

‘You Could Have Seen The Writing on the Wall’

After being recruited as a walk-on at Nebraska — the Aurich family’s preferred college team — Aurich ultimately settled on Princeton.

Justin Stull, Aurich’s teammate at Princeton and the team captain their senior year, recalled Aurich as a leader on the team even in college.

“He was always a very strong leader,” Stull said. “He was always somebody that was relatively reserved, but had just kind of like a supreme understanding for the strategy of the game. And he was always a coach on the field.”

Another Princeton teammate, Robert Holuba, said that Aurich’s midwestern upbringing came through in his “glass always half full” attitude.

“He’s from Minnesota, and he comes with that Midwest nice — meaning he’s just such a nice guy,” Holuba said.

Holuba also noted that Aurich’s choice of career didn’t come as a shock. While he personally wanted nothing to do with football after each week’s game, he spoke of Aurich sitting every weekend with his eyes “glued to the television.”

“You could have seen the writing on the wall from the very beginning,” Holuba said.

“Whether it was playing NCAA football on PlayStation, or whether it was studying his playbook, he was always 100% about football,” he added.

For his part, Aurich said he realized early on in college that he wanted to be a coach despite discouragement from his own coach at the time.

“I went to talk to my college coach, and I told him, ‘Hey, I want to be a football coach,’” Aurich said. “And he’s like, ‘Nah, nah, you don’t want to do that.’”

Despite the warning, Aurich settled on coaching and spent the end of college watching tape with his position coach in his spare time after practice.

Aurich was “obsessed with football” in college, per Szelingowski, but Aurich maintained that his passion didn’t stem from the fireworks that took place on the field. He said that the “life-long friends” he made on the football team were the most important part of his time at Princeton.

“It wasn’t the stadium, the playing experience, it was about the relationships that I end up building with those people,” Aurich said.

‘I Just Want to See Those Guys Beat Princeton’

Aurich will see several of these friends again on Saturday, but this time, they’ll be rooting for opposite teams.

Harvard and Princeton have a longstanding rivalry — one that was often stoked by Aurich’s predecessor Tim Murphy — and Harvard is looking for its first win over the Tigers since 2016 this weekend.

For Aurich’s old teammates, this means they’re seeing their long-time friend coach for the enemy team for the first time.

The group of players in the 2006 Princeton class have stayed remarkably close — often using Slack to keep in touch from all corners of the country nearly 20 years after graduating.

Despite the potentially awkward situation, Szeligowski said that the group of friends from the early-2000s Tigers is proud of Aurich — though he drew the line at rooting for Harvard.

“I know a lot of my classmates and people around the Princeton program gave him a lot of flak, I think initially, just as a joke, but we’re all super proud of him,” Szelingowski said. “We’re all old enough and mature enough to recognize it’s a tremendous opportunity to be named head coach anywhere, let alone at Harvard. So I think, from the grand scheme of things, am I happy to cheer for him nine weeks a year? Absolutely.”

Stull also said this week will be an exception for the Princeton alumni.

“There’s a huge sense of support from our community — Princeton football community that is — for Andy and his greatest success, but, admittedly, probably not this week.”

Aurich, however, said he has no such reservations going into the game against his alma mater.

“I haven’t had any weird like, ‘Oh, this is so strange’ because I’ve been here long enough where I’ve invested and gotten to know the guys on this team and the people that are here where I want to do everything I can to put them in the best position to win,” Aurich said.

“I just want to see those guys beat Princeton,” he added, about his talented Crimson roster.

After four years there as a player, Aurich spent eight seasons on the coaching staff for Princeton. This weekend, he'll be looking to keep Harvard's Ivy League title hopes alive. By Courtesy of Jared Montano/Princeton Athletics

“How You Do Anything is How You Do Everything”

As a coach, Aurich’s philosophy boils down to three words: sacrifice, integrity, and toughness.

“I want to help them to understand how to be a sacrificial person who's going to put the team before themselves,” Aurich explained.

In addition to teaching his student-athletes important life lessons, on and off the field, Aurich preaches a completely open and transparent relationship between the players and coaches.

He added, “Walk to my door and come in and see me and be brutally honest with me, because that's what I need to hear, I’m the guy. If there's something that we gotta change, I'm the one who can change it, so bring it to my attention.”

At the same time, Aurich recognizes the need to be tough on his players.

“They know I'm gonna be the same with them if I don't like something they're doing,” he said. “I'm not scared to have a hard conversation with them and say, ‘I don't like you doing that. If you keep doing that, you're not going to be a part of this program.’”

Aurich believes that how his players operate on the football field is an extension of how they operate in their day-to-day lives — a penchant for character development which puts him in the same bucket of coaches as his decorated predecessor.

In their first meeting, Aurich showed the team a video of Ed Reed talking about the Baltimore Ravens Super Bowl winning season in 2000. When discussing a singular spark for the team, Aurich relayed Reed’s story.

“He talked about how they had firefighters that would come and clean the locker room at night, volunteer firefighters that did it for free,” Aurich said. “They just wanted to be part of the Ravens team.”

According to Reed, the Ravens players weren’t treating their space with respect, leaving garbage, medical tape, and towels on the floor. In the video, Reed said that the team couldn’t expect to win if the players weren’t taking care of the little things.

“And his point was like, how you do anything is how you do everything,” Aurich said. “So for the guys to understand, like, you can't be a successful football player if you can’t go to class, turn in your assignments on time, like it's not either or it’s and like you have to be able to do both.”

On gameday, mental toughness is everything for Aurich’s squad. He believes that every single one of the roughly 150 snaps throughout the course of a game is vital.

“Each play is its own independent event. And if you are more mentally tough than your opponent, you can focus on one play at a time over and over and over and over again, and focus on the process,” he said. “And then you look up at the scoreboard, you’re like, ‘Oh, we won,’ as opposed to being results driven.”

What matters most to Aurich, however, are the lessons his players take from the field and how they apply them in life.

“It’s a skill that’s going to help you for the rest of your life, your mental toughness,” Aurich continued. “Life has problems, and the reality is, like some of these problems, you can’t do anything but do your job. You have to focus on your job and be the best you can at your job.”

He concluded, “That’s what I’m trying to teach these guys, so they can go be successful after football.

Coaching in the Ivy League

When Aurich was first announced as Harvard’s new head coach, he faced pushback from some players and alumni who would have preferred to see an internal hire.

Harvard Athletic Director Erin McDermott, who made the controversial call and dealt with the ensuing criticism, said she feels happy about the decision halfway through Aurich’s first season.

“I’m feeling great,” McDermott said. “I feel he has been so terrific in many ways to work with — how I see him engage with the team, how I see him engage with alums, how I see him engage with people on campus and administratively or with faculty. He is consistently very upbeat and positive, but at the same time, I think, incredibly sincere.”

Aurich said he took it as a given that he would need to connect with alumni — even if they’d initially been hesitant about him.

“When I got hired, I knew that was going to be something I needed to do just so they can get to know me,” Aurich said.

“They’ve been great. They are great people who love this school, and love this football program, and they want these young men to be successful as football players and then after,” he added. “It’s not that different than the people that I went to school with at Princeton, because they had the same feelings about Princeton and the Princeton football program.”

Having seen Ivy League football from the sidelines and between the hash marks, Aurich recognizes the particular importance of playing Princeton and Yale, believing that many athletes faced a choice between those three schools and want to reaffirm the validity of their decision.

On the recruiting side of the role, Aurich still sees the Ivy League as an amazing opportunity for any aspiring scholar and football player. But the recruiting process isn’t without its challenges.

“If you’re dealing with a recruit who has scholarship offers, who also has NIL opportunities, where it’s how that world lives these days, and that's the important factor to them, you’re gonna have to move on,” Aurich explained.

Despite the differences between the Ivy League and other conferences, Aurich remains confident in the team’s recruiting ability.

“If you go about your recruitment the right way, and you, you find the right type of young men who want this academic experience and this opportunity that can open doors for them that they don’t even know exists right now. You can win plenty of those recruiting battles.”

At the end of the day, coaching in the Ivy League doesn’t feel like a job for Aurich.

“It makes it a very fun group to be around, because they love football, just like you love football,” he said.

Aurich’s first year continues on Saturday as the Crimson face off against his alma mater at 3:00 p.m. this Saturday at Harvard Stadium, with streaming available on ESPN+.

—Staff writer Jo Lemann can be reached at jo.lemann@thecrimson.com.
—Staff writer Praveen Kumar can be reached at praveen.kumar@thecrimson.com.