Another Zampese in the Coaching Ranks

To his teammates and coaches at the University of San Diego, Ken Zampese was a football coach in the making. Insightful, determined and a tireless worker, Zampese was a student of the game.

“Should he choose to go that way, he’ll make an outstanding football coach,” USD Coach Brian Fogarty said in 1988 when Zampese was a senior wide receiver and captain of the Toreros’ football team.

Zampese, 24, indeed chose to go that way, and he was recently hired as a receivers coach at Northern Arizona University, an NCAA Division I-AA member of the Big Sky Conference. Zampese will also handle the recruitment of players from San Diego and Imperial counties and parts of Arizona and Nevada.

It is Zampese’s first full-time coaching job, though he was a graduate assistant at USD in 1989 and USC the past two seasons while completing work on a master’s degree in education administration.

“I’m so excited right now,” said Zampese, a 1985 graduate of USDHS. “I can’t wait for the season to start.”

Zampese learned from the best.

His father, Ernie, the Rams’ offensive coordinator, is generally regarded as having one of the keenest offensive minds in football, a distinction he earned while constructing Don Coryell’s offense with the Chargers in the late 1970s and early ‘80s.

As a youngster growing up in Del Cerro, Ken Zampese would accompany his father to training camps and practices and work out with Charlie Joiner, Kellen Winslow, John Jefferson and Wes Chandler.