A Winner at Every Turn

Champion. Veteran. King of the rebuild.

There are many words you could use to describe Coach Willie Fritz, and any of the above will do. But they would only tell part of the story — because Fritz, a head coach for more than three decades, believes his best chapters are still ahead of him. Fortunately for the University of Houston, those chapters will take place here on campus.

“It took me a long time to get around the bases. I finally got my home run by getting this job,” Fritz said at a press conference in December, where he was announced as the Cougars’ new football coach. “It’s a dream [for me to be] here at the University of Houston.”

The highly decorated Fritz arrives at the perfect time for UH. The new-look Big 12 Conference includes plenty of room for a young and hungry team to make its mark, and the new man at the helm has a habit of taking teams to the top of their respective leagues. He began his head coaching career by taking Blinn College’s football team from five wins in three previous years to two national junior college championships, and in his most recent gig, at Tulane University, he led the Green Wave to a 12-win season and a bowl game victory just one year after Hurricane Ida displaced the football team and much of the campus.

“I can’t tell you the number of coaches that I have worked with [who] have reached out and said: ‘You got the right guy,’” Chris Pezman, vice president for athletics, said at that same press conference. “It was clear who that person was, and it was Coach Fritz.”