Before Tim Polasek became the 32nd head football coach at North Dakota State, there were days he worked on the floor of a Wisconsin forest and nights he slept inside the NDSU locker room.
Neither location offered much comfort.
The forest saw temperatures dip to 10 or 15 degrees below zero in the winter and climb into blazing heat during the summer. The locker room offered shelter, but only temporarily. Polasek lived there for four or five months before someone reported the arrangement to the fire department, and he was told he needed to find an apartment.
Those were the early days of a coaching career built with little money, few guarantees, and plenty of reasons to quit.
Polasek just kept going, and it included time doing manual labor.
“You learn real fast to pay attention to details,” Polasek said of his time as a part-time logger. “And in really tough weather, minus 10 or 15 in the winter or blazing heat in the summer.”
Long before he led the Bison to a 26-3 record, two Missouri Valley Football Conference championships and the program’s 10th NCAA Division I FCS national title in his first two seasons, Polasek was doing whatever was necessary to remain in coaching.
While earning his master’s degree and working as a part-time assistant at Wisconsin-Stevens Point, he logged during the summers and winters to make ends meet. It was dangerous, exhausting work, something Polasek learned firsthand when a loose branch caught in another tree came crashing down.
Loggers call those branches “widowmakers.”
“This branch was 10 inches thick and probably 16 feet long,” Polasek said. “It came down and hit me and destroyed the hard hat, knocked me completely out.”
Polasek had not always worn the hard hat when he climbed out of the skidder to secure trees. On that day, he did.
The impact split the helmet and dropped him to one knee. It also reinforced one of the lessons that has followed him throughout his coaching career: Details matter, especially when the conditions are difficult.
The incident did not convince Polasek to abandon logging for football. His path had always required hard work outside the game.
During college, he worked in an iron factory to help pay tuition and continue playing quarterback at Concordia University Wisconsin. Polasek became the school’s all-time leading passer and the 2000 Badger-Illini Conference Player of the Year. Still, his playing success did not make the beginning of his coaching career any more lucrative.
“I think my first four years of coaching, I made about $20,000 to $24,000 total,” he said. “You couldn’t even start to pay back your student loans or any of that stuff.”
When an opportunity brought him to North Dakota State in 2006, Polasek barely had enough money to make the trip. He considered selling his golf driver for gas money. A superintendent from his small Wisconsin community learned what was happening, bought the club and then immediately returned it.
The money helped Polasek reach Fargo. Once there, he found another way to stretch what little he had.
He slept in the NDSU locker room.
For four or five months, the future Bison head coach quietly avoided paying rent. Eventually, the fire department learned someone was living inside the facility, and Polasek had to move into an apartment.
He laughs about it now, but the experience remains central to how he views coaching, opportunity and the changing landscape of college football.
“What I really pull from it is, with all the turmoil and some of the change in college football, we get to coach football,” Polasek said. “You get to coach for as long as they’ll allow you to.”
Polasek spent 10 seasons as an NDSU assistant over two stints, first under Craig Bohl from 2006 to 2012 and later as offensive coordinator under Chris Klieman from 2014 to 2016. He also coached at Northern Illinois and Iowa before reuniting with Bohl at Wyoming, where he served as offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach from 2021 to 2023.
Each stop broadened his perspective. NDSU, however, remained the place that helped raise him as a coach.
Under Bohl, Polasek gradually received more responsibility. At a time when his paycheck remained small, that trust meant everything.
“Every year, he gave me more responsibility,” Polasek said. “At that time, that was worth way more than money could ever be or some sort of contract.”
Three years into his first NDSU tenure, Polasek finally earned a full-time position. For the first time, he felt as if he could begin building a life away from the office. A year later, he met his future wife, Jill.
Another milestone came in 2017, albeit not in terms of on-field success, but an important one.
“My proudest moment still in my coaching and educational career is in 2017. I wrote the check and wrote my student loans off,” he said. “Pretty cool.”
Now, Polasek is leading NDSU into another defining period as he sits at Mountain West media days. The Bison are moving from the FCS to the Mountain West, but the coach who survived a widowmaker and slept in the locker room does not believe the program needs a new slogan for its new surroundings.
“We’re not a mantra-type team,” he said. “We have a living, breathing culture that was established in 1965.”
That culture, Polasek said, is rooted in humility, development and an aversion to becoming satisfied. He describes the Bison as “allergic to the big meal,” his way of saying the program cannot allow past success to satisfy its hunger for what comes next.
It is also why he believes coaches must continue fighting to preserve the traditions and developmental principles that helped build the program.
“We’ve worked too darn hard not to stand up and fight for what’s right,” Polasek said, “and to continue to try to hold on to traditions and the right way of doing things, or the North Dakota State way of doing things.”
The profession has changed dramatically since Polasek began coaching. Coaches are now responsible for navigating the transfer portal, player compensation, retention and roster management in addition to teaching football and developing young people.
His advice to young coaches is to understand the job clearly before entering it.
“It’s not just all about the ball anymore,” Polasek said. “There are so many more layers. But if you love it and you have a passion for it, and you can stay the course and learn and grow, stay with it because it’s really rewarding.”
Polasek stayed and has had success with it.
From the iron factory to the forest, from the locker-room floor to the head coach’s office, he never found a shortcut. He kept working until the opportunity he once slept beneath was finally his to lead.
