Sandia's Tylon Wilder is not your ordinary head football coach

“I’m not your typical football coach.”

These words, spoken by Tylon Wilder, serve only as a rough sketch of the man.

The 49-year-old Wilder, the new head coach at Sandia, has a compelling past, to say the least, and that’s long before he ever had a coaching whistle in his mouth.

Consider his lengthy tour as a Marine coming out of high school, with seven deployments, four of them combat deployments in the Middle East.

Or perhaps consider that he once was a rodeo team roper in Hobbs, where he played football. He even had Ralph Tasker as a teacher.

“Good guy,” Wilder said of Tasker, New Mexico’s all-time winningest prep basketball coach. “But you didn’t have conversations with him. Straight arrow.”

It’s the immediate past that bridges Wilder’s current professional stretch that took him from Española Valley to Albuquerque.

In short order, Wilder, in just three seasons, guided the Sundevils to the Class 4A state semifinals last November, a mammoth achievement in the heart of what was always known as a purely basketball community.

In February, he was hired to take over the Matadors, hoping the Sundevils template would translate favorably in a larger classification.

“I don’t think so,” he said, asked if his approach will change now that his address and classification has also changed. “I think it’s the exact same thing. It doesn’t matter; they’re still kids. At the end of the day, they still want to believe in the program, the system that we’re doing, and they want to believe in their coach.”

Sandia will debut under Wilder on Aug. 22 versus Piedra Vista. The Matadors scrimmage Rio Rancho next week as a prelude to Week 1.

The Matadors were a four-seed in the state playoffs just two years ago, and finished 5-6 last season, going out in the first round of the 6A bracket to Rio Rancho.

Española Valley fell to St. Pius in the 4A semis, and this was arguably the best football season the school had ever experienced. Wilder’s coaching stock was soaring, to be sure.

“The biggest thing is, when I showed up three years ago, it was showing up for the kids every day,” he said. “They didn’t have a lack of a program, they had zero program. It was about giving them expectations of winning football games, because they’d never had that before.”

Wilder, in turn, pledged his devotion to his athletes, and vowed to support them both inside and outside of football. Which is what he said he is bringing to Sandia, too.

“We have taken to him very much,” junior linebacker Aiden Maldonado said. “He has been a big part of our progress; he spends more time with us than he does his own family. So he loves us, he wants to be here, and he brings the energy every day.”

This, of course, ties directly to his military background and the need for precision.

“He gets every player involved and he brings the energy every practice,” said Matadors junior quarterback Jahleel Lewis. “(He wants us) to perfect everything. Every offensive play, every defensive play.”

Wilder was Silver High’s defensive coordinator — his first paid coaching job, as Wilder most certainly didn’t rise up through the coaching ranks in the traditional way — before he moved north to Española.

At Sandia, he promises the Matadors will be a physical outfit, even as their youth seems likely to absorb plenty of bumps along the way.

“It takes a couple of years to build it,” he said.

The good news for Sandia is its numbers: there are nearly 100 players out for football, which is a healthy turnout.

“We’re young, but we have a good foundation,” he said. “When I say young, we’re young in age and young in experience. But they have what it takes to do it, we just have to get them to that point.”

Maldonado said Wilder’s alpha personality was evident from the first day he met with the team six months ago.

“I think the two words that best describe him are respect and discipline,” he said.

Wilder left Hobbs and went straight into the military. “I (was) a grunt. I went to sniper school. I had deployments all over the place,” he said.

It was eight years, he said, before he began taking some college courses. After a few semesters of pecking away and being retired from military life, he earned a degree from Western New Mexico.

He said he has served as a volunteer football coach in any numbers of states. His Marine background is apparent as he lays out his coaching ideals.

“The way I carry myself, the way I talk, the way I’m all over the field — I’m that guy,” Wilder said. “I’m hoping some of that bleeds off on the kids. Hopefully it wears off on them and hopefully they take some of that DNA with them.”

Sandia has Piedra Vista, Cibola and Volcano Vista to open the season before jumping into league play. Wilder fully expects his group to be a slow starting one, but believes that the sharp-edged philosophies he’s trying to instill will make things smoother by midseason.

“It’s surgical, it’s precise,” he said.

But, he did concede, Sandia probably is certainly not ready to jump in and challenge for a blue trophy.

“I love this challenge,” he said. “It’s gonna be exciting, but it’s gonna be an up-and-down rollercoaster ride.

“They’ve bought in,” Wilder added. “We do things different than anybody else does.”