The town of Erie, Pennsylvania is a special place for Iowa fans. It is the place that brought the Hawkeyes Bob Sanders, Ed Hinkel, Jovon Johnson, and soon Abe Satterfield. But, another Erie product is also in Iowa City and has taken over as the defensive line. His name is Rick Kaczenski. Not only are there ties to Erie, but to the legendary Joe Moore, who is the mentor to Kirk Ferentz. Find out about the new DL coach in part one of our interview.

Q: Tell us who Rick Kaczenski is and about growing up in a place that Iowa fans have come to love, Erie, PA.

KACZENSKI: I am originally from Erie, as you know. It is a great place in Western Pennsylvania. The people there are blue collar and hard working folks. Everyone in my family was involved in athletics. My father played at Edinboro University, which is a Division II school. My brother played at Penn State and was on the national championship team there in 1986. My sister was a basketball player at a Division II school called Indiana, Pennsylvania. We were heavily involved in athletics. My father was a coach and a teacher for 33 years. My mother works for the school district at the credit union.

It is a very tight knit community and blue collar town. It is one of those places where you grow up with a football, a baseball glove and bat, and basketball in your crib. Erie is filled with great people and provided a great community. I tell people that it is a lot like Iowa, where people sit on their porch after dinner and they care about their neighbor. Probably not as pretty as Iowa, but the same type of people and community.

Erie has had some great football. Before Bob Sanders, Ed Hinkel, and Jovon Johnson coming to Iowa, they had Fred Biletnikoff, Mike McCoy, Mark Stepnoski and others. Erie is a little bit bigger than Iowa City, but it is still considered a small town.

Q: Ed Hinkel always used to say that Erie had become a Hawkeye town. Do you see that when you go back home?

KACZENSKI: Erie is one of those towns that is going to root for their own, no matter where they are at. It is funny even when I was growing up, I never followed the Steelers, the Browns, or the Bills, which are all close to Erie. You don't have your own team. I grew up as a Raiders fan because my father is friends with Freddy Biletnikoff and grew up a few blocks from him. He was close to his family and up until a few years ago, he played hand ball with his dad. I was a big fan of the Raiders. I loved Ozzie Newsome on the Browns. I just loved players. Then we had Mark Stepnoski, who was with the Cowboys when they were winning Super Bowls. Erie became a Dallas Cowboy town for a while. When I was there, we had a lot of Notre Dame people since it was a ethnic and catholic city.

The city of Erie wants to see their people do well and they get behind them. It is a huge Hawkeye town now, it really is. Bob, Ed, and Jovon are folk heroes back there. The people there love those guys. They are great football players and they beat up on Penn State, so there are more Iowa fans than Penn State fans in Erie now.

Q: You were pretty highly recruited coming out of high school and end up going to Notre Dame. Talk about the schools that were after you and the recruiting process for you back then.

KACZENSKI: The biggest benefit was that I came from Erie Cathedral Prep, where they have had a lot of players go to Division I schools. I had a coach who had been there for 20 years, so there was a lot of traffic. Anytime we had players, there were a ton of football coaches coming through from all over the country. Also, my father worked in the public school system, so whenever coaches came in to recruit the city schools, they would come see him. I had a little bit of advantage because my father made all of the videos. He would stay up putting those highlight tapes on video for me and sent them out to every school. He let me make my own decision, but he got really involved in the process. He really promoted me as best as he could.

Obviously my parents wanted me a little closer to home, but originally I had committed to Florida. I loved the Big Ten schools. I did not want to go to Penn State, because I wanted to be different. There were three guys who I played with and because my brother played there, I wanted to go somewhere different and shock people.

I went on a bunch of unofficial visits during the spring of my junior year. I went to Michigan, Ohio State, Michigan State, South Carolina, all the SEC schools pretty much were hit. I kind of had an idea of where I want to go and I committed to Florida early on. Then the following week, I went to Notre Dame. I met the coaching staff, including Joe Moore and the players. Once I left there on a Sunday, I sort of knew I wanted to go there. It was their team banquet and ten of the guys visited committed. Many of them became close friends.

What really sold me and changed my commitment from Florida was the people. Coach Moore was the big selling point, probably bigger than Coach Holtz. I wanted to play for Joe Moore and in Erie, Joe Moore is a Western Pennsylvania folk hero and a legend. He was almost like a guy that wasn't real and here I had an opportunity to go play for him and at Notre Dame. I was a catholic kid, who went to catholic schools and now I had the opportunity to go to a catholic institution for college. Plus, at the time, Notre Dame had the thing rolling.

I loved it once I got on campus and it was only a six hour drive from Erie, so it kind of fit. That was kind of at a time where people did not de-commit. Recruiting was different at that time. It was tough to call down to Florida and tell them I wasn't coming, but Coach Spurrier was great. He wrote me a letter that I still have in my closet where he wished me the best of luck and how he had enjoyed recruiting me.

Q: Talk about Joe Moore. Coach Ferentz mentions him quite often as his mentor. You used the term larger than life and that is really what he appeared to be.

KACZINSKI: The one thing about Joe Moore is that you knew that he loved to coach football and you knew that he loved to coach you. Now, he was a hard guy who never made things comfortable. But, I think as a football players, you see yourself on a certain level and I don't know if you see as a player where you can get to and what you can be. I think Joe had a special knowledge and a special talent of being able to see where you could be and it would be a disservice to his players if he did not get you to that level. He would push you day in and day out until he got you to that level. I don't think there is a guy who has ever played for Coach Moore that got worse. You knew that your success was just as important to him as it was to you and that is why you would run through a wall for the guy. You knew he cared about you. You knew he believed in the human spirit and you knew he wanted you to be the best that you could be. That is all he asked of you. He did not ask you to play outside of yourself or do things you are not capable of doing. He just wanted you to maximize on the talent you were given and the effort it took to be a great football player. If you did not get to that level, then I think he saw it as a disservice to his players.

Q: Do you and Coach Ferentz sit down and share a few Joe Moore stories from time to time?

KACZINSKI: Between Coach Ferentz, myself, and Chris Doyle, who was a graduate assistant for him, the stories never end. The stories are all the same, but you just change the names and the faces. (laugh) I still think that even though Joe left us four years ago this summer, we are all still a little bit afraid of him. (laugh) I think sometimes we are afraid that we might get struck by lightning that Joe sends down to us if we get off the tracks a bit. We sit around and tell a bunch of stories and what is great is that some of the players who come back here talk about him when he would just come by to visit during spring ball. Then we have NFL guys come in like Russ Grimm and Harry Hiestand, who is with the Bears coaching offensive line, they are Joe Moore guys. We all just sit around and it is always the same stories and you never stop laughing, you just change the names and the faces. I don't know if there are enough adjectives to describe the type of person and coach that Joe Moore was. He was just an unbelievable person and a guy who loved to coach football. He never desired to be a head coach or an offensive coordinator, he just wanted to coach offensive linemen and be the best at that job. I think you can see a lot of that in Coach Ferentz, Coach Doyle, and hopefully myself that if you are going to do something, then you might as well be the best at it.

Q: When did you get the coaching bug?

KACZENSKI: To be honest, when I got out of college, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I didn't have a real plan. I got my degree in four years and then I spent a year in grad school during my fifth year of playing. I didn't have a good shot at playing in the NFL and I knew that, but I didn't have another plan.

I was a free agent with the Packers and then was released by them. I kind screwed around in some camps up in Canada and really had zero direction. Basically, I was taking my own advice and I wasn't very wise. (laugh) Finally, I got in touch with the people that had helped me the most through my high school and college years. I spoke with Coach Moore and Coach Holtz, along with my old high school coach in Erie and they said I should get into coaching. They felt I would be good at it. So, I went back to Erie and coached at Cathedral Prep and had a construction job and I loved it. I think Ed Hinkel and Bob Sanders were sophomores that year and we started off 1-4 and ended up playing for the Western PA final. It was an unbelievable experience and I knew that if I could do this and actually not work, it would be like stealing. I caught the bug in 1998.

Then in 1999 during the summer I was getting ready to go back and coach again and Coach Holtz called and said he had a graduate assistant position open at South Carolina. I talked to Joe Moore about it. Any decision I made, I went through Coach Moore before I made it when it came to football. I asked him what I should do and he said you need to go with Lou, it is a no-brainer. Lou opened the door for me and gave me a great opportunity. I was a GA there for three years and then a member of our staff there, Buddy Pugh, who was a running back coach, got the head job at South Carolina State University and that was my first full time job as a coach. I knew this was going to be my life and my career.

It is just great to give back as a career to something that has given me so much. There is no other sport like this and when you think about what this sport has done for so many kids around the country and I think about what it is has done for me in terms of the places I have seen and the friends that I have made, it is truly amazing. I love to coach young people and be on the college campus teaching young people about a sport that has meant so much to me. I tell people I have not worked a day in my life and that is how I really feel. It is grind and you have to put your hours in, but it is really not work. When you are done playing, you kind of go through that time where you wonder what next? I had been competing since I was about seven years old in every sport and all the sudden I wasn't competing and had no idea what to do. Football has given that back to me. Not too many people get the opportunity to do what they love and I can tell you I love doing this stuff.