Considering where Western Colorado football was when Jas Bains took over as head coach in 2011, it’s only fitting his office was in what he described as a “dungeon.”
Located in the basement of a since-demolished dorm, the space had no running water, no bathroom and cement floors.
The set-up paralleled the Mountaineers’ situation on the field: Western Colorado was coming off a one-win season in 2010, and won just four total games across Bains’ first three seasons on the job.
“We were hidden away down there,” Bains said. “Out of sight, out of mind it felt like. It was a tough situation for a rebuild.”
In the 15 years since Bains took the helm in Gunnison, the script has flipped. No longer can the Mountaineers be ignored on the field as Western Colorado, owner of a record 20 Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference titles, reasserted itself as a force in Division II college football.
The Mountaineers have ripped off four straight winning seasons, including three years of 10 victories or more. That included a shared RMAC crown in 2021, the team’s first since 1998, and a program-record 11 wins last year that culminated in its first NCAA playoff victory. Western Colorado is on a similar track this year, off to a 5-0 start and ranked fifth in the D2 Football Top 25.
Yet it wasn’t all that long ago, Bains said, that there was “dialogue from some in our community of potentially dropping football.”
“People told me I couldn’t win here,” Bains said. “And at times, the program wasn’t where it could be or where I wanted it to be. So I stuck through it and kept fighting the good fight, and since 2021, we’ve won a lot of football games.”
Western Colorado’s makeover
When Bains arrived at Western Colorado as the defensive and special teams coordinator in 2010, the Mountaineers’ facilities were arguably the worst in the RMAC.
Beyond Bains’ “dungeon,” Western Colorado’s Mountaineer Bowl was outdated. Bains described the press box as an “old shack” where coaches climbed through a cutout in the roof to get up to makeshift coaches’ boxes under a tent on the press box roof. There were no locker rooms.
“We used to have halftime underneath the tree outside the stadium,” said former Western Colorado star running back Austin Ekeler, now in the ninth year of a distinguished NFL career.
“We would joke, ‘Whose mom has the snacks this time?’ It felt like Pop Warner football back in the day — we were just missing the handouts of the orange slices and the Capri Suns at halftime. That’s still a core memory of me playing up at Western, is how we did a lot with a little.”
In the winter, Mountaineer players shoveled the field for practices. The team once bused 25 hours to Humboldt County, Calif., to play a game. And on another road trip, the team got stranded in Lusk, Wyoming, due to a snowstorm. They ended up sleeping on the gym floor of a middle school, using clothes for pillows and blankets and eating Subway for four meals straight.
But over the last decade, as Bains started to get the Mountaineers on the right track on the field, the program’s situation improved off the field, too.
In 2014, the school opened the 65,000 square-foot Mountaineer Field House. It gave the football coaches (and coaches for other sports) new offices, and also new meeting rooms and a modern weight room.
Then came the big lift in the last half-decade with the $44.9 million renovation of the Mountaineer Bowl, a project paid for entirely by private donors. The total overhaul ahead of the 2024 season featured a new 10,000-square-foot, two-story box to house press, coaches and luxury suites; a new 20,000-square-foot building for home and visiting locker rooms; and the installation of artificial turf, a new videoboard, and, for the first time, lights.
It is now a venue that matches its postcard-perfect view, and the program’s upswing.
“Before that, we always had a lot of success here and a ton of tradition with all the sports, but not really much of the facilities to back it,” Western Colorado director of athletics Miles Van Hee said. “This (renovation) catapulted us to the very top (of the conference) as far as football stadium facilities.”
Bains’ two rebuilds
The Mountaineers’ breakthrough under Bains came in Ekeler’s senior year in 2016, when Western Colorado went 7-4. It was the program’s first winning record in 14 years, and the first seven-win season in 18 years.
But the departure of Ekeler’s large senior class, coupled with coaching turnover on Bains’ staff, immediately sent the Mountaineers right back to the bottom. Western Colorado was 1-10 in 2017 and 2-9 in ’18. Bains had a second rebuild on his hands.
“Did it feel like the beginning? Maybe worse,” Bains said. “Because I didn’t think we should’ve taken steps backwards like that.”
As it turns out, Bains, a former defensive back at Fresno State, was suited for the challenge.
Prior to arriving in Gunnison, Bains coached for five seasons at Chadron State, the first two as a graduate assistant. There, he established himself as a special teams guru who overlooked no detail and became a relationship-driven coach. He was also the Eagles’ equipment manager and in charge of the team’s academic study program.
“Those first couple years at Chadron, he was doing laundry, painting the field, mowing,” said Bill O’Boyle, the former Chadron State head coach who is now on the staff at Northwestern. “He takes pride in everything he does. The players see that nothing is too small for that guy, and doing the little things to perfection no doubt has made him the coach he is today.”
Bains’ close relationship with his players is best seen in the tradition that’s popped up in the last half-decade of the team welcoming him into its pre-practice meeting with a loud round of applause. Sometimes the clapping, hooting and hollering can last over a minute.
“He absolutely hates it and wants it to stop,” redshirt junior wideout Caden Measner said. “In fall camp, the claps last the longest, and he’s just standing up there with a grouchy look on his face just waiting for us to stop. We go crazy for him. It’s so funny, and we continued doing it because he hates it so much.
“We do it for as long as he lets us before he goes, ‘Alright, guys, stop. Let’s get to it.’”
Finding additional resources
While Bains and his staff have been successful in getting Division II-caliber talent from the program’s focus on “Colorado and the west” — California is a recruiting hub for the Mountaineers, as is Las Vegas and Phoenix — Western Colorado has also put a focus on making up financial ground within the RMAC.
Western Colorado football got $1.07 million in direct institutional support in the fiscal year 2024, according to its NCAA report. The program received $127,320 in contributions. And the football team gave out 20.83 scholarships, according to the report, well short of the maximum 36 allowed by Division II.
Compare that to Colorado School of Mines, which has been the class of RMAC football with shared or outright conference championships in five of the last six contested seasons. According to Mines’ 2024 NCAA report, the Orediggers received nearly double in direct institutional support in ’24 ($2.1 million); nearly triple in contributions ($357,190); and gave out 29.59 scholarships. Mines also pays its football coaching staff significantly more ($844,863 to $548,602).
Western Colorado is keenly aware of the gap between it and other RMAC athletic programs, says Van Hee, which is why the school has gotten creative with how it generates revenue.
The Mountaineer Football Alumni Association, founded in 2014 and comprised of approximately 70 members, raised about $75,000 in 2023-24. The Elevation Club, started in 2019, has provided another boost. The club recently reached double-digit members, with each donor pledging $7,723 (the elevation of Gunnison) for five years. That money goes mostly to scholarships for football players.
Plus, Western Colorado is using its conference and event services as well as its Junior Mountaineers Camp to generate funding for the athletic department. Van Hee said the revenue for conference and event services is used to cover travel costs for all of the school’s teams, while the camp program generated $369,550 for football in FY ’24 (compared to $70,568 for Mines). Both of those revenue streams for the athletic department were started six years ago.
“It’s a resource game, and for us to get more competitive, we knew we had to find ways to generate more resources,” Van Hee said. “And as far as funding goes, we still have a lot of work to do (with donors) to get there, but we also have a lot of support. We’ve made huge strides in our fundraising efforts.”
Mountaineers’ next chapter
Now, the hardest part for Western Colorado might be to keep a good thing going.
Donors stepped up in the offseason to keep the Mountaineers’ two returning All-Americans, quarterback Drew Nash and defensive lineman Ricky Freymond, by ponying up more scholarship money for each. And as Western Colorado eyes a conference title — back-to-back home showdowns against Mines and defending champion CSU-Pueblo loom on Oct. 25 and Nov. 1 — that would produce an automatic playoff berth, Van Hee has business to close.
Bains’ contract expires at the end of the season, and Van Hee said getting another deal done for the longtime head coach is a top priority.
“Coaches coming and going, you lose your donors that way, you lose momentum,” Van Hee said. “The longevity of Bains has really helped generate the resources for scholarships for football, in addition to the winning.”
Bains has had opportunities to leave in the past to become a position coach in Division I, but with his family rooted in Gunnison, the bar for him to bolt is now higher than ever.
For Bains’ players, that dedication and loyalty are part of the blue-collar appeal of Gunnison. Its population is less than 7,000, but as long as Bains is there, it feels big.
“At the end of each practice week for home games, he always reminds us, no matter who we’re playing: ‘Game of the week, (whatever time the game is), in Gunnison, America,’” redshirt senior defensive back Drea Thompson said. “I don’t know what it is, but whenever he says, ‘Gunnison, America,’ the entire team just gets pumped. It’s our gavel hitting and our reminder that our game is always a prime-time game for us.”
