Stanford football Coach Jim Harbaugh is partial to athletes whose fathers coached them, because he used to be one of those athletes.
So when his star running back, Toby Gerhart, calls home nearly every day to talk to his father Todd, and maybe hears a nugget of advice about the way his feet were moving or the way he cut right or left, Harbaugh isn't insulted. He's pleased.
"Kids who have been coached by their fathers, they are almost always really coachable kids," Harbaugh said. "They take advice, they're willing to learn. I'm happy to have them."
Toby was coached by Todd for four years at Norco High, where Toby broke the state high school career rushing record, running for 9,622 yards. In his spare time, Gerhart was a baseball star and he continues playing that dual role for the Cardinal.
It's football season now, though, and Gerhart, a 6-foot-1, 228-pound junior, is coming off a performance in which he ran for 116 yards against Arizona.
Gerhart has rushed for at least 100 yards in four games this year, the first Stanford back to do that since Brian Allen in 2001. Going into today's game against UCLA at the Rose Bowl, Gerhart's 91.6 yards rushing per game ranks fourth in the conference, this only a year after he had knee surgery.
Seemingly on the verge of a breakout season when he came off the bench to gain 140 yards in 12 carries in less than three quarters against San Jose State, Gerhart suffered a torn anterior cruciate ligament.
"I think some people doubted whether I'd come back to football," Gerhart said. "I wasn't one of them."
Gerhart came by his sports life naturally. Playing football, baseball and basketball is all he remembers.
"I think my first memory of anything was wearing a little football jersey and catching passes from my dad," Gerhart said in a telephone interview this week. "I was the water boy for my dad's team. I was always watching games with him. I think I was learning about football forever."
Todd Gerhart was also a running back at Norco High, and then at Cal State Fullerton. He played in the USFL and briefly in the NFL for the Houston Oilers and Minnesota Vikings before getting into coaching. He's in Norco's athletic hall of fame, as is Toby's mother, Lori, who starred in basketball.
Toby's brother, Garth, is a redshirt freshman football player at Arizona State. He has triplet sisters, and two of them, Teegan and Kelsey, plan to play softball at Stanford, while the third, Whitley, is hoping to play college volleyball. His youngest brother, Coltin, is an eighth-grade quarterback and Todd says he may be the best athlete of the bunch.
