The Beat: Former Natick standout Richards' son a Stanford star

Tuesday night at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Terry Richards gets to watch his son, Jordan, play football for the final time in a Stanford uniform.

The 21-year-old senior safety, a captain, will lead his team onto the field in the Foster Farms Bowl to play Maryland.

“It’s local for us,” said Terry Richards by phone from California last week. “It’s a little different than the Rose Bowl or the Fiesta Bowl, but if you want to go to the Rose Bowl you’ve got to play better. My son’s teams have gone to four bowl games in four years, so there’s no sense complaining.”

Terry Richards has spent the bulk of his life as a California resident. The first 22 or so years, though, Massachusetts was home. Natick, to be more specific.

Richards began his youth in Jamaica Plain before moving and attending Natick’s Kennedy Middle School and then Natick High, where he starred on the 1974 EMass Div. 1 Super Bowl winners on the defensive line before graduating in 1975 and going on to do the same at Tufts University.

He can point to the exact moment he decided to head west. It was late in his senior year at Tufts. Finals week.

Like anyone else in New England at the time, Richards had what he called “the privilege to live through the Blizzard of ’78,” a Tufts junior when that occurred in February.

In May of 1979, just prior to graduation, Richards was on his way to his last final on crutches as he recovered from a knee injury he suffered during football. His attire was befitting the time of year – “short pants, tennis shoes with no socks,” as he recalled.

“As I crutched out of my final, it was about 12:30 in the afternoon,” Richards recalled in a phone interview. “And it was snowing.

“Right then and there, I decided I was done. I wanted to go to California.”

Weather wasn’t the only thing pulling Richards to California. Richards’ sister had lived out in San Francisco for a little bit, so he knew he had a place to stay once he got a job. A civil engineering major at Tufts, Richards was able to get a job through the school’s career services center. He had done some interviewing with construction firms on campus, and got an offer from Turner Construction Company, which had offices around the country.

“I told them, ‘Anything west of Nevada,’” he said with a laugh.

Richards hasn’t looked back. In addition to his full-time job as a project manager at Teichert Construction, Richards is an assistant football coach at Folsom High School, which just won a California state championship. Folsom is where he settled after spending 10 years in the San Francisco area. He is in charge of the freshman program.

For the last 25 or so winters, he has been a member of the ski patrol at Squaw Valley Ski Resort, site of the 1960 Winter Olympics. He and his wife, Sharon (who grew up in New York), have two children – Jordan and 19-year-old Ashley.

Jordan Richards, a former basketball and football star at Folsom High, is one of the best safeties in the country, a projected mid-round pick in the 2015 NFL Draft by nfldraftscout.com.

A public policy major, he has fit the mold of a scholar-athlete at a school that is almost unmatched in combining its athletic and academic standards.

“It’s been a blessing,” said Jordan Richards by phone last week. “My mom and dad’s perspective on a lot of things in life, how they’ve chosen to raise me and my sister, it’s truly a blessing and I can’t thank them enough.”

Until Richards arrived at Stanford, his father had often been the one offering instruction from the sidelines since he put on the pads for the first time at eight years old.

“He’s been my coach since I started playing,” Jordan Richards said.

The father channels his Natick days often when on the sidelines. After playing for the likes of the late Dan Bennett, Bob Whelan, and Bob Ghilani, he has carried many of those lessons forward.

“When you’ve got coaches and players who all believe you can do something like we did at Natick, amazing things happen,” Terry Richards said. “We had only about five or six guys who played consistently at the next level. But we had a bunch of kids that all bought in, and the coaches were all in. That’s what I tell my kids now. ‘If you’re all in, we’ll do some things. If you’re not, we’ll have issues.’

“(At Natick), just when we were tired or sore and didn’t want to keep going, those coaches found the buttons to push. We beat teams with better talent. ... You need control and structure within a team to ensure it’s us against them, that you’re never shooting at your own. For us, it didn’t matter if you like each of them or don’t like each of them, they were our guys.”

Those lessons have carried forth to his son, who has been a coach on the field at times during a relatively disappointing season for the 7-5 Cardinal. Stanford had played in BCS bowls in each of the previous four seasons.

“Looking back, I remember being a freshman, in my first start ever at USC, and I didn’t even know the rules of overtime,” said Jordan Richards, who was recruited to Stanford by new Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh. “Now, being a senior, I like to mentor the young DBs. It’s like I have five younger brothers.”

On Dec. 10 at Disney World’s ESPN Wide World of Sports in Orlando, Jordan Richards was honored with the Pop Warner College Football Award, presented by Pop Warner Little Scholars, Inc. The award honors a player “who has contributed at a high level on the field, in the classroom and in his community, emulating the ideals of Pop Warner.” The other finalists were Oregon quarterback and Heisman Trophy winner Marcus Mariota, Nebraska running back Ameer Abdullah, and Florida center Max Garcia.

Richards also was an Academic All-American last year and recently won the National Football Foundation’s Scholar Athlete Award. The 5-foot-11, 208-pounder had 76 tackles, three interceptions, and three forced fumbles on the year entering Tuesday’s game.

“I had an inkling early on that Jordan would have success, but I never thought in a million years it would be this level of success,” the proud father said. “He’s put in all the hard work and made the right choices to be where he is right now.”

Jordan Richards doesn’t recall ever visiting the Boston area, saying his trip to New York for the scholar-athlete award was his first visit to the Northeast.

“When my son was probably 2, we went back,” Richards said. “We got Casey’s Hot Dogs and got Fribbles and all that. You lose some of that, when you don’t raise them where you grew up.”

The fandom element, too. Much of Jordan Richards’ impressions of Boston and Natick come through his dad’s rooting interests.

“All I have is my dad’s Patriots, Bruins, and Celtics memories,” Jordan Richards said. “He follows those three very closely.”

So what would life have been like had he not grown up in sunny Folsom, but instead in sparingly sunny New England?

“In the end, I feel like if my dad had stayed back East …,” Jordan Richards paused. “I’d probably be a little tougher.”

Hard to imagine.

Tim Whelan Jr. can be reached at 508-626-4402 or twhelan@wickedlocal.com. Follow him on Twitter @thattimwhelan.