The Tribune’s 2016 County Football Player of the Year: Paso Robles’ Christian Erickson

The different sides to Paso Robles High School’s star senior running back/linebacker Christian Erickson may surprise you.

In fact, for those who have only seen the Friday night lights version of Erickson, a bruising running back/linebacker widely considered San Luis Obispo County’s most physically imposing player who runs through opposition with violent efficiency, the other side of the senior will mostly definitely surprise you.

There’s almost a comic-book-like quality — say, such as Harvey Dent, better known as Two-Face, Batman’s arch nemesis — to the player better known as The Beast of North County.

On one side lies The Beast, all 5-foot-11, 215 chiseled pounds of him. On the other side lies the tech geek — that’s right, tech geek — a reserved 4.0 student who built his own computer as a 14-year-old and spends his free time playing video games and teaching himself how to code.

When the brains and the brawn converge underneath the bright lights of War Memorial Stadium, the Central Coast football world takes notice. Opposing coaches have stayed up late over the past three seasons working up game plans aimed at stopping him. In 2016, just like in years past, nobody could.

Erickson capped a stellar high school career this fall with his best all-around season. He rushed for more than 1,200 yards, averaging a shade better than 126 yards per game, and accounted for 28 touchdowns, all while taking on a new defensive role. He was the driving force of a Paso Robles football team that finished the season with an 8-3 record and a trip to the CIF-Southern Section Division 3 playoffs.

For his accomplishments, Erickson has been named The Tribune’s 2016 County Football Player of the Year.

‘Strongest guy on campus’

A college recruiter, like most people who come in contact with Erickson, was impressed by Erickson’s stature during a recent meeting. Particularly his neck.

“Do you lift your neck or is that natural?” Erickson recalled the recruiter asking.

“Oh no, I do neck weight lifting on my own,” Erickson said.

Paso Robles interim head coach Matt Carroll, who helped coach Erickson during his three years on the varsity team, just shakes his head when he describes his power.

“We don’t (work on neck weightlifting),” Carroll said. “We are developing players in high school, and he is doing what pros and college guys do. He’s lifting for his neck.

“He’s a beast in the weight room, too.”

The weight room is where Erickson built the base for the player he has become. He started lifting at a young age, he said, but around eighth grade, he got big. By the time he was a freshman, he was 215 pounds.

“It took probably four or five years of just hating it every day of the week,” Erickson said of the gym grind. “Then something clicked, and I started seeing good results. I could see myself getting stronger on the football field and being able to out hit and out run people. It just feels good.”

Erickson said he works out five days a week either at school or his home gym doing power cleans, dead lifts, front squats, snatches, overhead squats, “anything you can think of.”

“He’s our strongest guy on campus by far,” Carroll said.

And it’s not just strength.

His athleticism, when measured in a metric called SPARQ, put him among the top players in California. That same strength and agility earned Erickson a spot on the varsity team as a sophomore, when he rushed for more than 1,300 yards and 16 touchdowns on a team that went on to win the 2014 CIF-Southern Section Northern Division Championship.

This season, all those hours in the weight room paid off in the season finale against Atascadero with his best performance of the season — 297 rushing yards and four touchdowns.

“Outside of the CIF championship, that was probably the biggest accomplishment,” Erickson said. “Coming off of that three-year drought of them beating us, it was really nice to get that win.”

Passion for Computers

Erickson talks about his personal computer with the same pride and enthusiasm that his stepfather, Jimmy Erickson, uses when he talks about his son.

“It has a GTX 1080 graphics card, 32 gigabytes of RAM, an Intel Core i7 processor,” Erickson said about his pet project. “I have just always had a thing for computers since I was young. I built my first computer when I was 14, and I just keep adding to it. I like to mess around with programs and try to code.”

Erickson, who said he has designed “small games here or there,” plans to major in computer science in college. He said part of the inspiration for computer science came from a story he read about a reclusive Vietnamese programmer named Dog Nguyen, the inventor of the mobile game Flappy Bird.

“That was one of the things that got me going,” Erickson said. “He was just a normal guy that made an app in his free time. He made so much money. I was like, ‘I can do that. That’s not that hard.’ ”

But when the ball is snapped, the humble computer geek takes a backseat to The Beast.

“I don’t really need anything to get hyped up,” Erickson said. “Before the game, I am completely normal. And during the game, I just flip a switch and go. I can stay nice, but on the field it’s just free. I can do whatever I want and not have any penalties for it.”

Carroll calls him a “different guy.”

“For me, it’s been refreshing coaching him just because you can have a different kind of conversation,” Carroll said. “He is a guy that takes AP classes. For a quiet guy like that to shift and be The Beast, it’s truly a transformation. A Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde type-deal.”

What’s Next for The Beast?

For all the football successes enjoyed by Erickson, there has also been plenty of setbacks.

He missed Paso Robles’ 2014 championship run after suffering a meniscus tear in his knee toward the end of the season. Last season, he had a thumb injury that hindered his performance in a couple of big games, he said. And this year, three games before the end of the season, his coach and mentor Rich Schimke was removed from his position and wasn’t there for the Atascadero game.

And in the biggest league game of the Bearcats’ season, an October matchup against undefeated Arroyo Grande, Erickson was forced to sit out due to a staph infection in his nose. The doctor told him if he played, he risked the infection spreading to his brain.

“It sucked,” Erickson said. “Just sitting at home wishing that I could play. I knew on Thursday, I talked to my doctor, and he was like, ‘There is no way. It would be a risk to your health if you played.’ It was crushing. I just think, ‘What could I have done?’ Watching on the sidelines was one of the worst things.”

Paso Robles went on to lose the game 35-28 and finish in second place in the PAC 5 behind Arroyo Grande.

“It just seems like I look back and every year I have a problem, and I don’t know why,” Erickson said.

The frustrations have continued into the offseason with the recruiting process. Erickson saw preseason interest from Division I FBS programs such as San Jose State and Fresno State — both teams that parted ways with their head coaches this season — fade away.

“It has been a lot of waiting,” Erickson said. “I will be talking to one coach, and then he will just never talk to me again. There’s no hard feelings because that’s just the recruiting process, but it does get frustrating at times.”

But there have been newcomers interested in Erickson’s diverse set of skills. Erickson, who also had two interceptions as a linebacker playing defense for the first time since his freshman year, met with Sacramento State on Wednesday and has been in contact with Cal Poly and Northern Arizona.

Carroll, who as defensive coordinator helped coach Erickson on how to play cornerback against Atascadero’s All-County wideout Elijah Cooks in one week, has one message for recruiters: “Sign him.”

Erickson said while he would like to play running back in college, he realizes he might be better suited as a linebacker based on his body type and 4.7 second 40-yard-dash speed.

“I feel like I can use my running back skills to be able to see the hole and use my top-end speed to be able to catch the wide receivers or running backs or cover them,” Erickson said. “Linebacker is the same position, just on the other side of the ball.”

For now, Erickson will continue to embrace his dual personalities and use football to help pursue his long-term goals.

“I just want to graduate college with a good degree to be able to support my family,” Erickson said. “Just be able to have a nice family and a nice house. Take my kids to a nice area. Be able to send them to good schools, not worry about money. I don’t want money to ever be an issue.”

This story was originally published December 3, 2016 at 12:46 PM with the headline "The Tribune’s 2016 County Football Player of the Year: Paso Robles’ Christian Erickson."