LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — 13 Action News Sports Reporter Tina Nguyen walks and talks with UNLV head football coach Marcus Arroyo in our first "100 Yards With Tina Nguyen." Watch in the player above.
Below is the transcript from the interview. Some of the text has been edited for clarity.
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Tina Nguyen: Coach Arroyo, it's clear that your job can take you anywhere and everywhere. And it's brought you here to Las Vegas. What's it been like for you and your family to live here in Las Vegas?
Coach Marcus Arroyo: You know, we've lived in a lot of states. That's what you do when you come to this lifestyle for coaching. So, we've lived in nine states in the past 19 years. So, Vegas has been awesome. It's been a really, really cool place for us. We lived all the way from Oregon to Florida and everywhere in between. So, we really fell in love with the, with the people, the community and what Vegas is about.
Tina: How different is this from your hometown of Colfax, California?
Arroyo: Yeah, this couldn't be any further than Colfax. Obviously, by the town of a thousand people. My town is actually not too far from Colfax, about one stoplight and a really small, blue-collar hardworking town. So couldn't be further from what Vegas is.
Tina: You and your wife recently welcomed in a new baby boy. How do you balance out being the father of two kids, but also being a head coach?
Arroyo: Yeah, that's a delicate balance for us coaches. Really the wives and the families of college coaches, they're the heads there. They're the ones that should be really celebrated. We're gone 17 hours a day from August to December. And so, having a family and that balance is really, really more kind of like a military family than it is anything. So, we've had our ups and downs and hard times just like anybody else, but I think that I'm just really excited to have, you know, we got a new baby boy. I got a daughter who's seven, so my family is pretty important. And, that balance is something that I probably got a lot better at over the years, too.
Tina: Well, lastly, coach, we've already seen this team show resilience, but what else do fans need to know about this group that you've got this year?
Arroyo: Well, they've got fight in them. I think that for the first time now we've got a chance. We're coming off a pretty disappointing start to it, but I think there's a lot of good things that we'll get out of it. And I think that our guys who've got the right mindset and the right culture. We're starting to gel together a little better, but we've got a lot of work to do. We knew that coming in, though. We knew coming into this was going to be a really hard process at this place, and we're cut for it. So excited to keep it going.
Tina: Coach Arroyo, as always thank you for your time and good luck the rest of the way.
