TULARE – On the surface, Tom Salmen’s football journey seems fairly routine. He won a state championship as a high school player and last month won another as a high school coach.

However, it’s what happened in between those periods of his life that is anything but routine.

It wasn’t that long ago that the head coach of the Hitchcock-Tulare Patriots was serving on the police force in Fargo, N.D. It’s a job he did for more than a dozen years before deciding to make a career change.

“I was made to a be police officer, I think,” Salmen said. “It was a good job. I’m not saying it was easy, but I was good at it and enjoyed it for the time I did it.”

Football has always been a part of his life, however, so it was only natural that he eventually gravitated back to the sport.

Salmen was part of a state championship squad in high school in Longmont, Colo., and later became a four-year starting linebacker at Black Hills State. There he met his future wife, JoEllen Hofer, a former Hitchcock girls’ basketball standout who had transferred from Huron College.

The couple started their teaching careers in Arizona where Tom got his first taste of coaching high school football. After three years as a head coach, an opportunity to move presented itself.

Salmen recalled thinking, “If we’re going to leave, we better just get back closer to home.”

He wanted to become a strength coach at an NCAA Division I college. He reached out to every school from the Missouri line to California and only two schools got back to him: the University of Idaho and North Dakota State.

After visiting both locations, their minds were made up.

“We just didn’t feel connected to Moscow, Idaho and we really liked Fargo,” Salmen said.

However, through a series of circumstances, the situation changed at NDSU and Salmen needed additional income. He decided to pursue law enforcement after studying it in college, but still had a desire to coach.

“I had lot of opportunities actually to coach there,” Salmen said of his time in Fargo. “The problem was my department wouldn’t let me coach at the high school level.”

So Salmen took a job with the force, working nights for the majority of the next 12 1/2 years.

Needless to say, there were some harrowing experiences, including the time his fellow officer got shot in a standoff.

Salmen recalled going out on a call to an armed robbery. He just missed encountering the suspect.

“I get there and I get inside and the guy is gone,” Salmen said, “but when you go back on video I missed interacting with him by not even 30 seconds.”

That individual was later shot in Nevada after a confrontation with law enforcement.

“I just think how close your life comes to certain things,” Salmen said.

Of course there were also light-hearted moments on the police force, including his first night on the street.

“I have a brand new car. I’m going down this two-lane road,” Salmen said of the rainy evening. He encountered a driver exceeding the speed limit. “I turn around and my right tire catches the ditch and pulls me right down and this is a deep ditch, so I drove down in the ditch and continued with lights and sirens in the ditch. I ended up getting stuck in the ditch and had to call for a tow truck.”

Salmen became the source of a lot of good-natured ribbing after that experience.

He equated going out on a call when he was a police officer to experiences he had on a football field.

“It’s just like playing a state championship game,” Salmen said. “You get excited. You get fired up and anticipate things. You just do the best that you can do at the moment.”

While he liked his job, he knew that it was something that wouldn’t last forever.

“I liked the street,” Salmen said, “but it’s not something you can do long haul.”

The Salmens eventually decided to moved to Tulare to be even closer to family.

For Tom it was a major adjustment going from a metro area of more than 250,000 people to a town of slightly more than 200.

“JoEllen of course was used to it. She grew up in the area, but I’ve always been a city boy,” Salmen said. “Even today it’s a shock that I’m living out in the middle of nowhere it seems like.”

After serving as an assistant coach, Salmen received a chance to become a head coach two years ago and this past year ended up guiding the Patriots to the Class 9B state championship capping off an undefeated campaign.

“It was just a great season,” he said. “When I took over, I knew this was possible.”

Looking back on how things have played out, Salmen is grateful for his new role in life.

He used to have nightmares of being shot at while he was a police officer. Now, as a P.E. teacher he has dreams frisbees flying at his head.

“I just try to live life and definitely trust God in leading all these things,” he said, “and it’s been wonderful.”

While Salmen has experienced many highlights on the gridiron during his career, it may be hard to top this past season. Not only did he get to coach two sons on the team, the Patriots reached their full potential and ended up winning their first state title since 2009 in undefeated fashion.

“How do you top that? Life is good all the way around, whether you win or not, but it was just a good season to finish out with your goals and what you expected to happen, happened,” he said. “That doesn’t happen every day, so it’s great.”

Just like the journey that went through four states and landed Salmen in Tulare.

“I did not see me coming back to small town South Dakota,” Salmen said, “but God has a plan and it all worked out.”