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When he began coaching at age 23, Chris Carlisle thought he knew it all.

“When I started, I thought I was the smartest coach,” the Seahawks’ first-year head strength and conditioning coach said of his fresh-out-of-college coaching gig, the top job at Dodge High in Nebraska. “I read all the books of the famous coaches and I thought I knew more than they did.

“Bill Walsh had nothing on me.”

But then in one game that season, Carlisle’s squad faced a 3rd-and-24. The rookie coach looked at his call sheet and didn’t see an answer. Instead of burying him, that moment instead birthed an intellectual campaign and coaching journey that has taken him through the ranks and into his first season at the NFL level.

“On the way home from that game, the epiphany struck — ‘man I don’t know anything,’” said Carlisle, now 47. “So for the last 25 years I’ve been on a crusade to learn as much as I can and become the best.”

And what a crusade that’s been. Carlisle has blossomed into one of the nation’s most respected strength and conditioning coaches, earning national collegiate coach of the year honors in 2006. It’s been far from easy, though — starting with that initial epiphany and going up until the present.

“The problem with this crusade is that every time I answer one question, five more questions come out of it,” Carlisle said. “I’ve got a lot more questions now than then. I had three questions back then; I’ve got 3 million questions now. It seems like the smarter I’ve gotten, the dumber I’ve become.”

Carlisle knows one thing for sure now. He can take solace in the knowledge of his shortcomings, because he knows that makes him better.

“I’ve always said the greatest strength of any man is to understand his weakness,” Carlisle said.

In the beginning

Carlisle got his start in coaching fresh out of Chadron (Neb.) State College, where he was an All-Area offensive lineman in 1983. He took the head football coach and head strength coach position at Dodge (Neb.) High because he “enjoyed being around football.”

“It was an opportunity to help with young people and help them not make the same mistakes I made when I was younger,” Carlisle said of his motivation to get into coaching. “It was a way to share the information I had been given when I was a player, and it was an opportunity to teach and work in athletics.”

After just a year, Carlisle got out of Dodge and then went on to be offensive line and strength coach at Blytheville (Ark.) High for six seasons. In 1992-93, Carlisle was a strength and conditioning graduate assistant at Arkansas before taking the head football and strength coach position at Subiaco (Ark.) Academy, a college prep school, for four seasons. Then he went on to Trinity Valley Community College in Athens, Texas, where he won the NJCAA national championship in his one season there. Then he got his big break, and became an assistant strength and conditioning coach at Tennessee in 1998-2000, winning the national championship in his first season with the Volunteers.

Along the way, Carlisle learned so much about how to coach strength and conditioning — and how to become better as a person and leader.

“I started to learn that you can be great if you just work,” said Carlisle, who grew up in Mason City, Iowa.

After three seasons at Tennessee, Carlisle got a call from Coach Pete Carroll, who had just taken the head job at USC. Just like that, Carlisle was the head strength and conditioning coaches at one of the country’s most renowned programs. He would go on to help train Trojan teams that won seven straight Pac-10 titles, two national championships and 97 games in nine seasons.

“Chris was enormously instrumental in our success on and off the field at USC,” Carroll said. “He brings a unique cerebral element to the strength and conditioning portion of our program. We wouldn’t have been nearly the same without him.”

Through the years and across the jobs, Carlisle’s philosophy on coaching and life has taken shape. Every day, he’s studying in his office; every practice, he’s observing; in every meeting, he’s constantly writing. Carlisle has turned into quite the scribe, as he’s constantly scratching out notes.

It’s all part of his pursuit of knowledge.

“As you go through the process of writing, you’re articulating what’s on your mind,” explained Carlisle, who fills up — in tiny, precise handwriting — about four notebooks a year. “You’re able to label it and look at it and answer it and change when you need to. It helps me see why we do things and how we’re able to get better at it.”

One of the key components of Carlisle’s approach is attitude. While any player can slosh through a workout, it’s the ones who do it with desire who truly get the most out of it. Carlisle calls it the “get to, got to” philosophy, and he compares it to two foods.

“You’ve got to eat broccoli and you get to eat ice cream,” Carlisle said. “If you have a ‘get to’ attitude — you get to work out, you get to be around your teammates — then it’s very simple. But when you’ve got to — you go to a meeting and say, ‘I’ve got to do this’ — then you’re not going to get anything out of it.

“It changes the whole light of how you do things.”

The “get to, got to” philosophy especially carries over into Carlisle’s lengthy career as a coach.

“For 25 years, I get to coach,” Carlisle said. “I don’t go to work — they pay my wife for me to come here and be with these guys. For 25 years we’ve been able to do this.”

Stricken, yet undeterred

In 2000, just before his first year at USC, Carlisle’s career hit a major road block when he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease.

However, he wasn’t going to let it slow him down one bit as he continued his quest to be the best he could be as a coach.

“I never became a victim, I never let it take me down,” Carlisle said. “I went to work every day, and it was another battle. I never felt like I was ever behind, I always felt I could push through.”

Carlisle and Carroll kept the disease a secret from the entire team as he continued treatments in Tennessee and Los Angeles before doctors told him in the summer of 2001 that the cancer was in remission.

“We purposely didn’t tell the team what I was going through because I did not want them to treat me differently,” Carlisle said. “When you hear somebody has cancer, all of a sudden they become a ‘sick person.’”

Throughout the treatment, Carlisle said he had some ups and downs. Some days he would feel horrible, but he always knew he could make it though “because Coach Carroll had put so much trust in me and I was not going to let him down.”

“The more you sit and think about ‘woe is me,’ the more you allow it to take control,” Carlisle said. “If you put it in the back of your mind and it’s the last thing you deal with, you can get up and push through. It teaches you to persevere and appreciate every day. It teaches you to take life as it is and not worry about what you can’t control and only control what you can control.

“I didn’t let it control me. It made me feel sick and feel tired, but I pushed through.”

Carlisle finally told the players about his battle at the start of fall camp in 2001, a story that proved inspirational for years to come. He was one of 17 nominees for the 2003 Most Courageous Award presented by the Football Writers Association of America and was one of 11 nominees for the 2005 award, on top of the routine mentions of his story during USC team meetings.

“It makes you appreciate a lot of stuff,” Carlisle said. “I was able to get through it by the grace of God, my family, Coach Carroll and the football team. They didn’t allow me to feel sorry for myself.”

Pressing on

Carlisle has made it his mission to not only learn as much as he can, but also to teach and pass along what he’s collected over the years. And he’s doing it through a care-filled approach to coaching.

“There’s an old saying in teaching, ‘they don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care,’” Carlisle said. “That’s what I want guys to know. Whatever we do, it’s not about me but about them and how I can help them achieve their dreams.

“My dreams are being achieved through their hard work.”

Yet much more is being achieved than Carlisle’s dreams as his pursuit rumbles on into the NFL and beyond.

“There’s a lot more to be done,” Carlisle said. “I’m not near done.”