Micah Welch's high school coach shares why Welch and Colorado are a perfect fit

It only took four months for Micah Welch to become one of Buff Nation’s favorites. Welch’s punishing, physical play style and straightforward, humble demeanor impressed his coaches and teammates throughout Colorado’s 2024 spring practices. After skyrocketing up the depth chart this spring, Welch is set to be a major factor for Colorado on offense this season.

Jesse Hicks was Welch’s head coach at Baldwin High School and was extremely generous with his time to speak with me about who Welch is as a football player, a person and why he and Colorado are a perfect fit.

When were you made aware of Micah Welch and when did you first see him play football?

I was at Baldwin for two stints. In my second stint back at Baldwin, I knew the community I coached some of my former players’ kids. So I was out at a rec league game, some travel ball, I guess he just got through playing and somebody was like, “Hey, man, you need to see this Welch kid,” and so I was like, okay, I can’t wait to meet him. It was more the things I heard about him when I got back. So when he got to middle school, he was playing running back and linebacker. You could tell there was a difference between him and everybody else. I’ve been telling him this since his freshman year, he’s built different, just a different cat.

So I knew when he started playing in middle school, I knew he was special. I knew he was the kind of guy that was a difference maker, I knew he would play as a freshman and I knew he would play major division one football. We’ve always had athletes but you always knew Micah was a little bit different. He was special. He’d do things that other people couldn’t do but one thing you’d notice about him first, he was very physical. He ran with a purpose and an attitude. And you always knew that once that kid got to the high school level he would demand some attention as a freshman and he did that.

The thing I think that separates him from everybody, he’s built different than most guys his age. God gives all of us gifts and he’s been extremely gifted with the talent to play ball.

How would you describe Micah’s demeanor off the field?

Micah’s a little guarded, he’s serious. This is what I told Coach Flea when they were recruiting him, I told Coach Pollock this too. You’re going to earn your relationship with him. You’re going to earn every conversation, you’re going to earn your relationship, you’re going to earn every handshake, you’re going to earn every hug. I did, it took me time to do that. Your relationship with him is going to be well-earned and it’s going to be a solid one once he gets there. But you’re going to earn all of it because he’s not going to mince his words. He’s extremely focused and he’s going to figure you out before he gives you an opportunity to know who he is.

How would you describe Micah’s playstyle?

The same way he is off the field. I shared this with him, I told him he’s a cross between Barry Sanders and LaDainian Tomlinson. He has every attribute of both of those guys. Micah’s very explosive and is extremely powerful. Micah can change direction, stop and start. He has tremendous vision. He has awesome balance. He was probably the best wide receiver on our team, he had the best hands on our team. So he has such a good mixture.

I told him one day, “If you keep your head on straight, you’re going to have an opportunity to play at the next level and give your family generational wealth. But also I think you have an opportunity to be one of the top running backs in the country.” He heard me at a young age and I said this to him every single summer, he heard me.

Micah was one of those guys who carries the ball the way he lives his life: with intention and purpose. What’s crazy is everybody says that about him when they’re watching. He lost his mom when he was a very young kid. His aunt, Miss Regina raised him and did an awesome job along with his other siblings. That’s another thing I told him before, both of us lost our mothers. I lost my mother at 47, he lost his mom at a very young age. He wears that, he’s not going to talk about that with you but, me personally, I know he wears that on his sleeve because he wants to make his mom proud. He’s very guarded about that. But again, you can tell he runs intentionality, with purpose, and lives his life that way. He’s a different cat.

Micah committed to Colorado after visiting last June, many of the 2024 recruits who committed to Colorado ended up decommitting, why was Micah so committed to Colorado throughout his recruitment?

It was Coach Flea, to be honest with you. I’ve known Flea for years now from him recruiting my school and the state of Georgia. And then of course, who doesn’t love Prime? He’s the kind of guy where you have to respect him because of who he is, but he’s the kind of guy that doesn’t mince his words so they’re similar. Prime is very intentional in what he does, so is Micah, I think Micah noticed that about him. Micah saw a little bit of himself in Coach Flea and Coach Prime.

He was recruited by every school in the South. There was something about him when he got back [from his visit] he said, “Coach, I think that’s the spot for me. I know I’m not going to be close to home but there’s something about Colorado I really like.” I said, “Son, when you know, you know. When God puts something in your heart, he doesn’t do it accidentally, he does it for a purpose. And if you feel that way, don’t waver. That’s what you want to do, don’t look at anybody else’s story and try to write yours. Because you can’t write your story with someone else’s pen. It doesn’t work that way.” He totally understood it and I knew he was locked in because every day he had a CU towel on at practice or gloves.

After all that, people were calling me, SEC schools were calling me asking me, “Coach do you think he’s signing with his commitment?” I’d say, “Have you talked to him?” Micah told me they were calling him and I said, “Micah, you’ve got to call these guys and let them know that you’re going to go to Colorado and you want to thank them. With the way the world is with sports now, you don’t know whether you’ll be there or who your next coach is going to be. It’s an honor for a school, if it’s a major division one school to give you an opportunity. So you just tell them, guys, thank you but this is what I’m going to do.” He saw that too.

I think a lot of it had to do with the people there. Micah’s not a big talker, he’s not one that if you’ve not earned your relationship with him, you’re not going to get the best of Micah verbally. You’ll always get the best of him when it comes to ball and how he goes about his business, but when he opens up and tells you the kind of intimate things he’s thinking about, you know you’ve won him over.

It was all about the atmosphere the coaches built over there. It’s all about Coach Flea and how those guys made him feel when he got there he really felt like those guys cared about him more than just football. A lot of times our kids are looking for either somebody in their life when they make that next step or the culture. Something about their culture or their high school coach that they saw up there or it made them feel that way. I tell them all the time, people will forget what you say but they’ll never forget how you made them feel. I really felt like he felt like he was at home when he was there. He felt like those people really wanted him for more than just a football player but to continue to build that program.

Were you surprised about Micah’s recruiting rankings and that he was not recruited more by big time programs?

In order to answer that question, you’ve got to look at the position that he plays. Let’s just go to the NFL, the most underappreciated position on the field is a running back. That’s why you don’t see a lot of them drafted in the first round. So when you’re going around the country, everybody likes the tangibles. Everybody likes certain things. Everybody likes certain optics, how tall is he, how much does he weigh and how much does he bench. Everybody’s looking for the perfect player but what Colorado was looking for was a football player.

I’ll never forget when Coach Flea came down, I talked with him before Micah came down to the gym. I said, “Now Flea, you’re going to have to earn this relationship with him.” Flea’s very similar to him so when he when he walked in, he probably stayed in there about 15-20 minutes then he walked out and after we walked out, Flea said, “That’s the one we want.” Flea saw in Micah not just what he saw in football, but in his eyes, the way he spoke and his intentionality, he saw that in him. He wasn’t talking about the football player, he was talking about the person and said, “That’s the kind of guy that we’re actually looking for.” A lot of people don’t have those intimate conversations with kids. I talk to every school in the country. Everybody’s looking for that perfect guy. They want the size, the speed, I want this, I want that. And at the end of the day, I’ve been a college football coach at the Division II level, I’m looking for football players. Micah Welch is a football player. When you recruit that way, you recruit great players, it’s gonna show up on Saturdays. I think running back is something that’s underappreciated these days in the sport of football but you’ve got to realize every high school’s got two of them.

Once Micah decided to go to Colorado, the recruiting picked up verbally towards me. That’s when it actually picked up. Once he committed they’d call and ask, “Do you think he’d want to take a trip?” I’d say, “You can waste your time calling him and ask him if you want to,” because we knew Micah was solid. Recruiting is like a rat race, you can say it’s bloodsport. So you could be recruiting here one minute and the next minute you could be looking at another kid to pop up. When you’re talking about division one schools these guys are recruiting the country they’re not just recruiting their state and adjacent states.

So when you see Colorado, which is on the west coast of the United States, is coming all the way to Georgia, you see them do that a lot to get players. They could have picked a bunch of guys from that side of the world or all over the state of Georgia, all the way down to Florida, but they decided on Micah Welch. I think that’s really what made him solid towards them. He felt that and the recruitment part of it, man, that thing is up and down, you never know how it’s gonna go. But I think he’s at the perfect place.

When you see hit pieces written about Colorado and the coaches after you’ve gotten to know them, what is your reaction to seeing these negative things about Colorado?

I’m glad you asked me that because I get that question all the time from people. “Man, what do you think about what’s going on in Colorado?” I think what’s going on in Colorado is that there are a lot of schools that want to promote their programs in this day and age in recruiting and ain’t nobody doing it better than them. It’s almost like a small piece of jealousy to the point where these guys are constantly in the news and people don’t like that. It’s almost like maybe they look at it a lot of times like these guys are flamboyant and over the top and I just don’t look at it like that. I look at it as though these guys have, you start talking about multimedia and social media, there’s not another school that’s been as good as Colorado has been the last couple of years. You can’t touch it. But that’s what recruiting is now.

So when you’re seeing what they’re doing with social media, nobody’s doing it better than them for recruiting. So when a guy does jump in the portal they say, “Okay, let me take a look at what’s going on over there at Colorado,” that’s a problem for some people because not everybody has that cache. When you think about Uncle Neely, you think about what Bucky is doing, man, I get up in the morning and I watch it. Not just because my kid is there but because it gives you an open view of how things function and in truth, a lot of people don’t like the truth. They’re killing the recruiting with social media and are the most talked about school in the country. I’ve got friends of mine who don’t watch football who watch Colorado because of what they’re doing.

Then there’s the cache that goes along with it. When you gotta face an opponent like that, instead of just going, “Hey, man, what are y’all doing at CU? I’d like to get some of this,” the first thing they’re going to try and do is beat it up. And that’s the same thing that happened with Oregon. These days you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. So instead of trying to get an example of what Colorado is doing, they want to beat it up, they want to find a fault in it. When I hear it and I see it, I laugh about it really. People can question it, they can say this or that but at the end of the day it’s been productive.

People say all they did was win four games but they said before he wasn’t going to win a game. Now it’s a problem, “Oh he’s not treating these kids right”, the one thing about [Coach Prime] is he’s always honest. I coached college ball, I know it’s a bloodsport and I know what coaches say and do and Dan Lanning gave you just a sneak peak of what’s being said when the cameras ain’t around. What Prime does, he’s an open book and he allows you in and so we don’t like truth. We don’t really like reality and the reality of it is those guys are good at what they do. Now has it turned into football wins? They won one game and he won four, won three straight and he knew he was building something. But everybody else said, “Let’s see them go to TCU, they’re going to be beat by 30.” And what happened?

So now when they see that, I gotta find fault in it because it’s working. I laugh about a lot of it because at the end of the day, it comes down to recruiting and social media and really pushing the brand. It’s like anything else that you do right and gets good reviews, somebody’s going to dislike it.

After his phenomenal spring, what are your expectations for Micah this season?

The first thing about Micah and I think he knows it because he got it in high school, he’s a piece of the puzzle. You can’t get caught up in yourself, this is a team sport. I tell my guys this if you want to play for yourself, play tennis or golf. It’s a team sport and you’ve got to realize you’re a piece of a puzzle. When you think you’re bigger than that piece that you fit into, it doesn’t work and you’ll never fit in. He’s a piece of what has to fit to make the Colorado brand what it needs to be football-wise. What he’s done is he’s earned the opportunity to touch the football. I told him, “Okay you’re going to get maybe 10 to 12 touches, now let’s get it up to 20 to 25. Let’s really separate ourselves.” He’s created a name for himself, he’s really done a great job but he can’t get satisfied.

My expectations for Micah Welch are to touch the football, score touchdowns, continue to bring back the Rashaan Salaam’s, bring back the Eric Bieniemy’s, and make his name into one of those names. That’s my expectation for my son, all my kids are my sons but I have a unique relationship with that kid. I know I’m biased because he’s my kid but at the end of the day, I know who he is and I know what Colorado is looking for. So my expectation is that he will go in, he’s going to do wonderful things but the program will grow because of him and he will grow because of that program.