With mother in mind, Woodland native Paul Wulff has Cal Poly football trending up
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Paul Wulff rebuilt Cal Poly football program, driving wins and momentum.
- Team overcame injuries to upset No. 21 Sacramento State and reach a 3-2 record.
- Wulff’s life adversity informed coaching ethos: develop players, sustain program.
Paul Wulff used to run football practices in the elements.
This included sideways wind and rain that cascaded down the rolling Palouse hills in the Pacific Northwest from his time as head coach for the Eastern Washington Eagles in Cheney.
Wulff is now in his sixth season on the coaching staff and third as head coach at Cal Poly on the Central Coast, where the football-practice elements tend to be a bit more favorable. Some fog. Some wind. Plenty of sunshine and views. The ocean is a short distance away from the San Luis Obispo campus. Summers do not melt helmets and those inside of them. Winters do not include any measure of scraping ice and snow off of windshields.
The Woodland/Davis native sounds like a man in his element, beaming at the prospect of his resurgent Mustangs after two lean seasons. There are visions of rolling momentum, of sold-out home crowds, of competing for Big Sky Conference championships.
Down to its third quarterback with a rash of injuries across the roster, Cal Poly last week stunned then-No. 21 Sacramento State, 32-24, in a conference opener. That moved the Mustangs to 3-2 on the season, matching the program’s win total for 2023 and also in 2024.
Wulff leads the Mustangs’ charge for the next hurdle. Cal Poly on Saturday plays FCS No. 7-ranked UC Davis in the Battle of the Golden Horseshoe. Cal Poly owes UCD one, or two or three, having lost eight consecutive meetings against the Aggies.
The work-in-progress plan at Poly initiated by Wulff is in full motion, a season of curiosity in August now a sudden season of promise. He soaks in the views of all of it.
“I’m on one of the most beautiful places on Earth,” Wulff said with a hearty laugh during a phone conversation with The Sacramento Bee. “I put my time in at Cheney, the cold, the wind. I love it here.”
He added, “God put me on Earth in a professional sense to take over football programs and build them, and I did that at Eastern Washington, and we’re trying to do that here.”
The Almighty also may have put Paul Louis Wulff on Earth to serve as a remarkable reminder of perseverance. One cannot tell the story of Wulff without a peek at all of his chapters, some tragic, some difficult to comprehend and many of the latest chapters uplifting and inspiring.
Wulff’s mother vanished in 1979
Wulff’s mother, Dolores, did not allow him to play youth football when growing up in rural Woodland in the 1970s. He was also the largest kid on any roster, but the big lad knew by the time he was 10 that he had a craving to compete.
The world of Wulff and his three siblings was rocked to the core in 1979, when their mother disappeared. A secretary at Woodland High School, Dolores Wulff vanished without a trace, leaving behind her purse and car keys. This was all the more troubling because those who knew her best insisted that she would never leave her children behind. Paul Wulff was the youngest, the one who most resembled her.
The family long suspected their father, Carl, of foul play. Weeks of exhaustive searches, including combing through fields, revealed no clues and no sign of Dolores. Her body was discovered 48 days after her disappearance, but was not properly identified until 2020.
It was Wulff’s DNA that helped solve that part of the mystery.
Carl Wulff died years ago and never confessed to any crimes. That part of the case remains unsolved.
Wulff and his siblings gained a bit of closure, though there really is no “moving on” from something so horrific.
Wulff said he carries his mother’s spirit. He thinks of her daily. Does she look down on him?
“I believe so,” Wulff said. “I do think of that. My siblings and relatives who so passionately loved her all think of her. We are all doing good things in her eyes. There is motivation in knowing that. I think she’d probably be proud of me.”
‘Football saved me’
Wulff used football as a vehicle to cope, to channel his frustrations in a positive outlet. Without that sport, Wulff wonders where his path may have led him.
He became a lineman star at Davis High School in the 1980s, mentored by his prep coach Dave Whitmire. He was tough in the trenches and versatile enough to long snap — firing the ball to the holder for kicks — and it helped him land a full athletic scholarship to Washington State in Pullman.
“Dave Whitmire saved me and football saved me,” Wulff told The Bee for a 2020 story. “He grabbed me, steered me in the right direction. I would have gone down a bad path otherwise without that direction. That first year without Mom was really hard, the worst year. Spent the whole time denying what had happened, a very dark period, just floundering, not a lot of hope, angry.”
Wulff became an anchor to the offensive line at WSU, a four-year starter, mostly at center. During his senior season in 1988, Washington State stunned top-ranked UCLA and won a bowl game, the first for the program in 63 years.
Wulff had a taste of professional football as a player and got into coaching, landing at Eastern Washington in 1993. After seven seasons as an assistant, he took over the Eagles program as head coach in 2000, winning Big Sky crowns in 2004 and 2005 and earning Big Sky Coach of the Year honors three times.
Wulff was named head coach at Washington State in 2008. He endured four taxing seasons and was fired in 2011, but he wasn’t broken. There’s a big difference between being pained and broken.
Wulff had endured far worse. He would lose another woman dear to him. Wulff in 1993 married his college sweetheart, Tammy Allen. Life was grand, and then it suddenly wasn’t. She was diagnosed in early 1997 with inoperable brain cancer. She died in 2002 at 39.
Before her death, Tammy volunteered at an oncology clinic. She had a friend, a nurse, named Sherry Roberts. Tammy introduced Wulff to Roberts. It was Tammy’s hope that her husband would remarry some day and have a happy life.
Next month, Paul and Sherry will celebrate their 23rd wedding anniversary.
Lessons learned and Cal Poly’s upside
Wulff said despite the dreadful seasons at Washington State as coach, he knew he could handle the rigors of the job. There is the loss of a game, or even a lost season. And then there is human loss. Wulff’s perspective has carried him for decades.
“Dick Bennett was the basketball coach at Washington State when I was there, and he gave me the best advice,” Wulff said. “He said, ‘You’re going to take a lot of bullets of criticism. People will question your ability. Stick to your plan, and you will get through it. It’s going to be hard.’
“He was right. I learned a lot. Listen, I’ve been down this road. I know how to rebuild, but it never happens as fast as you’d like.”
At Cal Poly, Wulff said he is in charge of a sleeping-giant football program, one that has tasted success in past decades before a decline that happened well before Wulff’s arrival.
Cal Poly never lost its status as one of the top academic schools in the country, a key point in recruiting high school student-athletes across the state. The John Madden family has donated tens of millions of dollars to Cal Poly football to upgrade facilities. Madden was a Cal Poly player in the 1950s who went on to become a Hall of Fame coach with the Oakland Raiders before a decorated career as a broadcaster.
“I do feel honored to be in this position,” Wulff said. “I think we’re developing a program he’d be proud of, the style of how we play, the nuts and bolts of how to run a program. I can embody that.”
He added, “We’re not going to be a Transfer U, bringing in new players every year. That’s not who we are. We want to raise and develop players. It may take a little longer, but we’re getting there, and we’ll have some of the best facilities on the West Coast. That, the academic degree that is real, the location, we’re positioning ourselves to perform at a high level.”
Wulff’s class, character and ability to coach is not lost on those who know him. This includes UC Davis coach Tim Plough, who used to work alongside Wulff when they were UCD assistant coaches in 2019.
“I’m always rooting for Coach Wulff,” Plough said. “I’ve known Paul for a long time. He’s won in this conference before. That team is much improved, and I’m not surprised because of Coach Wulff.”
Jake Hall said the human side of Wulff resonates deeply with him. Hall is Cal Poly’s director of football video operations, a Cal Poly graduate by way of Jesuit High School, near Sacramento.
“Coach Wulff is a true leader of men and cares for each individual in the program,” Hall said. “I am grateful to have him as our head coach. He cares for everybody around him. He strives to bring out the best in everyone.
“For myself personally, he has put lots of belief in me that has helped me to break into the football world, and for that I am forever indebted to him.”
This story was originally published October 3, 2025 at 5:00 AM.