Meet the Hanson family, the secret to USCs o-line

It’s the remaining days before the Alamo Bowl, the last gasps of USC’s soccer season, and Rock Hanson is still getting over a fever.

For USC offensive line coach Zach Hanson and his spouse, Annie, who beforehand was Trojans recruiting director, the timing isn’t ideally suited to be tending to a sick 1-year-old. The Trojans are shorthanded in attempting to end out a 10-win season on Tuesday against Texas Christian. The switch portal opens three days after that. And the teaching carousel is already in full swing, with one assistant already gone and Zach garnering outdoors curiosity, specifically from his alma mater, Kansas State.

But they’ve been parenting long enough now to know not to stress over a fever. And they’ve been working in faculty soccer long enough to know the timing is never ideally suited. Their past decade together has been a testomony to that. Last December, Rock was born on early-signing day, hours after Annie had wrapped up USC’s 2025 recruiting class. Two weeks after that, Zach was thrust into a new function as USC’s offensive line coach. They spent the bowl season in a Las Vegas lodge, strolling the Strip with a three-week outdated, in a new-parent-induced delirium, their entire lives having out of the blue turned upside down.

“It was a lot of learning on the fly,” Zach said. “We were figuring all of that out together.”

There aren’t many in faculty soccer who have navigated all that the Hansons have during the past two seasons at USC. But their resilience has been the beating coronary heart behind an unexpectedly strong season for a Trojans offensive line that overcame its own harrowing hurdles. Even as accidents pressured USC to reshuffle the line on a close to weekly foundation, Zach still guided the group to its best season since 2022.

“To lose all that we lost, then to have all the reshuffling on the offensive line we had, normally that could almost be a death sentence for an offense,” coach Lincoln Riley said. “We’ve had some big challenges. We’ve been able to respond.”

That’s a credit not only to Zach, who has develop into one of the most vital assistants on USC’s teaching workers, but also to Annie, who has remained an important half of the program, albeit now in a more unofficial capability.

That they’ve confirmed so adept at navigating such antagonistic circumstances ought to come as no shock contemplating the uphill climb they confronted from the start of their relationship. When they first met on a blind date at an Eric Church live performance in 2014, Annie labored at Oklahoma in the development workplace. Zach was a graduate assistant at Kansas State, a five-hour drive away in Manhattan, close to where Annie grew up. They hit it off so properly straight away that both knew they’d to make it work. A yr in, just as Zach deliberate to suggest, Annie bought a job in Chapel Hill, N.C., main the Tar Heels recruiting workplace.

For years, they toiled away, rising through the ranks, hoping their paths would converge. They never did for long. They spent the 2015 season aside, before Zach bought the job as North Carolina’s particular groups assistant coach in 2016. They spent a yr together, then employed Annie was employed to run recruiting at Oklahoma in 2017. They spent another season aside, before Zach returned to Kansas State and that same five-hour drive into Oklahoma.

When Kansas State coach Bill Snyder retired, Zach joined Riley’s workers as a grad assistant in 2019, finally back at the same faculty as his spouse. But in 2020, Tulsa provided him a job two hours away, teaching the offensive line. He took it. They purchased a home. And Annie drove two hours every day, there and back, to work in Norman.

It felt, by then, like a blessing.

“You just find a way, right?” Annie says.

Zach dreamed at some point of being a head soccer coach. Annie had gotten into faculty athletics to sometime be an athletic director. At USC, they may pursue those paths for the first time together. Zach coached tight ends while Annie ran the recruiting workplace. For the first time, it felt like they could keep in the same place for a while. They determined to start a household.

Annie bought pregnant in 2024. Then last September, just before the start of the soccer season, she began to expertise critical pain in her leg. One doctor brushed it off. But ultimately she went back to the hospital. Another doctor found a vital blood clot operating from the center of her calf, all the means up close to her stomach.

Emergency surgical procedure was scheduled for the very next morning. Annie spent the next six weeks relegated to a wheelchair or a walker. With her husband in the throes of the soccer season, the Riley household insisted Annie live in the casita of their Palos Verdes home. So for six weeks, while she recovered, Riley’s spouse, Caitlin, waited on her every need. “I mean, [she did] everything you could think of,” Annie says, still blown away by the kindness.

After all that, having a child didn’t really feel so daunting. Riley told her to take the time after Rock was born. She still labored from home, setting up recruiting visits for January. She didn’t need other girls in the business to assume you couldn’t have a child and run recruiting for a major faculty soccer program. But at some point, she got here into USC’s soccer workplace and set Rock up in a pack-and-play in one room while she ran a workers assembly in another. As she spoke to her workers, Rock wailed silently on the child monitor app on her cellphone. She couldn’t take it.

USC assistant coach Zach Hanson embraces his spouse, Annie, and son, Rock, share a hug on the subject at the Coliseum after a USC soccer sport.

(Courtesy of Hanson household)

“I turned to my counterpart [current director of USC recruiting strategy] Skyler [Phan] and said, ‘Girl, it’s your turn. You’ve got it,’” Annie recalled.

She’d already told Riley she was pondering about stepping away. Actually doing so “was incredibly difficult” for Annie, Zach said.

She made it official in March; though, she maintains it’s just momentary.

“My time in college football is not over,” Annie says. “I truly believe whenever I do return, I’ll be a much better leader now that I’m a mom.”

Just as Annie stepped away, Zach set out to put his imprint on USC’s offensive line. Immediately upon taking over the group, he began switching up combos, to guarantee that each linemen discovered a number of positions, never figuring out which combos he may need.

He’d also discovered over the course of his profession how vital chemistry could possibly be up entrance. If it was off, it may sink the entire season. So he made a concerted effort from the start to deliver the group together outdoors of soccer.

USC offensive line coach Zach Hanson; his spouse, Annie; and son, Rock, be part of linemen and workers for a group picture in the Trojans’ locker room.

(Courtesy of Hanson household)

“One of the coaches I worked for several years ago told me, the players aren’t just going to come to you,” Zach said. “You’ve got to bring them in.”

So they hosted dinners at their home. Annie baked every lineman their favourite cake on their birthdays. They wished the linemen to know that they cared about them as more than just soccer gamers.

“He’s a great coach,” guard Alani Noa said. “There’s nothing too personal. There’s nothing out of whack. Everything is open as far as conversations.”

They’ve even taken to holding Rock, who’s now already 33 kilos.

“It’s so important to Zach,” Annie says, “that those kids understand, like, ‘You can do this, and we believe in you, and we are going to prepare you to a point of trusting your training. So when you get out on that field, like there’s not even a question, you know, and I think that those guys very much played that way this year.”

USC was without stalwart left sort out, Elijah Paige, for half the season. Starting middle, former walk-on Kilian O’Connor, performed in eight video games. And just two of its beginning lineman — Tobias Raymond and Justin Tauanuu — began all 12 video games heading into the Alamo Bowl.

USC offensive lineman Alani Noa (77), Amos Talalele (75) and Kilian O’Connor (67) heat up before dealing with Notre Dame at the Coliseum on Nov. 30.

(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)

“This is a position group where it’s not always the most talented guys you throw out there,” Zach said. “It’s the five guys who played best together.”

Zach managed to keep discovering those 5 all season, maintaining the entrance regular all season in spite of accidents. USC gave up just 15 sacks, fewer than all but 14 groups in faculty soccer. The line also cleared the means to average 5.29 yards per carry, the highest speeding clip at the faculty in over a decade.

Other faculties are beginning to discover. At Kansas State, his alma mater, Hanson’s identify has been talked about as a potential offensive coordinator under newly employed coach Collin Klein, who Hanson described to The Times as “one of my best friends” whose “family is like family to us”. Annie’s household also hails from just outdoors of Manhattan, Kan.

“That place is certainly a place that’s special to us,” Zach said of Kansas State.

But in the same breath, Zach says he’s “extremely happy [at USC] doing what we’re doing.” It’s not misplaced on the Hansons how a lot the Rileys have accomplished for them.

In the coming days, those questions will certainly come up again. But for now, the Hansons had been more preoccupied with kicking a 1-year-old’s fever and getting ready USC to play Texas Christian without three of its top seven linemen.

“Our philosophy has always been, as a family, we’re going to be all in no matter where we’re at,” Zach says.

At USC, that has actually been the case. That consists of Rock, who is a excellent 9-0 at USC video games he’s attended heading into Tuesday’s Alamo Bowl — and can now say the phrase “ball.”

Whether he’ll get to construct on that report past the bowl sport stays to be seen. But there have been other choices elsewhere before. Options nearer to household, for childcare functions.

But USC, Annie says, “has made our experience so incredible and worth the sacrifices.”

“We’ve chosen to stay because of how special this place is, you know?”