The Masculine Wilderness Podcast · Epik Project

From the Field to Fatherhood: Ashton Clark on Manhood, Mentorship & Legacy

·55 min·5 clips

Tom Perez frames the conversation with a bittersweet memory of his own last college football game, a loss to Eastern Washington University. He brings in Ashton Clark as someone whose life now stretches across counseling, coaching, marriage, and fatherhood. Ashton starts by laying out his current work at Heritage High School. He says this is his fifth year there as a counselor and his ninth overall at the school. He is still coaching basketball, having just finished his fourth year as head basketball coach, and he says he is back in football coaching too. The first stretch of the conversation goes back to his own athletic path. Ashton remembers being highly decorated in high school and then quickly realizing at Eastern that the room was bigger and the competition sharper. He describes the eye test of seeing other recruits and knowing he was the smaller guy. He talks about the first practices as a wake-up call, when he realized he was not as fast or as strong as he had thought and started to doubt himself. The first year became a redshirt year, and that reality forced him into patience. He describes the mental shift that comes with going from being the guy on your high school team to trying to earn your place again. Tom follows that thread into culture. He asks what was good and what was not about the environment he found there. Ashton points first to the teammates and the sense that everyone was in it together, along with the next-man-up mindset. The conversation stays close to the human side of that transition instead of rushing to a neat lesson. Tom keeps drawing Ashton back to what those years felt like from the inside. Ashton does not dress up the hard parts. He says the transition was different once he got there. He keeps returning to the gap between expectation and reality, while making clear that being humbled did not erase the value of the experience. It sharpened his sense of how quickly identity can shift. The emotional center is the accumulation of honest, ordinary admissions. Ashton speaks as someone who has moved through roles as athlete, counselor, coach, husband, and dad without treating those roles as separate from one another. Tom's questioning helps those connections surface naturally. The result is a conversation that feels less like performance and more like a mutual search for meaning. It keeps returning to how men show up in the world and how the people around them matter. The ending circles back to telling the people around you that you love them while you can.

As heard by us

A patient football-to-family conversation about identity, team culture, and responsibility.

The conversation begins with football and gradually opens into identity, duty, and the person Ashton Clark is trying to become. He speaks with plainness about being the smaller recruit at Eastern Washington, the hard reset of college athletics, and the steadier life he has built…

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Why you'd press play

You want a grounded conversation that starts with football and ends with fatherhood.

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