Greg Hansen: Cut by 5 NFL teams, ex-Wildcat Rick Elmore wrote new playbook

This is enough to derail a man’s ambition and career. Far more than enough.

On Sept. 3, 2011, Rick Elmore was waived by the Green Bay Packers.

On Aug. 31, 2012, Elmore was released by the San Diego Chargers.

On Sept. 25, 2012, Elmore was cut by the Arizona Cardinals.

On Jan. 5, 2013, Elmore was released by the Cleveland Browns.

On Aug. 23, 2013, Elmore was waived by the NFL’s Washington football club.

“When I left high school for the UA, I wanted to play football until I was 30 and then open a gym,” Elmore says now. “But what I found out is that things change very quickly after college. Although it was scary after football, I knew I wasn’t going to sink. I was going to swim.”

If you spend any time talking to the 32-year-old Rick Elmore — business owner, husband, father of two, graduate of the UA’s Eller College of Business — you are tempted to dispatch a note to UA football coach Kevin Sumlin and every other coach on campus. It would be a simple note:

You should arrange to have Rick Elmore talk to your athletes about life after sports.

In fact, Elmore could expedite the process. His start-up company Simply Noted, which is in the process of opening a 3,000-square-foot compound a mile or two away from Sun Devil Stadium, of all places, could send a handwritten note to all UA student-athletes using the 21st century technology he created.

It might open with this paragraph: “I led the Pac-10 in quarterback sacks. I was drafted by the Green Bay Packers. I married the UA’s national championship softball catcher. And then life got really hard.”

A lot of this isn’t surprising.

Elmore and his twin brother, Cory, chose to sign with Arizona’s 2006 recruiting class at a time when the Wildcats were coming off successive football seasons of 2-10, 3-8, 3-8 and 3-8. The Elmores, from Simi Valley, California, could’ve gone to, say, Oregon, and added a Rose Bowl ring as a daily accessory.

Rick Elmore became a significant part of the UA’s resurgence to the Top 25, three bowl games and return to relevance not seen since Dick Tomey’s days. It was never all about football.

“I owe the UA everything,” he says. “I’m the first generation from my family to go to college, to graduate from college. The opportunity to play college football at such a high level is a gift that keeps on giving to me. It gave me my family, my life. I feel indebted.”

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Here’s the thing about Rick Elmore: after being released by his fifth NFL team in the fall of 2013, he wasn’t bitter. It launched the rest of his life.

“I had some really good moments with the Chargers and Cardinals, and as I look back, it was actually a good foundation for my business career,” he says. “I wasn’t like, ‘Oh, no, I can’t handle this,’ it was an opportunity for me to transfer the skills I had learned in football to be a father, a husband and an entrepreneur. I decided I’d use the same passion I used in football for whatever came next.”

Elmore married Callista Balko, the UA’s national championship catcher of 2006 and 2007, a Canyon del Oro High School High School grad who is one of the leading softball players in Tucson history. They have two children, Rekker, 3, and Piper, 1. Callista, who started at an entry-level position in the UA athletic department’s A-Club, is now the school’s director of athletic regional development in the greater Phoenix area.

After graduating from the UA’s Eller College of Business, Elmore started on the ground floor with the global medical sales firm, Neodent, a Brazil-based medical/dental device corporation that required Elmore to create his own clientele. “I had zero book,” he says. Elmore survived and then thrived, in part, by helping to invent a robotic-controlled handwriting process that would mass-produce hand-written notes to potential clients.

Elmore initially contacted 500 doctors; 32 opened his Simply Noted envelopes and contacted him. Game on. He soon had more than 400 doctors in his book.

Elmore turned his Simply Noted creation into a profitable operation that in two years has gone from $0 to more than $1 million in sales. He has four full-time employees with plans to expand to six. He also pulled off the Triple Crown of start-up entrepreneurs.

“We have no investors, no debt and no loans,” he says. He has a bold vision in that Simply Noted is just the first step in a lifetime of business opportunities.

“Rick’s as tenacious in business as he was on the football field,” says his close friend Jim Patterson, a prominent UA football donor who is a noted Phoenix freelance photographer.

In 2011, Elmore stuck with the Packers until the final cuts of September. He had reinvented himself as a football player, transitioning from a defensive end in Arizona’s 4-3 alignment to an outside linebacker in the complicated 3-4 alignment as created by Green Bay defensive coordinator Dom Capers.

Now Elmore deals day to day not with rushing quarterbacks but with the complications of payroll taxes, working with software engineers, building websites and getting his new Tempe office outfitted for employees and production.

It is far from the most daunting challenge of his post-high school days.

When Elmore arrived on campus for his first UA football training camp, he realized he was playing the same position as one of the rare five-star recruits in UA history, defensive end Louis Holmes, a celebrated junior college prospect who was bigger, faster and stronger than the 6-foot-2-inch, 235-pound Elmore.

“I knew I couldn’t match Holmes’ athleticism, so I had to find another way,” Elmore remembers. “I had to study film better. I had to play my gap better. I had to use better technique. It was the only way I’d get on the field.”

By the end of his career, Elmore had 25ƒ sacks compared to Holmes’ six, achieved in two seasons.

“I learned so much from competing against athletes like Louis Holmes,” says Elmore. “Now I use the same concepts in business. We’ve done a lot with a little at Simply Noted, working crazy hours, trying to build something special. The last two years have been really hard. But it’s just the start.”