Catching Up With Longtime NFL QB Carson Palmer

“He said, ‘Get ready, you’re just gonna fall in love with these kids.’ But he also said, ‘You’re gonna wake up at 2 a.m. and worry about this kid’s ride, this kid’s diet, this kid’s grades, this kid’s whatever.’ And man, he’s been spot on. I have not slept well yet.”

Palmer’s lengthy NFL résumé, which includes 46,247 passing yards, 294 touchdowns, and a 62.5% completion rate in 14 seasons (Bengals, Oakland Raiders, and Arizona Cardinals from 2004–2017), won’t shield him from the typical challenges prep coaches face.

There is nothing amateur about this program, from the star-studded coaching staff Palmer has assembled, to the first-rate facilities in the school’s three-story, 39,000-square-foot athletic center, to the sophisticated playbook Palmer will unleash on foes in the rugged Trinity League, which includes national powers Mater Dei and St. John Bosco.

“We’re running an NFL offense,” said Palmer, the former USC star who won the 2002 Heisman Trophy and was the first overall pick of the 2003 NFL Draft. “We’re doing five-man routes, six-man pros, seven-man pros, five-man scat protection. A lot of teams at this level carry one protection. We’ve got four. We’ve got eight different running schemes, stuff where we can get an empty formation. I don’t know how an ‘NFL offense’ is defined, but we’re running Bruce Arians’ offense.”

Arians, of course, is the longtime NFL assistant and former Arizona and Tampa Bay coach who tutored quarterbacks such as Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, and Palmer, and led the Buccaneers to a Super Bowl LV win over the Kansas City Chiefs after the 2020 season.

His offense was known for its vertical passing attack, strong running game, physical wide receivers, schematic diversity, and unpredictability.

Many of the high school coaches Palmer consulted after taking the job advised against incorporating such advanced concepts.

“They were like, ‘Yeah, just keep it simple,’” Palmer said.

But those who played or coached in the NFL — Kitna, Pete Carroll, Phillip Rivers, the former Chargers quarterback who now runs a successful high school program in Alabama — told Palmer to “go for it,” and Palmer is glad he did.

“These kids are like sponges — they’re hungry for knowledge, they’re thirsty,” Palmer said. “I can’t believe how smart these kids are. I just keep adding more stuff, and they get it. We’ve been layering on more and more stuff, they’ll mess up, and then they get it.”

It doesn’t hurt to have what Palmer describes as “an NFL-quality coaching staff” teaching and drilling Eagles players.

Palmer’s offensive coordinator and associate head coach is Lenny Vandermade, his former center at USC who in just two years took San Francisco’s St. Ignatius College Prep from a sub-.500 team to its first California Central Coast Section Open Division title in more than a decade in 2024.

Palmer’s staff also includes five former NFL players — receiver T.J. Houshmandzadeh, fullback Mike Karney, linebacker Rob Thomas, quarterback Doug Johnson, and defensive lineman Steve Fifita — who played a combined 31 years in the league.

Fifita, a former college star at Utah, served as Santa Margarita’s interim coach for the final seven games last season and is the team’s defensive coordinator.

“I’ve got a history with all these guys, and it’s very collaborative. There are no egos,” Palmer said. “I want the kids to come through the program and be college-ready.”

Johnson, the former Florida star who played five years in the NFL, moved to California with his son, Trace, who threw for more than 6,300 yards and 64 touchdowns and led Buchholz High in Gainesville, Fla., to a 23–5 record and back-to-back regional titles in his two years as a starter.

Trace will be Santa Margarita’s senior quarterback this season, giving its sophomore signal-caller with a familiar name and NFL pedigree — Palmer’s son, Fletcher — another year to develop before taking the reins of the Eagles offense in 2026.

Fletcher and his twin sister, Elle, a star basketball player who dreams of playing in the WNBA, are the primary reasons Palmer and his wife, Shaelyn, a former college soccer player, moved their four children from the bucolic resort town of Ketchum, Idaho, where they lived for seven years after Palmer’s playing career, to Southern California.

Carson Palmer career stats

“We lived in Cincinnati, Phoenix, and Oakland, all big cities, and we always dreamed of taking our kids somewhere else,” said Palmer. “We wanted to get away from iPads and TVs and raise our kids differently.”

But when Fletcher and Elle started to emerge as elite athletes, forcing the Palmers to drive several hours to Boise and Salt Lake City in search of better competition, Carson and Shaelyn made the difficult decision to move to Orange County.

“We were fortunate enough to have the ability to go wherever was best for the kids, and this is the mecca for football and basketball,” said Palmer, who earned $172.5 million during his NFL career. “We wanted to go where they’d have the most opportunity and the best competition, coaching, and training.”

Palmer coached his son’s freshman team at Santa Margarita in 2024, a season during which the varsity coach was fired. School President Andrew Sulick, one of Palmer’s coaches at Santa Margarita, encouraged his former star to fill the vacancy.

How long does Palmer intend to coach?

“I don’t know, I’m not putting a timetable on it,” he said. “My youngest son, Carter, is going to be a quarterback, too. He’s going into the fifth grade.

“I hope I like it enough to be here for a while. It’s a challenge, but I’m having fun.”