MontrealAlouettes.com Staff
MONTREAL — The Montreal Alouettes announced on Wednesday that Don Matthews and Turk Schonert have joined the coaching staff as consultants.
Matthews returns to the Alouettes in a consultant role for the second consecutive year, having previously helped the Montreal coaching staff during the second half of the 2013 season.
Matthews was the Alouettes’ head coach in 2002 and led the team to a Grey Cup victory in his first season while taking home Coach of the Year honours for the fifth time in his career. During his five years as head coach of the Alouettes, the Amesbury, MA, native recorded 58 regular season wins, five playoffs wins and four East Division titles, guiding Montreal to three Grey Cup appearances in 2002, 2003 and 2005.
At the time of his retirement, he had the most victories of any coach in CFL history with 231 career wins, 133 losses, and 1 tie as well as holding the record for most Grey Cup wins as a head coach with five and most Grey Cup appearances by a head coach with nine.
He is the only coach to win the Grey Cup in four different decades and was inducted into the Canadian Football Hall of Fame in 2011 following a brilliant coaching career that spanned over 22 seasons.
Schonert joins the team as an offensive consultant and will help the coaching staff with game planning.
After playing for nine seasons in the NFL as a quarterback for the Cincinnati Bengals and Atlanta Falcons from 1981 to 1989, Schonert joined the Tampa Bay Buccaneers as a quarterbacks coach in 1992.
He later joined the Buffalo Bills, the Carolina Panthers, the New York Giants and the New Orleans Saints before returning to the Bills in 2006 in the same position. Under his tutelage in Buffalo, quarterback Trent Edwards was the most productive rookie passer in the NFL in 2007. He was promoted to the team’s offensive coordinator in 2008.
More recently, he was the head coach of the Sacramento Mountain Lions in the United Football League in 2012. He has over 15 years of coaching experience at the professional level.
