5 things to know about Boise State’s adorable tee-fetching dog tradition

Boise State football has another tradition that’s just about as rare as the Broncos’ signature blue turf. During home games, the Broncos use an adorable dog named Cowboy Kohl who retrieves the tee every time the football is kicked off. About once a year, the Boise State kicking tee dog’s performance goes viral, as happened again in September 2017.

“We actually started that in the early- to mid-’90s here at Boise State,” Boise State football SID Joe Nickell told SB Nation this week. “And then it went away for a little bit, and we brought it back eight years ago.”

Back then, the Broncos had a black labrador named Kicks, who retired in 1998. Then in 2010, the tradition was brought back with Zee ...

... before Rox-Zee became the dog for the job for a few years.

“College athletics is about entertainment, so having a dog retrieve the tee is another area where the crowd has fun, laughs a little, and looks forward to seeing something unique and different,” Boise’s assistant AD for football, Brad Larrondo, said via the Idaho Statesman in 2010.

The dog’s owner and trainer, Britta Closson, adopted Kohl, a seven-year-old Labrador retriever, when he was about four.

“He wasn’t in the best shape when we got him, so he was a little bit underweight, just wasn’t treated very well,” Closson told SB Nation. “And it showed. He didn’t really trust people when we got him, and so the first six months to a year was basically just about building a relationship with him and building his confidence and his trust in that.”

Closson works with Positive Pets, a dog training company in Boise that was started by her father 28 years ago.

Kohl first learned retrieving while going on hunting trips with Closson’s father.

“He loves to retrieve and retrieve birds and go hunting and stuff,” Closson said. “So my dad really kind of dialed that in as far as hunting [goes], and Kohl just loves it.”

Boise State’s football team noticed Kohl’s bat-retrieving skills, and asked Closson if he could retrieve the tees on kickoff.

“Someone at Boise State had seen him retrieving the bat,” Closson said. “And then approached us [asking], ‘Can he retrieve the tee here?’ And so we were like, ‘Yeah, of course we can!’”

It all goes back to the obedience commands that are taught to dogs while they learn to retrieve.

“He went through hunting training with my dad, so he knew how to retrieve birds and what-not,” Closson said. “So as far as retrieving objects, it was just about transferring the formal retrieve that we taught him to other objects.”

“A tee was just another object that he was retrieving, so it was just really about transferring it to other objects,” Closson continued. “But really it has to do with the obedience side of it, making sure that he knows he needs to come back to me, he needs to go into a heel position, and not running off or anything like that.”

Closson said it took Kohl only a few months to get the action down.

“He’s very external, so everything he feels, it’s just out there. So I had to work a lot, as much as I could around crowds, so — but now, he’s good now. You’d think there would be tons of distractions, but he’s so focused on his job that it’s not really an issue anymore.”

A few years ago, Kohl was featured at halftime during one of the Broncos’ home basketball games.

“We had been practicing for that part of the show for about three months,” Closson said. “Every day I was going through 100 to 200 reps per day of shooting a basketball, and at first, I didn’t even have a basketball hoop. I put an ‘x’ on a wall with tape, and we were just shooting at the tape.”

As a top non-power team, Boise State home games typically air nationally, with plenty of them on weeknights each season. That means whenever ESPN or another network shows Kohl, the whole thing goes viral all over again.