MOBILE, Ala. — Kerry Joseph doesn’t have any thoughts yet on the Chicago Bears’ biggest offseason decision, the one that holds the key to the NFL draft.

The team’s new quarterbacks coach, hired Friday, doesn’t even know where his office is at Halas Hall. He has been on a whirlwind tour since the season ended, free to seek a new job after the Seattle Seahawks forced out coach Pete Carroll.

Joseph, the assistant quarterbacks coach for the Seahawks the last two seasons, spent one day in Lake Forest interviewing for the Bears job. In between, he was scrambling to get to Mobile, where he’s serving as quarterbacks coach of the American team in the Senior Bowl.

Somehow along the way, Joseph got hooked up with Bears gear and was wearing a team-issued navy hat, navy shorts and gray sweatshirt at practice Tuesday at Hancock Whitney Stadium on the South Alabama campus.

He doesn’t have preliminary thoughts on Justin Fields. Joseph was the assistant wide receivers coach in Seattle in 2021, when the Bears drafted Fields. He has yet to dig in on this year’s draft, in which the Bears hold the first and ninth picks and are in position to select a new quarterback.

“I was getting transitioned to coming out here,” the 50-year-old Joseph said.

It’s the first time he has been an NFL position coach — above the assistant position coach level. The connection is easy to make. He worked with new Bears offensive coordinator Shane Waldron, who came from the Seahawks. The Bears also interviewed Seahawks quarterbacks coach Greg Olson for the offensive coordinator job.

The last first-time quarterbacks coach the Bears hired was Shane Day in 2010 based on his experience working with then-offensive coordinator Mike Martz in San Francisco. Since Day, the Bears have rolled through Jeremy Bates, Matt Cavanaugh, Dowell Loggains, Dave Ragone, John DeFilippo and most recently Andrew Janocko.

It would be overly dramatic to say this is the most important offseason for a Bears quarterbacks coach. There has been urgency to get the position right for the longest time. It just so happens they own the No. 1 draft pick as they prepare to thoroughly examine a talented group of passers, including USC’s Caleb Williams, North Carolina’s Drake Maye (who was a spectator at practice Tuesday), LSU’s Jayden Daniels and Michigan’s J.J. McCarthy.

Joseph, who was responsible for red-zone preparation with the Seahawks, had a hand in helping revive Geno Smith’s career in Seattle as Smith threw for 4,282 yards and 30 touchdowns in 2022. Joseph’s knowledge of Waldron’s system will be critical whether the Bears draft a quarterback or not.

“When you think about Shane and what we were able to do with the (Seahawks) offense, I think quarterback play is about having confidence,” Joseph said. “Quarterback play is just about being competitive. It’s about being smart, being dependable, having a good IQ of the game, being passionate.

“When you think about traits, when you talk about quarterback play and when you talk about Shane’s mentality, it’s just about being connected to the play caller, being connected to the offense. There are some things you’ve got to have and you’ve got to bring to it.”

Joseph was a quarterback at McNeese State and had a 42-11 record as a four-year starter, helping the Cowboys to two Southland Conference titles. He spent time with the Cincinnati Bengals in 1996 as an undrafted free agent before playing in NFL Europe. He tried to make the Washington Redskins as a slot back and then played safety for the Seahawks from 1998 to 2001, appearing in 56 games with 14 starts.

He returned to quarterback in the Canadian Football League in 2003, winning a Grey Cup with the Saskatchewan Roughriders in 2007, when he was named the league’s most outstanding player. After retiring following the 2014 season, he got into coaching at the college level with stops at his alma mater and Southeastern Louisiana before joining the Seahawks as an offensive assistant in 2020.

The diverse background — having played defense in the NFL — gives him a different perspective to teach offensive football.

“It helps me tremendously,” Joseph said, “because playing the safety position, playing that dime (position), playing down in the box helped me understand how defenses attack the offense, how guys fit. So now that I’ve gone back to quarterback, I see it from a defensive mentality.

“Being able to help guys to understand the game, not just from the offensive side but from the defensive side, kind of helped (with) where to put their eyes. That’s what it did for me as a player, and I try to teach it that way with a defensive mentality.”

Joseph will learn where his office is soon, and then he can hit the ground running as the Bears prepare for the draft and install a new offense — quite possibly with a new quarterback. As far as his philosophy on developing a young quarterback, he leaned into some basic tenets.

“I use three things: accountability, responsibility, communication,” Joseph said. “It’s about trust, believing and having confidence in each other. A quarterbacks coach and a quarterback, you’ve got to have those three things.

“Then, hey, it’s about the fundamentals. It’s about developing the fundamentals, developing the mentality to be a good leader. To be a winner. Just willing to compete. There are so many things that I have in my philosophy as a person that I take into the coaching world and into the quarterback room to help develop a group of guys.”

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Chicago Bears wide receiver DJ Moore could reunite with his former college coach.

The Bears are working to hire Chris Beatty to be their wide receivers coach, though it was not yet official Tuesday morning, a source confirmed. Beatty was Moore’s position coach for two of his three seasons at Maryland, including 2017, when Moore was the Big Ten wide receiver of the year.

Beatty would join the Bears after three seasons as the Los Angeles Chargers wide receivers coach, his first NFL stint after 15 years coaching in college.

He would replace Tyke Tolbert, whom the Bears fired along with offensive coordinator Luke Getsy and three other offensive staffers earlier this month. ESPN first reported the news of the expected hire.

Along with his time at Maryland, where he was promoted to associate head coach and co-offensive coordinator, Beatty was a position coach at Pittsburgh, Virginia, Wisconsin, Illinois, Vanderbilt, West Virginia, Northern Illinois and Hampton. He was the co-offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach under Tim Beckman during his lone season with the Illini in 2012.

A former wide receiver at East Tennessee State and in the Canadian Football League, Beatty started his coaching career at the high school level.

He would be tasked with coaching a wide receivers group that Bears general manager Ryan Poles might look to bolster after it lacked production beyond Moore in 2023.

In his first season with the Bears and quarterback Justin Fields, Moore had a career-high 96 catches for 1,364 yards and eight touchdowns.

But Darnell Mooney had his worst season with 31 catches on 61 targets for 414 yards and a touchdown. And rookie Tyler Scott had a bumpy first season, finishing with 17 catches on 32 targets for 168 yards.

Beatty would be the fifth Bears coaching hire this offseason. They previously hired offensive coordinator Shane Waldron, quarterbacks coach Kerry Joseph and defensive coordinator Eric Washington and are hiring Thomas Brown as passing game coordinator. They also need to hire a running backs coach.

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A quiet week with nonfiction about a woman who found strength on Wisconsin’s Ice Age Trail, and a middle-grade novel about two girls living continents apart who bring change to a village in Kenya.

Yolanda DeLoach (Courtesy of the author)

“Squatter”: by Yolanda DeLoach (Cornerstone Press, $23-$29 depending on place of purchase)

I walked the tail with a new purpose. The wishy-washy voice that so many times had said, ‘I don’t  really want to be in this relationship anymore,’ transitioned to, ‘I won’t be in this relationship anymore.’ Overnight, the trail had gone from being an enjoyable pastime, to a necessity for curing my confusing addiction. The hours and days spent on the trail so far had given me the courage to let go for good. Now I needed it to keep me from going back. — from “Squatter”

There are many ways to end a toxic relationship, but debut author Yolanda DeLoach did it the hard way. She tried to make a relationship work until she realized she was being emotionally abused by a man who shamed her for having a “mediocre” high school education, accused her of looking at other men. On a camping trip he insisted she take down her drying underwear because a forest ranger might see it. She told him to go away, to leave her alone, but he was also charming and she kept going back even though she knew he was breaking her spirit.

To end her addiction to this man, DeLoach challenged herself to hike the Ice Age Trail that wanders through Wisconsin. She was only going to do the 400 miles from her home in Wausau, in the middle of Wisconsin, to the trail’s western terminus at St. Croix Falls on the Minnesota border. But when someone asked if she was hiking the entire trail, she heard herself saying she was.

To understand the dangers and wonders this 52-year-old grandmother with five children experienced, here’s a little background. The Ice Age Trail is a National Scenic Trail stretching 1,200 miles in Wisconsin. Coming from the west it crosses the northern part of the state, takes a sharp turn to the south, then northeast ending at Door Peninsula near the city of Sturgeon Bay.

DeLoach, a palliative care/hospice nurse, had little experience camping. It took her a year of hiking to become a Thousand Miler who completed the entire trail hike during the COVID shutdown of 2020 and into 2021. She dealt with boots so wet her feet felt frozen, sometimes traversed a field of unbroken snow up to her hips, and woke up in her tent in near-freezing weather. There were times she was so tired her bones ached. Her steady companion was her truck, named Fiona, that held her camping equipment and the 20-year-old Schwinn bike she used to go back and forth between sections she hiked. Some days she put in 18 miles, starting before sunrise to bike to the place she had ended the previous day. Hikers call this section hiking, defined by counties the trail runs through.

Since most everything was shut down because of the pandemic, DeLoach had most of the trail to herself. She enjoyed being alone, figuring things out such as how to pull Fiona out of the mud. She rarely planned where to stay when it was too cold to sleep in her little tent, but strangers who had been following her journey on social media opened their homes (and garages) to her. Others who contributed lodging and rides were members of the Ice Age Trial Alliance. (Her ability to miraculously find places to stay led to her tail nickname Squatter.)

Whether DeLoach is savoring the smell of crisp fall leaves or tiredly hiking the ups-and-downs of hilly sections, she is bombarded with emails from her former lover, trying to entice her back. But this time her commitment to her trail goal keeps her from responding.

DeLoach is a graceful writer whose voice on the page is friendly. She is unflinching in her honesty about why she stayed in a toxic relationship, her childhood during which she felt she should not have opinions, and even screw-ups that cost her miles of unnecessary hiking because she didn’t read the trail guide.

Readers will learn from this well-written book, whether you are interested in the Ice Age Trail, emotional abuse or the wonders/miseries of hiking and biking long distances. And you’ll wish you had a truck as faithful as Fiona, always waiting for her at the end of the trail.

“Fetching Dreams”: by Mary Bleckwehl (Immortal Works, $16.99)

Mary Bleckwehl (Courtesy of the author)

Three weeks into the rainy season and not a drop of rain. It means more fetching, more missed school, and more lost dreams. If one of these organizations builds my village a well, I will talk to every family myself. I will teach them what you taught us. I will help them see that change is worth it if they want their children to survive. — from “Fetching Dreams”

Neyah is an 11-year-old living in a small, impoverished village in Kenya. She dreams of being a doctor, even though she hardly ever goes to school because the tribe’s tradition is that women and girls are responsible for carrying precious water. Sometimes they walk seven miles a day to fill cans from a polluted water hole that holds urine from people and animals, an occasional goat carcass and snakes. Many people in the village have died of cholera and most are sick, at least sometimes.

Stubborn and angry, Neyah questions why she and other girls have to fetch water when her four brothers run off to school in new uniforms. She wears a tattered dress to fetch from the distant river in the dry season, pulling 40-pound cans up a slippery bank. Neyah’s mother loves her daughter, and she knows the village girls make a dangerous journey to water because the path is a haven for bandits. But she has to make hard decisions about how to divvy up the precious liquid. Should it go to the cow to keep milk coming? To the garden for vegetables that provide much-needed nutrients? For cooking? If they want to survive, they must have water.

When Neyah can go to school she loves to study science. Her kind teacher, a former Peace Corps volunteer, lets the students look through a microscope at the bacteria in the pond water. They are aghast and Neyah vows to somehow get a well of clean water for her village, ending constant deaths and freeing girls to go to school and their mothers to work in the gardens.

Thanks to her teacher’s Peace Corps connections, Neyah is assigned a pen pal in the U.S. Smart, friendly Abby is from an upper-middle-class family, so different from Neyah’s circumstances. But they bond through letters, and the most touching parts of the book are how they learn about one another and share secrets. Neyah, for instance, doesn’t know what “sleep over” means or how water can come out of a pipe. Abby has never heard of girls not going to school.

Abby, who has a brain tumor, helps Neyah overcome her shyness and unwillingness to speak and urges her Kenyan friend to begin a letter-writing campaign to dozens of NGOs and the government of Kenya, begging for funding for a well.

Hovering over the story is Neyah’s father’s severe illness and his scorn for the idea that unseen bugs have anything to do with sickness. He loves his daughter, too, but he is head of the family, responsible for their well-being, and the only way he knows how to do this is to marry off Neyah in exchange for more cows. She can only hope her beloved paternal grandmother will not allow this.

This is a riveting story that would make a fine supplementary text for social studies classes.

Bleckwehl, who lives in Northfield, has written four picture books, five nonfiction books and “The Worry Knot,” a novel about a 12-year-old boy who’s responsible for his autistic brother at school, leading to his stomach constantly in a “worry knot”

We are blessed in Minnesota with so many fine middle-grade authors. Add Mary Bleckwehl to the list.

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