DESTINED TO LEAD

They’re spread throughout the sport, and the number of James Madison alums coaching in college football only keeps growing.

This coming fall – assuming games are played – more than a dozen will pace the sidelines or sit anxiously in coaches booths each Saturday at stadiums large and small while trying to lead, impact, and push their teams to victory.

“Honestly, I think it’s the same reasons why our players at the NFL level succeed,” said Kyre Hawkins, the defensive line coach for Emory & Henry College, about why JMU is producing so many college coaches. He’s one of the youngest in the profession, having starred at linebacker on the 2016 national title-winning team and graduated the year after.

From Division III programs like Emory & Henry all the way up to the Power Five, with ex-wide receiver John Miller serving as a quality control coach for blueblood Texas, products of JMU reside at every level of the industry.

“Why does it happen?” Frostburg State coach DeLane Fitzgerald, a 1999 JMU graduate, pondered. “I think that young men have so much fun at James Madison that I don’t think they want it to end.

“I knew from an early age that I wanted to be a coach, but that was the case with me. At JMU, I enjoyed my experience and didn’t want the experience to end. And there were coaches at James Madison that meant a lot to me, and I wanted to turnaround and mean a lot to young men.”

East Carolina outside receivers coach Drew Dudzik agreed.

As a quarterback for the Dukes, he guided JMU to its never-forget upending of Virginia Tech a decade ago, and then returned to the school as an assistant in time for that FCS championship in 2016.

“I played for Mickey Matthews and have had the tremendous opportunity to be on Coach [Mike] Houston’s staff for a while,” Dudzik said, “and there’s just a lot of passion that surrounds the game of football within the JMU program. And when you have a passion for something, it’s hard to give it up.

“You get into coaching because you want to influence young people and because you can’t move on without football. You have to have football in your life, and I think when you go through the experiences that I’ve had at JMU as a player and then obviously the success we had for three years there as a coach, there’s so much energy and excitement that it’s hard not to want to get into coaching.”

NAIA Lyon College defensive backs coach Clint Kent, a member of the 2004 I-AA champion Dukes, added: “And I’d say we always had a great staff. When I was there, we had one of the better staffs in I-AA and it showed. Everyone that was on that JMU staff during the four-year span moved up to N.C. State, Virginia, Virginia Tech, Marshall. They were great coaches. And when you have a great coach, they’re going to instill in the athlete to do the right thing and master the little things. I’m always trying to master the small details and that’s why there are so many JMU alums coaching in college now.”

Of all the former JMU players that have continued in college football as coaches, Fitzgerald is the lone head honcho.

“Here’s the story of my career,” Fitzgerald, a Nelson County native, said. “Everywhere I’ve been, it’s been a fixer-upper.”

That includes his previous assistant-coaching gigs, too, which he said ultimately readied him to take on drastic rebuilds with Southern Virginia, a Division III school, and his current job with Frostburg State, which he’s not only turned into a winner but also led in a transition from Division III into Division II.

This past fall was the Bobcats’ first in Division II and playing with only five scholarship players, Fitzgerald noted, they went 8-3 and two of their three losses came by just a field goal. The three previous years, Frostburg State won 31 games, lost only four times, captured the New Jersey Athletic Conference crown twice, reached the NCAA playoffs twice, and in 2018 hosted postseason contests for the first time in school history.

When he arrived at Frostburg State in 2014, it only had three winning seasons since 2000.

“When you take over a downtrodden program,” Fitzgerald said, “and they’ve been down for a long time, it’s because they’re doing 20 to 25 things incorrectly. If you’re running a successful business you’re doing 20 to 25 things really, really well. But if you’re unsuccessful, it’s because you’re doing 20 to 25 things incorrectly.

“So what you have to do when you get to these places, and I can rattle off seven or eight of ‘em because they’re universal but then there’s another 12 to 15 wrong things that aren’t universal and are different at each program, but you start to fix those 20 to 25 things, and when you do, your football program turns around.”

He said he always saw the potential for football to flourish at Frostburg State, a rural 5,000-plus-student campus located about 60 miles east of Morgantown, W.Va., on I-68.

But that wasn’t the case when he became a headman for the first time.

Fitzgerald had been Southern Virginia’s special teams’ coordinator and offensive coordinator prior to his promotion to head coach.

“It was possibly the worst head-coaching job in the country,” Fitzgerald said. “In 2009, there were 206 schools playing [Division III] football. I took the job, but we didn’t have an on-campus practice facility and we didn’t have a game facility. We practiced at the municipal field in the middle of town and we played at Parry McCluer High School, and that’s the way it went.”

Fitzgerald said he drew from past experiences to dig the Knights out of their daunting hole.

He was JMU’s defensive line coach in 2002, which came immediately on the heels of one of the worst seasons in Dukes history when they went 2-9 in 2001. About the ’02 campaign, he said he could start to see the program moving toward what it eventually became in 2004 when it won the national championship.

There was the one-year stop at NAIA Bethel, which hadn’t had a winning season since 1933 when Fitzgerald became its offensive coordinator in 2005. Bethel went 7-4 and won the Mid-South Conference Western Division that year.

“And amazing as it is, at SVU we went from really, really bad and I say bad,” Fitzgerald said, “we were bad. We’d have to scratch out three wins a year. But four years later we won five games, and then five years later we went 8-2, and when we went 8-2, we had the best record of any Division III independent team in the country.”

Like Fitzgerald, to get to where they are now, each of these ex-Dukes have maneuvered on their own unique routes.

“It really is one of those professions where you can’t read someone’s bio and think like, ‘That’s the way to do it,’” Dudzik said. “Because there are so many ways to do it. It is all about people, relationships and developing those relationships to make the most of your opportunities.”

Dudzik would know, considering he didn’t jump right from his playing days into coaching.

The unconventional start he took included a brief stay with Cisco Systems upon finishing school at JMU. The office in Raleigh, N.C., is where Dudzik said he realized how much he missed the game.

“That first fall was really difficult for me not to be involved with a football program,” Dudzik said, “and a dream of mine has always been to be a college football coach. So one year without it, I said, ‘I’ve got to find a way to get back in it and maybe that’ll lead to something.’”

His first opportunity came coaching running backs at Cardinal Gibbons High School in Raleigh. Dudzik said he arranged with his boss at Cisco Systems to show up early there in order to leave early to get to practice on time. Not long after getting acquainted to coaching on the prep scene, Dudzik gained hands-on experience with Duke University after he was introduced to Jeff Faris – a Duke graduate assistant at the time who is the tight ends coach there now – through another former JMU quarterback, Justin Rascati. Rascati spent a number of years as an assistant at the FCS level before joining the Denver Broncos staff last season.

Faris invited Dudzik to volunteer with spring practices at Duke, which was coming off an ACC championship game appearance and a 10-4 finish in 2013. Less than a few months later, the former JMU signal-caller found himself in a permanent position with the Blue Devils.

“It was April or May and I just randomly get a text from Jeff Faris,” Dudzik said, “and he said, ‘Hey, we’ve got two opportunities here with Duke on the offensive side of the ball. If you’re interested, let me know.’”

Dudzik said he had a formal interview with Duke coach David Cutcliffe, gained the job and absorbed everything he could from Cutcliffe for two years ahead of joining Houston in Harrisonburg.

So, no two paths are the same and that’s true even if stints at certain schools are.

Currently, there are four JMU alums on staff at nearby Bridgewater College – offensive coordinator Scott Lemn, offensive line coach Kyle Rigney, defensive line coach Sam Daniels and linebackers coach Kyle Purkey. Unlike Daniels, Rigney and Lemn, Purkey never played a down for the Dukes.

He was a student who had aspirations of becoming a high school or college coach.

“They didn’t have a bunch of interns running around with Coach Matthews then,” Purkey, the BC linebackers coach, said. “But I had applied to be a [video assistant] and before my junior year at JMU, one of their assistant coaches called me in the beginning of August to ask if I was still interested in filming.

“I said, ‘Yeah,’ and asked when he needed me. He goes, ‘Camp starts in two days. We need you ASAP.’ It was standard football coach operating, with it being a last-minute thing, but I hopped in the car and started the next day.”

Once he had his taste of college football, Purkey was hooked.

He volunteered at Stevenson University in Maryland after finishing school. Purkey had pit stops at McDaniel College (also in Maryland) and Maine Maritime Academy, too. But because he managed a few stretches with JMU, he’s the only staffer ever to work for ex-Dukes coaches Matthews, Everett Withers and Houston. And Purkey said the most critical breakthrough of his career came in 2014 when Withers switched his assignment from wide receivers intern to assistant special teams coach.

“That’s because once you work with special teams, you really have to work with everyone,” Purkey said. “You have to know everybody and you have to be extremely organized and that was the thing I learned from that whole staff.

“They were running it literally like Ohio State. If it was something Urban Meyer was doing at Ohio State, it was exactly how we were doing it. It was definitely a high-stress environment, but it was necessary and made me a better coach to be prepared and speak the same language as guys. It was tough but really good and it was fun. That actually helped me get my first full-time job, because of the special teams’ experience. I don’t think I would’ve gotten it if I didn’t have that.”

Kent played seven seasons in the Canadian Football League, and a few years after returning to the states, he used a connection formed with Casey Creehan, a 2003 JMU assistant who spent more than a decade working in the CFL, to get a foot in the door of the college game. Creehan got the Lyon College job two years ago and hired Kent.

Others like Hawkins and Miller, two more recent alums, said they understood pro football wasn’t in their futures as players and decided coaching was best for them. Hawkins was a first-team All-CAA linebacker in 2017 and Miller was the league’s special teams player of the year that same season, but is most remembered for his touchdown catch to clinch JMU’s 2016 national semifinal win at North Dakota State.

“Growing up in Baltimore I saw a lot of very talented athletes who came out of high school, went onto college and made it to the pros,” Hawkins said. “But what I also saw an abundance of was a lot of talented athletes continue to chase the NFL and actually miss out on some other opportunities that might’ve presented themselves outside of playing. They might’ve been chasing a dream that really wasn’t there for them.

“So my mindset was all I had to do was my absolute best every Saturday. … I believed that would result in me having an opportunity to play in the NFL and if that opportunity didn’t present itself, I understood that maybe God had a different plan for me and maybe I should be open-minded to the other doors that were opening up. I decided to use the intellect I have for the game and pass it down to men the ages of 18 to 22.”

Houston had graduate assistant spots for Hawkins and Miller, first with the 2018 Dukes and then eventually at East Carolina after Houston departed JMU for ECU.

Hawkins stuck around for this past fall with the Pirates, learning from mentors former Dukes defensive coordinator Bob Trott and defensive line coach Jeff Hanson, Hawkins said, but Miller left Greenville, N.C., last summer for an opportunity he couldn’t resist.

At the annual coaches convention, according to Miller, he ran into Jordan Salkin, a then-graduate assistant for Tom Herman at Texas. Salkin worked for Withers at JMU when Miller was playing. One thing led to another and Salkin got Miller in touch with Drew Mehringer – the former Dukes co-offensive coordinator that was the wide receivers coach at Texas up until this offseason.

Miller’s first day in Austin was the start of August training camp.

“I’m not going to lie,” Miller said. “The first day was a little nerve-racking because I didn’t know anybody aside from Coach Mehringer and Jordan. I had to get to know all the receivers, players, and learn a new playbook. It was rough at first, but as the days went on, people got more comfortable with me and it got a lot easier.

“And I’d say to this point, I’ve learned a lot football-wise and a lot about recruiting because recruiting is different here. And I learned about how important creating relationships are with people and players, so I’ve learned a lot outside of Xs and Os of being here.”

Though Miller isn’t a stranger to big-time football – his uncle Erik Campbell, the current passing-game coordinator at Bowling Green, had stints at Michigan and Iowa – he has gotten a kick out of being at Texas and coaching in high-profile contests.

“Everyone hates Texas for some reason,” Miller said with a laugh. “I have no idea why. I understand why Oklahoma does because of the rivalry, but every game Texas is going to get everyone’s best shot whether it’s from Kansas, Kansas State, Oklahoma State.

“So that was the number one thing that I took away. I noticed that early. So each week we had to be on top of our game, which is good and which I like. The pressure isn’t a bad thing, but everyone hates Texas.”

The pressure to win at tradition-rich Texas, where Herman was paid $6.75 million last year, doesn’t only come on the field, but in recruiting, too, Miller said.

He said it didn’t take long to learn how recruiting operations vary widely between the schools – Texas, ECU and JMU – he’s worked with.

“You’re competing with the Oklahomas, Alabamas and Ohio States,” Miller said. “You’re a big fish and you’ve got to compete with the other big fish. That’s what the difference is.”

Purkey said the number of players recruited by schools at each level is different, too. He said Bridgewater College has more than 70 players – of course, no athletic scholarships are given in Division III – in its 2020 recruiting class. For comparison, JMU signed 19 players to scholarships to make up its 2020 class.

Hawkins said staffs coaching at various levels must alter their offense, defense and special teams schemes depending on the potential of their players as well.

“Every level has a different personnel ceiling it can reach it,” Hawkins said, “and then the way coaches adjust their game plan is based off of that personnel ceiling.”

The day-to-day budgets of the school matters, too, since money allotted for a specific staff directly correlates to the number of responsibilities a coach may have.

Miller works on a Texas football staff of 35 members, which includes the ex-JMU coach Withers, who has the same job title as Miller. Fitzgerald’s staff at Frostburg State is 13-men deep and the group Kent works alongside at Lyon College only has only about eight full-timers.

“It’s a grind,” Kent said. “We’ve got to handle equipment. We don’t have any video guys, so we handle video. We’ve got to figure out the trips. If we’re flying to Arizona, I’ve got to book all the flights and the charter buses. It’s washing the clothes and drying the clothes. We don’t have any equipment managers, so we’ve got to stay on top of that. We’ve got to make sure our guys are going to class and practice. We’ve still got to break down film and our opponents, so it’s a grind man, but that’s the beauty of it. And if you love what you do, it’ll work.”

The size, the speed and how highly-sought-after prospects are separate Power Five players from Group of Five and FCS players, and FCS players from Division II and down the line, and the financial commitment from schools to their football programs do the same to separate divisions, the six JMU alums said.

But what isn’t different, according to them, is the personality of their players and the messages they and their colleagues have for players.

“The mental aspect is the same everywhere,” Fitzgerald said. “Don’t ever think for a minute that it’s more important in James Madison’s locker room on a Saturday at lunchtime than it is in Bridgewater’s locker room on a Saturday at lunchtime. … Mentally I’d tell you it’s the same. It’s of importance to them personally and to their families. It’s the same at West Virginia as it is at James Madison as it is at Frostburg State as it is at Bridgewater.”

The thriving Fitzgerald was a two-time coach of the year in the NJAC and is building a lengthy, successful track record as a head coach.

And that’s what many of his fellow former Dukes in coaching are aspiring to do. The JMU program has a rich history, with former wide receiver Gary Clark named to the D.C. Sports Hall of Fame on Tuesday after a standout NFL career in Washington. JMU products Charles Haley, Scott Norwood and Clark all appeared in at least one Super Bowl.

Now other alums are forging a path on the sidelines.

In 2018, Dudzik was named to American Football Coaches Association 35 Under 35 Leadership Institute.

“Right now the goal is to win, develop players and do my best to make sure my position group is playing at the highest level,” Dudzik said. “Ultimately, I’d love to be a head coach at the Division I level. That’s been a goal of mine since I got into this profession and that’s why it’s great that I’ve been surrounded by so many great people, going from the Cardinal Gibbons experience to Duke to now with Coach Houston and our staff.”

Miller, who had Dudzik as his position coach at JMU, and Hawkins echoed the sentiment of Dudzik.

“And maybe one day we can build a coaching staff powerhouse,” Hawkins said. “Just like we built up the JMU dynasty the last couple of years. That’d be great. I’d love that.”

Miller said from the feedback he’s gotten from people in the Power Five that he wouldn’t be surprised if more former Dukes don’t join Fitzgerald and become head coaches.

“Every time I mention JMU to a coach, they say, ‘Man, that’s a great program,’” Miller said. “And I think that speaks volumes for the program that JMU has become.”