HARRISONBURG — All Tripp Weaver initially wanted was to coach high school football.

But former East Carolina coach Ruffin McNeill told Weaver, who at the time was a student at the school, to want more.

“Early on, Coach Ruff and I developed a really strong bond,” Weaver said. “I still talk to him all the time.

“And when the [graduate assistant] job came open there, he offered it to me. I said, ‘Well coach, I thought I was going to coach high school.’ He said, ‘No, you need to stay in it and try to coach college.’”

Weaver had worked his way up from student assistant to graduate assistant and by the time he left Greenville, N.C., he was headed to The Citadel for his first full-time job at the age of 23.

This weekend Weaver, now the cornerbacks coach at James Madison, returns to his alma mater and Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium for the first time as an opponent. The Dukes and Pirates are set for a 6 p.m. kickoff Saturday.

“So after high school, I had some walk-on opportunities, but I ended up having a second Lisfranc injury to my foot,” Weaver said.

He played at T.C. Roberson High School in Asheville, N.C., the same school where JMU coach Mike Houston coached from 1996 to 2005. Weaver graduated from there in 2008, so there was some overlap with Houston.

“So about halfway through my freshman year at ECU, I got a hold of Coach Houston, who was coaching at Lenoir-Rhyne,” Weaver said. “I just said ‘Coach, I miss football and I think I want to be a high school coach.’”

Through a few of Houston’s contacts at ECU — Pirates director of high school relations Harold Robinson and then-wide receivers coach Donnie Kirkpatrick — Weaver landed a student-assistant gig in his first year on campus.

“This all goes back to the story of Coach Houston and myself and when we met,” Kirkpatrick said. “When he was a high school coach in Asheville and Tripp was a player.

“I had that area and Tripp was on my recruiting list. He was a pretty good player and it just turned out that he maybe wasn’t the level of player that plays at East Carolina, but he decided to go to school there.

“I can remember that Mike had called and I remember when I was in the school he had mentioned that Tripp wanted to get into coaching and that he was a former player, and he had asked if we had student coaches. I said, ‘Yeah, we do.’”

As an assistant, Weaver worked with the secondary helping defensive coordinators Brian Mitchell, who’s now at Virginia Tech, and Rick Smith, who retired after last season. Mitchell worked more with corners, so in Weaver’s first few seasons, he worked with safeties. But then when Smith became defensive coordinator, he was more hands-on with safeties, so Weaver worked with cornerbacks.

The first assistant coach he worked for as an undergrad student was Vernon Hargreaves, who’s now the linebackers coach at Arkansas. Hargreaves worked with the defense and special teams at ECU.

“I laugh because my first job as a defensive student assistant was to draw up the screen game,” Weaver said. “So I took my time. I drew the circles real nice. I made sure it looked real good. I bet I spent three hours on it. It’s about a 20-minute job, but it took me about three hours.

“Then I handed it to Coach Hargreaves, and he said ‘Tripp, this looks great, but you drew it upside down.’ So I started learning the process there.”

McNeill, now the defensive tackles coach and assistant head coach at Oklahoma, said Weaver never stopped learning. He said Weaver tried to learn from him, Hargreaves, Mitchell, Smith, Kirkpatrick and offensive coordinator Lincoln Riley, who is entering his first year as the head coach at Oklahoma.

“He did a great job,” McNeill said of Weaver. “Smart and a hard worker. He picked up everything so quick.

“I knew he’d be a great coach and you can see it happening at JMU. He was a football coach from Day 1.”