Hetherman Brings Aggressive, Adaptable Defense To JMU

HARRISONBURG — A month ago, Corey Hetherman couldn’t have predicted his coaching career would bring him to Harrisonburg.

He was preparing to call the defense for Maine in its national semifinal contest at Eastern Washington as a berth to the FCS national title game was at stake.

“Last couple of weeks have been very interesting,” Hetherman said as he finally sat settled in his office at James Madison. “Obviously, we had a run and it was the best run in the history of Maine football, so this isn’t where I thought things were going to happen.”

The Black Bears dropped the game and a few days after the loss, former Maine coach Joe Harasymiak — the Colonial Athletic Association Coach of the Year for 2018 — left for an assistant-coaching job at Minnesota while Hetherman took the role of defensive coordinator with the Dukes, joining new coach Curt Cignetti’s staff.

At Maine, Hetherman stabilized a defense that fueled a deep postseason run, and now his task at JMU isn’t much different.

A rebuild, retool or overhaul isn’t necessary for the Dukes just like it wasn’t necessary when Hetherman was promoted to defensive coordinator at Maine as Harasymiak went from defensive coordinator to head coach prior to the 2016 season.

“Maine has had a culture on defense,” Hetherman said. “Everyone has heard it now with the playoff run, but it’s the Black Hole [defense].

“There were tweaks and little things we changed each year. Some years it was off, then it was press and then it was maybe a little bit more heavy pressure. Then more base or more man, but we just tried to change it a little bit depending upon what kind of guys we had in the program.”

Cignetti noticed and felt the basic ideas of the system aligned with what he wanted for the Dukes.

“What I really like about his defense was they really played hard and they were very athletic,” Cignetti said. “They had done a good job of recruiting to that system and I thought their defensive front was excellent and extremely well-coached. I thought the guys just really played relentlessly, very similarly to what we had seen from JMU in the past, particularly the 2017 defense.”

Hetherman said his job is to continue to build upon and grow the established strong defensive mentality at JMU, and to do so he’s bringing what he did at Maine with him. He plans to keep an attacking system in place and then adjust the defense as the Dukes’ new defensive coaches learn more about their players during winter workouts and spring practice.

“JMU was really the team we were trying to knock off of being the top defense,” Hetherman said. “We’d watch JMU because they were similar. They were aggressive, they were violent up front and they challenged throws, so a lot of the cut-ups that we would watch when we’d watch common opponents, JMU matched up very well with what we were trying to do.”

The Dukes topped the Colonial Athletic Association for scoring defense and total defense in each of the past two seasons, but in Maine’s pursuit of JMU, the Black Bears ended up with the best rushing defense in the country and were tied for second nationally in total sacks en route to the semifinals.

The approach falls in line with what former JMU defensive coordinator Bob Trott believed in. Trott joined former Dukes coach Mike Houston at East Carolina last month, but in postseason victories with JMU, Trott would often gamble successfully when he sent blitzes at opposing quarterbacks while leaving his own defensive backs in man-to-man coverage.

Under Trott, JMU operated out of a four-man front, and Hetherman said he’d continue that.

“We want to play an aggressive style of defense,” Hetherman said. “We’re going to play some press quarters. We’re going to play some man-to-man and we’re going to change it up with some zone coverage, but our biggest thing is we want to make the offense one-dimensional.

“We want to stop the run, and I think last year it really showed up because over the last four years that’s what we were really built on and building toward at the University of Maine. But we want to get an extra hat in the box and challenge people to make hard throws, so last year if you watched us, we didn’t play a lot of off coverage. Everything was press. It was just challenging people to try to fit the football in tight windows and make them one-dimensional early in the game. That’s kind of the style.”

JMU returns 10 starters to its defense for the fall, and gets 2017 All-American cornerback Rashad Robinson back after he missed all of this past season with a foot injury.

Hetherman said he always adapted to the strengths of his depth chart throughout his three seasons as Black Bears defensive coordinator.

In his first few weeks on the job at JMU, Hetherman is studying up on his players, and the paused the game film on his desktop during the interview was proof.

He said Ron’Dell Carter, Paris Black and John Daka compare well to the defensive linemen he had at Maine and that he’s excited about coaching Robinson, defensive back Wayne Davis and linebacker Dimitri Holloway.

“Sterling Sheffield was a piece that we moved around,” Hetherman said of the standout Maine linebacker who was a second-team All-American choice by the Associated Press for his 84 tackles and 9.5 sacks in 2018.

“There were guys we would move around and try to do some different things with,” Hetherman said. “But right now on this [JMU] roster, I don’t know if we have that same piece. We have other pieces that are very talented. Last year, the safeties, [JMU] did a lot of different things with them, and up front, I think they did they did some different things with [defensive linemen] Paris Black and Ron’Dell Carter and some of those guys, so I think we’ll have the flexibility to do that.”