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AFM Magazine


Stepping Out of the Shadows

What some may consider to be a struggle, other coaches believe that being an assistant coach is good fortune
by: Richard Scott
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When George Lumpkin was a young assistant coach at Hawaii, he worked alongside an assistant with big hopes and dreams for his career. That assistant started at Kent State, moved to Hawaii, made stops at San Jose State, Cal, Tennessee and Ohio State before finally moving on to an extended pro football career.

Lumpkin and his friend kept in touch and he even visited him professionally over the years, tapping into his friend’s growing experience. On one of his visits, Lumpkin and his friend started reliving a few old times when the coach admitted Ohio State had once been his dream job.

“He said, ‘I thought Ohio State was the ultimate in coaching,’ but when he finally got there it almost drove him out of coaching,” Lumpkin says. “He lost the fun in the game. He said they took it away from him with the pressure, the way they recruited, the way they ran their meetings. He said, ‘If (pro football) hadn’t come along, I probably would have gotten out of coaching.’

“Then he said to me, ‘you know, I think you might have it right.’”

That coach, it turns out, is current Houston Texans head coach Dom Capers.

Conversations such as that one have always stuck in Lumpkin’s mind. Sure, he’s had his chances to leave Hawaii since he first arrived as a player in 1970, but instead he’s decided to invest himself in a program, a place, a purpose, a people.

“I enjoy where I am,” Lumpkin says. “I enjoy the people here. I enjoy the atmosphere. I enjoy the weather. It’s my home.”

That alone doesn’t make Lumpkin unique. Lots of coaches find good jobs in good places and never want to leave. What makes Lumpkin so special is that he is one of a small group of coaches who hasn’t had to leave Hawaii throughout his 29-year coaching career. He has survived four of five coaching changes, and the one who didn’t retain him at Hawaii was fired after just three losing seasons. The next coach, June Jones, hired him immediately, and later promoted him to defensive coordinator. If Lumpkin has his way he’ll finish out his coaching career with the Rainbows.

It’s hard to find coaches such as Lumpkin who have managed to endure at the same program through coaching changes. Lumpkin is one member of a small fraternity that also includes Auburn’s Joe Whitt and Miami’s Art Kehoe. In a business where change seems almost inevitable, both Whitt and Kehoe have coached at their respective programs since 1981.

They are solid. They are durable. They are resilient. They are the survivors.

“I hate the word survivor,” Whitt says. “It makes it sounds like it’s a struggle. It hasn’t been a struggle. It’s an achievement, not a struggle.”

All three coaches will insist their ability to sustain their employment at the same program, through a series of coaching changes, is the product of good fortune, hard work, staying on the top of the game and doing the job the right way for the right reasons.

“I hope it has something to do with me as a person and the job I’ve done and the commitment I’ve made to young people that I’ve been able to stay here for such a long time,” Whitt says. “I’ve made a commitment to this community, to this university, the people of this university and the young men on our football team.”

That’s an honorable commitment, but it’s also one that’s rarely honored in this profession. There’s little debate that a new head coach has every right to bring in his own coaches, but how often does the new coach seriously consider keeping someone from the previous coaching staff? It’s typical for members of the previous staff to get a cursory interview from the new head coach, only to be told their services are no longer needed.

Of course, there are other methods of sticking around.

“I just hid out in closets a lot,” Kehoe says. “Then I’d come back out and say ‘hey, I’m still here. Are you gonna keep me around?’ And they did.”

In all seriousness, Kehoe says, “I’m kind of a persistent pain in the butt. I do my job and I’m pretty relentless about it. I’m lucky to be here and I appreciate it and people know that, and that’s helped me stay around.

“If that sounds too trite or too simple ... it’s the truth. I don’t know how I got here, but I got lucky. I don’t know how I stayed, but I got even luckier.”

Kehoe first arrived at Miami as a juco transfer in 1979 and played two years for Schnellenberger. Kehoe then spent one year as a student assistant and one year as a graduate assistant before Schnellenberger left for the USFL and then ended up in Louisville. Schnellenberger hired two Miami GAs, “but I got left out of the mix,” says Kehoe, who then went to work for new coach Jimmy Johnson. “To be honest with you I figured I’d just get my masters in the spring and move on to something else.”

That changed the week before the 1984 Fiesta Bowl. As the Hurricanes took the long walk from the practice field to the locker room, past a large wooded area, Johnson grabbed Kehoe and asked for a second of his time. Kehoe had no idea what he wanted, and anyone who’s ever been a GA can understand why Kehoe was nervous.

Instead, Johnson told Kehoe that assistant coach Christ Vagotis had decided to join Schnellenberger at Louisville and Johnson wanted someone to assist Tony Wise with the offensive line.

“Jimmy said, ‘I can’t announce it until January but would it be alright with you if we took you on as a full-time coach?’ “ Kehoe says.

Kehoe tried to remain calm and cool, but as soon as Johnson walked away, he ran off into the woods. “I was so excited. It was a dream come true for me. I always wanted to be a coach and I thought I could do the job and do it well, but you get frustrated when you’re a GA for a long time. I just kept running through these tall pine trees screaming like a little kid.”

Amazingly, Kehoe says, “That’s the only job offer I ever got in my life, and that’s good.”

Since then, Kehoe has gone from assistant offensive line coach to tight ends coach to o-line coach to assistant head coach. Not that it’s always been easy. There were times when Kehoe worried about what the new coach would do, especially when Johnson left for the Dallas Cowboys and Miami hired Dennis Erickson. It was former Miami athletic director Sam Jankovich who told Kehoe not to worry, that he would insist Erickson keep him on the staff.

When Erickson left in 1994, Kehoe caught a break when Miami hired former ‘Canes assistant Butch Davis. Kehoe’s interview was fairly simple.

“The first day he walked in he said ‘hey Art you ready to be my line coach?’” Kehoe says. “It was my first time coaching the offensive line by myself and he really let me coach.”

When Davis left for the Cleveland Browns just before signing day in 2001 veteran assistant Larry Coker became the head coach. Kehoe not only stayed, he became Coker’s assistant head coach.

“Larry’s just about the best guy I’ve ever been around,” Kehoe says. “I’ve been lucky. I’m not just saying that, because I know I’ve got skills and I think I do a good job, but I’ve been real lucky to be around good people who appreciate my passion for what I do and for this school, and it’s worked out well for me.”

“We’ve had five national titles, probably lost another five. I feel like I’ve been given a train ticket to the best ride in college football history, so I’m not complaining at all. The people here mean everything to me. Not just the football people but all the people who make it special. I bleed orange and green.”

Whitt didn’t bleed Auburn orange and blue when he came to Auburn in 1981, but the longer he stayed the harder it’s been to leave.

Whitt was a 31-year-old assistant football coach and head wrestling coach at Robert E. Lee High in Montgomery, Ala., when former coach Pat Dye had offensive line coach Neil Callaway contact Whitt to see if he was interested about a defensive opening at Auburn. That same day Whitt had read in the newspaper that John Mitchell was leaving Arkansas’ staff for Auburn, but he got different information from Callaway.

“I knew the job was a long shot at best,” Whitt said, “but I also knew it was possible.”

Because of his success at Lee, a prep football hotbed for success and college prospects, Whitt had formed solid relationships with assistant coaches recruiting Lee players and had already been approached about two other opportunities to coach in Division I-A. This one was different. It was an offer in his home state, from a university less than an hour away. When Mitchell decided to stay at Arkansas, Whitt made the move without worrying about the long-range future.

“You never think you’re going to be in one place very long in this business,” Whitt says. “When I got here, to be quite honest, I didn’t know if I was going to be here two years.

“I never thought about being here 20 years or 10 years or two years. I just went to work one year at a time, one game at a time, one day at a time. After awhile it added up to quite a few years.”

Over 24 years at Auburn, Whitt and his wife Ethelrine have raised two children, including a son, Joe Whitt Jr. who is the wide receivers coach at Louisville. During that time, Whitt also survived the forced resignations of both Dye in 1992 and Terry Bowden in 1998.

Since it was Dye who gave him his first shot at coaching in college, Whitt felt especially vulnerable when Dye was forced to resign.

“I heard all the things about Dick Sheridan getting the job and he was bringing in his staff and nobody was going to be retained,” Whitt says, “so I was pretty much prepared at that time to go out and find another job.”

Whitt was as surprised as anyone when Terry Bowden got the head coaching job, simply because Bowden was coaching at Division I-AA Samford and had not been seriously mentioned in the media as a leading candidate. Whitt had worked with Terry’s brother Tommy for two years but barely knew Terry and didn’t expect a job. Instead, he was one of four coaches Bowden retained from Dye’s staff.

Staying at Auburn also allowed Whitt to avoid uprooting his children, who were still teenagers at the time. That also explains why he turned down at least two opportunities to coach in the NFL. Now that his children are grown he might be willing to consider such a move to the pros, but he had other priorities when they were growing up.

“That’s one thing I’ve always kept in mind,” Whitt says. “My family is so important to me and I just didn’t want to move them one place to another if I could avoid it. That’s been a wonderful blessing. Without question, that’s not something that happens very often in a coach’s life.”

His desire to stay in Auburn also played a part when Auburn hired current coach Tommy Tuberville from Ole Miss. Whitt knew Tuberville and members of his staff because they had recruited many of the same kids and visited the same homes and high schools, but Whitt also knew Tuberville might bring his entire staff.

Whitt was ready to help create and develop a brand-new position as a liaison to high school coaches if it meant he could stay with the university, but when one of Tuberville’s coaches stayed behind at Ole Miss and when Tuberville saw Whitt’s work during recruiting season, Whitt joined Tuberville’s staff.

“To be quite honest, at that time my mind was really set on being part of Auburn and I would be a part of Auburn in whatever capacity,” Whitt says. “I felt like I could help Auburn, whether I was working with the high school coaches or coaching.”

Despite his own personal satisfaction, Whitt is quick to remind young coaches that his career path isn’t for everyone. In fact, it can be a hindrance to coaches who want to move up the coaching ladder.

“It all depends on what you want,” Whitt says. “It depends on what phase you’re in in your life. We came here with Coach Dye and built a program and we had a lot of success. It was a great job, we had a great staff, great friends, and our kids grew up while we were there and a lot of them became teenagers.

“By the time they become teenagers you don’t want to move them anymore. Then both of my kids came to school here at Auburn, so I was pretty entrenched in the community, so we didn’t want to move. I’ve been here so long that I have a passion for the university and Auburn, period. It’s my school and I love it like no other.

“But I don’t really recommend that. Most everybody ultimately wants to be a head football coach or a coordinator, and if you want to do that I do recommend moving. I told my own son, ‘you don’t move for money, you move for opportunity. If it’s a chance to improve your career then you’ve got to look at it long and hard and make the right decision.’ That’s especially when you don’t have kids or when you’re kids are younger.”

Staying with one program for a prolonged period, especially through coaching changes, also has its drawbacks. A coach can get stuck with a reputation as someone who doesn’t want to move along, regardless of his career choices.

“When you stay a long time you’ll always be looked at as the holdover,” Whitt says. “You’re always the guy the coach kept, not the one he hired. That has somewhat of a negative connotation to it. On the other hand, it’s a positive to know where you’ve been, know where you are, know where you’re going. Experience at a school is a plus.”

Experience at the University of Hawaii has been a big plus for Lumpkin, who has become synonymous with Rainbow football since he arrived as a juco defensive back from Los Angeles is 1970. He’s had plenty of opportunities to move on in the past 31 years, but none have been enough to convince him to leave his adopted home.

“In our profession sometimes guys just look to move,” Lumpkin says. “I think they have in mind what they think is the ideal job or the great job or the level of coaching they would like to be at, and some of them think they have to move to get all that. And then there are people who wish they could stay but don’t get to stay. And then there’s people like me.”

After Lumpkin completed his career under coach Dave Holmes, Holmes then hired him as a GA. When Holmes left in 1974 Hawaii promoted Larry Price from defensive coordinator to head coach, and Price gave Lumpkin a full-time job.

“That was a dream come true,” Lumpkin says. “I was just a graduate assistant and all of a sudden I was hired as a full-time coach at my alma mater.”

It wasn’t long before Lumpkin experienced the kind of career conflict that is common in the coaching profession. When Price suddenly departed after spring practice in 1977, Lumpkin figured he might be in trouble.

“You’re a little nervous because you don’t know if the other guy is going to keep you or not keep you,” Lumpkin says. “Then you start thinking about having to go to another place, starting all over again, moving your family.”

Fortunately for Lumkin, a young Dick Tomey got the job. Tomey didn’t know a lot of people in the business and it was a difficult time of year to find new coaches, so Tomey decided to keep the staff intact and give them a year to prove themselves.

“Afterward one of the other guys and I were talking and he said ‘what are you supposed to do?’” Lumpkin says. “I said, ‘there’s only one thing we can do.’ I was a young coach, so I just figured, hey, I’m going to do the best job I can do, and if I’m not what he wants then he can find someone else and I’ll move on. But Dick ended up keeping me.”

By the time Tomey left to become the head coach at Arizona in 1987, Lumpkin had decided he didn’t want to leave Hawaii. The university interviewed five serious candidates, and to Lumpkin’s good fortune, four of them told Lumpkin they wanted him to stay. One of those coaches, Hawaii defensive coordinator Bob Wagner, became the head coach.

Lumpkin wasn’t so lucky when Wagner was fired in 1996, but then again, neither was new coach Fred VonAppen.

“I interviewed with him and he had done his homework and had gotten some favorable feedback from people around the program, but I think that made him uncomfortable,” Lumpkin says. “He told me I wouldn’t fit in. I just told him ‘well, I’m not leaving Hawaii, so if I can help you with anything, give me a call. I don’t have to be on your staff to give you some insight.’ But he never did.”

VonAppen never won, either, going 5-31 in three years before he lost his job. During this time, Lumpkin kept busy coaching high school football and running his own business cleaning office buildings. He assumed he was done with college coaching until an old friend and fellow alum, current Rainbows coach June Jones, got the job.

Jones had already offered Lumpkin an NFL job when Jones was the head coach with the Atlanta Falcons, but Lumpkin turned it down to stay in Hawaii. This time was different.

“I’ve known June for 30-something years and when he called me and asked me to come back I decided it was something I really wanted to do,” Lumpkin says. “I’m back where I spent practically my entire adulthood and I’m blessed to be here.”

Lumpkin, like Whitt and Kehoe, is quick to admit that surviving a coaching change is almost always beyond an assistant’s control. He didn’t have any say over Tomey’s decision to keep his staff, or Hawaii’s decision to elevate Price or Wagner, or VonAppen’s decision to bring in his own coaches. He didn’t have anything to do with Jones’ return to Hawaii, either.

But in each case, Lumpkin had done all he could to give each coach a reason to keep him on the staff.

“When you find a place that you enjoy and you like the people and you like the community and the atmosphere, I think you need to dig in, work hard, be good, treat people well and maybe you’ll have a chance to be there for awhile,” Lumpkin says. “You’ve got to believe in yourself, work hard enough to be the very best coach you can be and then everything else take care of itself – and it will.

“You can’t control what someone else is thinking or what someone else is doing. But you can control what you do. That’s where your control comes. Do the very best job you can do, do it to the best of your ability, learn as much as you can learn and people will respect you for that. That’s all you can do.”






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