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AFM Magazine


Making the Jump

Three high school coaches that made the move to college assistants
by: Patrick Finley
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You ask Tommy Knotts why he decided to leave his job as head coach of one of the most dominant high school programs in America for an assistant’s job at a college football program. You wonder how he could leave Independence High School in Charlotte, N.C., where his teams have won 62-straight games, the second-best mark in the country.

You assume it’s because of some major life-changing event.

Was it because of his family?

“No, not really,” he said.

Was he bored with winning at the high school level?

“The kind of person I am, winning wasn’t enough,” Knotts said. “We had to win and play perfectly. Winning never got old, but it was never satisfying. We had to be perfect.”

Was it because he evaluated his life after almost dying two years ago, when he contracted West Nile virus?

“I knew I would beat West Nile like any Charlotte high school,” he said.

No, Tommy Knotts didn’t decide to leave for a college program because of anything that happened to him in the past few years. Instead, you have to go back to when he was 5 or 6 years old.

“My uncle Doug was coaching Duke,” he said. “I stood on the sidelines. It was amazing.

“From then on, I was bound and determined to be a player, especially a player at Duke. I wanted to play football my whole life, not coach. But I realized later that coaching was something I could do.”

Knotts would go on to play football at Duke, the same way his three uncles and father had in the past. In many ways, Duke was always in his blood.

“It had always been in the back of my mind that I’d like to try it, but only at Duke,” Knotts said. “I’d pretty much decided I didn’t want a chance unless Duke came along. I couldn’t pass it up.”

So Knotts gave it all up – his 228-55 career record as a head coach and his team with 15 or so returning starters – to become the quarterbacks coach at Duke. This will be his first season. “It was just the right time for me to go,” Knotts said.

The same was true for Keith Flynn. He was the head coach at Pinecrest High School in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., when a new administration started to put less emphasis on extracurricular activities, namely athletics. So in 2000, he left South Florida to take a job as the running backs coach at Western Michigan. Fourteen years earlier, he had been a graduate assistant for Western Michigan coach Gary Darnell at Wake Forest. The two had kept up their friendship and would talk football at conventions. Darnell offered him a job.

“I always wished to coach on the college level,” Flynn said. “But, like the saying goes, be careful what you wish for.”

Flynn moved his family to Kalamazoo, Mich., and became the team’s running backs coach. He was tabbed to recruit South Florida, his old stomping grounds. He absolutely loved his job, but was on the road constantly. He missed his family.

Flynn had an epiphany during the Christmas season of his second year. He had a boy and a girl and a son on the way, and his family had “all of 20 minutes to go pick out a Christmas tree,” Flynn said.

“ I was sitting on a plane on the way to Florida to go recruit that night,” he said. “I didn’t even get to see them put decorations on the tree. I thought, ‘no job is worth this.’”

So Flynn started looking for high school coaching jobs. He found one at Providence Day School in Charlotte, where he got a pay raise from his salary at Western Michigan. He was also able to enroll his children in the school, something he says he wouldn’t have been able to afford otherwise.

The two coaches offer an insight into college football coaching, especially in comparison to high schools. It’s more glamorous, there are more perks and the pay can be better, but, for some coaches, it can be somewhat of a culture shock.

“I always tell people that in high school, football is about 10 percent of my day and everything else is 90 percent,” Flynn said. “In college it’s reversed.”

That life sounded good to Van Malone. Malone had just finished a four-year stint in the NFL as a cornerback for the Detroit Lions, and was looking for something to do next. “I didn’t know what to do when I stopped playing,” he said. “I figured coaching was the easy thing to do.”

Malone coached defensive backs for two years at Waltrip High School in Houston before taking the defensive coordinator job at Conroe High School across town in 2001. In 2003, he received a phone call from North Dakota State head coach Craig Bohl, who Malone first met when he was recruited coming out of high school.

“He called and told me that he wanted me to go with him to a new job and coach offense, which was different,” Malone said. “I accepted, and then he told me where I was going.”

Malone went to North Dakota State for 11 months before accepting a job to coach defensive backs for Darnell at Western Michigan this season. Like Bohl, Malone knew Darnell from the recruiting process. “Getting a college coaching job is definitely all about contacts,” Malone said.

“To jump from high school to college, it’s about a guy knowing who you are and how you fit in. When you’re making a hire, you want to hire someone you know will fit in. It’s harder for a high school coach to fit in on the college level.”

Flynn said he would recommend a coach try to meet as many other coaches as he can, whether it be through clinics, conventions or even by attending other coaches’ practices as a guest.

“Be the best you can at where you are,” he said. “But get out there and make connections. Try to meet as many college coaches as you can.”

Once they got to the college level, these former bosses had to learn how to take orders as assistants.

“I’m the low man on the totem poll,” Knotts said. “At first I was so overwhelmed, I was just trying to soak everything in. I felt lost. It was a little different for me. At times, there were points when I should have spoken up about certain things when I didn’t. But that’s the nature of a coach’s personality. Every coach probably thinks he’s a perfectionist and that there’s a better way to do things.”

Malone was eager to soak up knowledge.

“My attitude is that I’m a learner,” he said. “It’s easy to take orders from guys who have been coaching for 20 years.”

Being on Darnell’s staff had an impact on Flynn’s coaching style. After being run-oriented for 15 years, he’s starting to throw the ball more at Providence Day.

Even as they were soaking up new strategies and systems from their new coworkers, they found recruiting to be the most difficult challenge ahead. To prepare for the May recruiting season, Knotts said he practiced with a few mock interviews during a coaching meeting. That was the extent of his recruiting practice.

Knotts said that his experience as a high school coach will help him deal with other prep bosses.

“I think that it will also help that I’ve been on the other end as a high school coach dealing with a recruiter,” he said. “This May period, some high schools think that recruiting is something they don’t like. It’s a very hectic month. I think I’ll be able to tell if a coach wants to visit or not.”

Said Malone: “The biggest adjustment is recruiting. It’s hard to know all the rules at first.”

Flynn said keeping up with eligibility rules was his biggest challenge. “But it was fun – I loved getting out and talking to high school coaches,” he said. “I learned a whole lot from watching practice and meeting the kids.”

For these coaches, their job is all about the players. All three said that interacting with their players was the greatest reward of their job. They also said that college players were far more open to instruction and mentoring than they had expected.

Because of their desire to mold young men, all three hold high school and college coaching in equal regard as noble professions.

“It was always a little befuddling to me that people would congratulate me when I got the Duke job,” Knotts said. “Sure, maybe it’s a step up in pay and perks. Maybe it’s a little more prestigious. But there’s nothing more valuable than a good high school coach.

“I don’t know that congratulations were in order. I think they were selling high school coaches short. Being a great high school coach is one of the great jobs in America.”

And just as Malone went from high schools to college and Flynn went from high schools to college and back again, both wouldn’t rule out making the jump again. Malone has two boys, ages 3 and 5. He’d like to coach them in high school one day.

Flynn’s got other plans.

“Maybe when my kids go to college,” he said, “Maybe I’ll go with them.”

Tips before Moving

Making the jump from high schools to the college ranks isn’t easy. Below are five tips on how to make the jump from coaches who have done it before:

1. Make connections. Making friends and acquaintances in the college ranks is the fastest – and maybe only – way to move up from the prep ranks.

Malone knew his two college bosses – Craig Bohl at North Dakota State and Gary Darnell at Western Michigan – from his days as a prized high school recruit.

“It seems like all college coaches know each other,” he said.

Keith Flynn, a high school coach who made the jump to the college ranks before returning to preps, said conventions, workshops, clinics and other team’s practices are the best places to meet other coaches.

“Try to meet as many college coaches as you can,” he said.

2. Be willing to shift positions. Malone was a defensive back at the University of Texas and then for the Detroit Lions. He coached defensive backs and was a defensive coordinator in high school, but agreed to coach wide receivers when he was offered a job at Division II North Dakota State.

“Coach Bohl wanted me to coach offense, and that was fine,” he said. “I got to learn something new.”

3. Be willing to coach in a new system. Flynn’s Fort Lauderdale Pinecrest High School team was a run-based team, but he jumped at the chance to coach running backs at pass-heavy Western Michigan.

Flynn had to learn a new scheme at Western Michigan, but said it helped to make him a better coach. Now the head coach at Providence Day High School in Charlotte, N.C., Flynn has incorporated a more complex pass scheme. He said it makes him a more dangerous play-caller.

“We definitely throw more, and we do it more efficiently than before,” he said.

4. Pay attention during recruiting. A high school coach is an integral part of a process most new college coaches have difficulty with – recruiting. Next time a college coach comes to your high school campus, note which approaches seem to work and which don’t.

“I think I’ll be able to tell if a coach wants to visit or not,” said Tommy Knotts, who took the quarterbacks coach job at Duke this offseason after leading Charlotte’s Independence High School to 62-straight wins.

Also, familiarize yourself with some of the basic college recruiting rules and deadlines, if you haven’t already. Flynn, Malone and Knotts all said that learning the minutia of recruiting rules was a challenge.

5. Don’t be afraid to start at the bottom. When Malone took the North Dakota job, he was put in charge of film exchanges, practice set-up and “other kinds of dirty work,” he said.

“But it was a great learning experience for me – I got to know things inside and out,” he said.





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