The Pull of the Water
Charleston is the city I kept circling back to. Every few years, when the coaching carousel started spinning, I would find myself looking at the Lowcountry first, before I looked anywhere else, telling myself I was only curious. Thirteen years, four states, every classification the sport has, and the map always bent back toward this stretch of coast. That is not a football decision. That is the pull a place has on you, or it doesn't.
Football is different in the South. I have coached it in the Virginia mountains and across both Carolinas, and it is not about talent or the number of teams. It is that the season organizes a town. Restaurants change their hours on Friday. People who have never had a kid on the roster still know who the starting quarterback is. The stands fill with folks who have sat in the same section for three generations, and losing hurts the whole community for a week. August is when all of that starts humming again, in heat that never lets up, before a single snap has counted for anything. Getting to be part of that never stops feeling like a privilege.
Why here
People ask what it is about Charleston, and I never have a tidy answer, because it is not one thing. Mostly it is the water. I have always been better around it. Something about being near it settles me down in a way I have never bothered to explain to myself.
Then there is the city itself. The food is worth every bit of its reputation. The pace of life suits me, slower than the places I have lived, without ever feeling like nothing is happening. And I love exploring it, which is the part I did not expect to enjoy this much. You can walk one block and find something that has been standing for two hundred years, then turn the corner into something that opened last month. Old and new sitting right next to each other, neither one apologizing for the other. I could wander around in that all year and not get bored.
There is one more thing. I started my coaching career in South Carolina, at a small private school, coaching both lines and learning this game from the inside out. There is something right about ending up back in the state where I first found out I could do this at all, except now I know what I am doing, and I know exactly who I want to be while I do it.
What nobody warns you about starting over
Here is the less romantic part. When you walk into a new place, nothing you did before walks in with you. Your résumé does not tackle anybody. A ring in a drawer at home means nothing to a sophomore who is deciding this week whether he trusts you. You earn it again from the ground up, every single time, and thirteen years of doing it has not made that part any easier.
So you learn names. All of them, fast, including the kids who will never take a varsity snap. You go to their other games and their concerts. You find out which ones have somebody at home checking their grades and which ones do not. That work is slow and unglamorous and it is the entire job in year one.
Your résumé does not tackle anybody. You earn it again from the ground up, every single time.
What travels
Almost everything about a program is local. Schemes change, personnel changes, the community and what it expects of you changes. A few things load into the truck with me and come out the other end exactly the same.
Aggressive by design, flexible by nature. That is the identity, and it has survived every move I have made. So has the standard I hold a locker room to, the one my players learn as FAMILY, which stands for Forget About Me, I Love You. It is a mouthful, and sixteen-year-olds roll their eyes at it in August. By October they are the ones enforcing it on each other, which was the point the whole time.
What I am looking forward to
The first Friday night, obviously. That has never gotten old and I hope it never does. But the thing I am actually most excited about is smaller. It is that first morning in a weight room when a kid who did not want to be there in June shows up early in July because his teammates are going. You cannot script that moment. You build the conditions for it and then wait, and when it finally happens you know the thing is going to work.
I am excited. I am hopeful about what is ahead, more than I have been in a while. After all these years and all these stops, I get to do this work in the city I always wanted to do it in, near the water, in a place I am looking forward to knowing well.
Now let's go to work.