FSU's Coaching Community: It's not where you start, it's what you bring with you from the start (2024)

Of Florida State's 10 on-field assistant coaches, four played in the NFL. Three of those four – Odell Haggins (FSU alum), Ron Dugans (FSU alum), and Randy Shannon (Miami alum) – all started their respective coaching careers at their former institutions.

The fourth, Patrick Surtain, was an All-Pro corner who got his coaching start at the prep level as he worked his way up from position coach to head coach over nearly a decade at South Florida power American Heritage.

Five of the six of remaining on-field coaches all worked their way up from small cities or even smaller programs to get to this point:

• DC Adam Fuller - Started as a position coach at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, a Division-III program in the Heart of the Commonwealth

• OC Alex Atkins - Was a graduate assistant and then a tight ends coach at his alma mater where he played at FCS program UT-Martin. His first time coaching the offensive line was at Itawamba Community College.

• TE coach Chris Thomsen - Was a GA and then coached both sides of the line at Abilene Christian, then a Division II program.

• RB coach David 'YAC' Johnson - Worked as a prep coach in New Orleans for nearly a decade before getting an on-field job coaching multiple positions at Division III program Millsaps College.

• QB coach Tony Tokarz - Began his career at Division III Anna Maria College as a receivers coach.

Everyone has to start somewhere, right?

Fuller made $2,500 in his first year at WPI, living out of a one-bedroom apartment with three other full-time coaches or in his car in the initial eight months of his career. The head coach at WPI was fired in the offseason – Fuller's prep coach was fired when he was playing linebacker, then his head coach at Sacred Heart was fired before his senior season, and then this…he learned the harsh realities of the business quickly – during Fuller's first week on the road recruiting.

"I was angry, I didn't know why they were calling me back from the road," Fuller said.

WPI's athletic director asked Fuller to stay on and run the program while they conducted a coaching search. He was barely old enough to buy a beer.

"It was wild because I had never conducted a recruiting meeting," he said.

And not only was Fuller running the program, he was also conducting interviews to find the new head coach. One day, looking at his agenda, Fuller saw a familiar name: John Strollo, a legendary OL coach in the northeast who was then in his 50s and well into his career. Fuller had his set of questions ready, but it didn't take long for Strollo to push back at the absurdity of the age discrepancy and inverted power dynamic of the situation.

"He stops the interview and goes 'define leadership.' I'm like, 'oh my goodness,I have no idea' and he started to get after me," Fuller recalled. "I knew I had a long way to go, and it's not the way you would start a career with learning and developing.

"It was very much like I was in the ocean and trying to stay afloat."

Fuller isn't the only one who got his college coaching career started by sleeping in a car.

Johnson spent a couple weeks in his 2003 Camry that had a busted AC. Millsaps College is in Jackson, Miss. and it was early September.

"It was really, really hot in that car," Johnson said.

Johnson also put some miles on that Camry.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans native was with 23 other members of the O. Perry Walker High School program at Frank Wilson's three-bedroom house in Oxford (Wilson was a legendary prep coach in New Orleans who got an on-field job at Ole Miss in 2005). Johnson, who was a middle-school teacher for 10 years before even becoming a prep coach in the 90s, had his family displaced from the storm that ravaged his home city. Two older children were in Atlanta, and his newborn child was with his wife and Johnson. While at Wilson's place, Johnson got a job offer at Millsaps College.

He accepted before even knowing if it was a GA job or a position job, and before knowing the salary. During the two-hour drive, the coach called Johnson to tell him it was only $500 a month.

"It doesn't matter. I'm on my way," Johnson said.

Johnson's wife thought something was wrong with him. The timing wasn't ideal, but it was a dream and sometimes realizing those dreams mean sacrificing something in the interim.

Upon getting to Jackson, Johnson realized that hotels in the city weren't accepting any storm refugees.

He had credit cards, he had cash.

It didn't matter. So he slept in the car in the Millsaps parking lot, or sometimes got to crash in players' dorms if they weren't using them for a couple days. He'd use the football facility's shower in the morning and brush his teeth, and would end the day the same way before going back to the Camry.

"That was just my journey, that was part of it and I knew that," Johnson said. "I knew that wouldn't last forever."

For the next two years, Johnson would drive a couple hours home to New Orleans – after it was livable again for his family – to be with his wife and youngest child. He made that commute a few times each week until he started falling asleep at the wheel and realized it was time to come home and stay home for a while.

The Millsaps experience opened up Johnson's world when it came to understanding football, running a program, and making connections. The New Orleans Saints held their preseason camp at Millsaps, and Johnson used the opportunity to sit in meetings held by receivers coach Curtis Johnson.

And when those meeting rooms were full, he'd sit on the outside of the room and listen in the best he could.

"Routes, stance, starts. I didn't care what he was talking about, I had the notebook and I was writing everything down," Johnson said. "I'd bother him all the time."

Curtis Johnson would remember that and hired David Johnson several years later as a position coach at Tulane, after Johnson had returned to New Orleans to become a first-time head coach at St. Augustine (which is where he first met Norvell, back when the future head coach was an assistant at Tulsa).

That's sort of what it takes to make it as a coach who doesn't start immediately at a power program. You have to create your own connections, and those can come organically if you're working relentlessly, which is essentially a requirement at a job that has you setting your alarm clock before 4:30 a.m. and leaving the office after 9 p.m.

Those hours are Fuller's. Success, he says, looks a certain way to him.

But that's not an uncommon work day in the industry. Atkins estimates that his average day as a GA was 18 hours. You're expected to arrive early, leave late while learning the game and doing the dirty work like breaking down film, inputting data, and handling player discipline.

"It's all facets of everything, entry-level, you work for everybody," Atkins said. "But it was fulfilling because of learning. I love learning. Those 18-hour days, I wouldn't say it's fun, but it's informative."

Eventually, you might catch a break.

Johnson's came with Curtis Johnson rising up the ranks, and again with Norvell making a promise back when he brought Tulsa's staff to St. Augustine High to watch Johnson coach, promising that he would one day hire Johnson whenever he became a head coach.

Atkins got a GA job at Marshall in 2009 and then moved on to Itawamba Community College in Fulton, Miss., where he was the offensive line coach and recruiting coordinator. He worked alongside Gabe Fertitta, who was the only other offensive coach on staff, and would eventually unite with Fertitta when an analyst position opened up a few years ago at FSU.

Together, Atkins and Fertitta learned about aspects of running a program and got a chance to see various sides of recruiting. They were learning how to recruit major prep prospects who were academic non-qualifiers and also had their own players get recruited by FBS or FCS programs.

"I'd hear what kids liked, what they thought was BS," Atkins said.

Part of the job responsibilities for Atkins and Fertitta included working three hours at the student rec center four days a week, checking students in. Atkins jokes that Fertitta had the morning hours where he got the motivated students looking to workout, and Atkins had the evening shift where he got the slackers who were just looking to kill time after class by playing basketball because there wasn't much else to do at a campus without a student union and in the city of fewer than 5,000.

"All I have to do is sit here, click this computer for a couple of hours, and then I get to coach football? Yes, I'm all good," Fertitta said.

Sure, it wasn't a luxurious life. Fulton County was dry, so if you wanted a drink – or heck, even to sit down at a legitimate restaurant – you'd have to drive 20 minutes or so to Tupelo, the birthplace of Elvis.

That didn't matter, though. The duo was living out its dream as coaches. They both felt drawn to the teaching aspect, they both were getting a livable wage in the early 2010s and even got to live in houses next door to one another that were paid for by the community college.

"I'm fired up," Atkins said. "I've got a free house and I'm making $40 grand? I bought a truck!"

So Atkins went from starting his career loading up UT-Martin's equipment truck to buying his own pickup truck in the span of a couple years.

Fuller's break happened about 10 years earlier. A position coach from his time at Sacred Heart, Henry Quinlan, got a job at Wagner, an FCS program in Staten Island, N.Y. The head coach at Wagner since the early 1980s, Walt Hameline, was a legitimate coach albeit rough around the edges.

During his first spring game at Wagner, Fuller was running the scout team and had too few players on the field. Hameline, who coached over the loudspeaker, shouted over to Quinlan in a microphone: "Henry, this guy can't coach, why did you bring him here?"

"I legitimately bit the whistle off my mouth, I was so embarrassed and angry," Fuller said.

But Fuller finally had someone above him who was stable. The cool thing about Hameline's program is that responsibility increased with performance. So Fuller took on more as he learned. From food coordinator to video coordinator to special teams coordinator and then, in 2004, co-defensive coordinator.

"There was never any doubt that I wanted to coach, it was 'I want to do this, I just don't know what I'm doing yet.' Everybody was a stranger, there was no connection with anybody," Fuller said. "Once I got to Wagner, that really helped.

"You kept getting work thrown at your desk and it taught me to be organized, to delegate, who you could and couldn't trust, how you had to do the work. And as a position coach, you got to learn how to coach."

Even the analysts and GAs on FSU's staff, largely, have roots from smaller programs.

Third-year offensive GA Guy Lemonier Jr. started off as a quality control coach at FCS program Howard in 2018 before becoming the wide receivers coach at New Mexico Military Institute in 2019. Defensive GA Andrew Wilson began at Ave Maria University, an NAIA program in Naples, Fla. Senior defensive analyst Phillip Simpson was a position coach at his alma mater, Southridge High School in Miami. Defensive analyst Antonio Rodriguez was the JV head coach and a varsity position coach at Goleman Senior High School.

Fertitta cut his teeth at the prep level and at the junior-college ranks. An English major with a fondness for referencing classic writers, Fertitta always loved the idea of teaching. Aunts and uncles would jokingly call him "Coach" at family get-togethers because he'd always be the one getting the other kids organized for different games.

And he knew he wanted to impact and help people. So, coaching made sense.

After his time at Itawamba, Fertitta got his first HC job at St. Stanislaus in Mississippi, a traditionally strong program in The Magnolia State. Fertitta felt like an overhaul was needed to get his culture right, and that led to a bottoming-out period. Four wins in Year 1, and 0 wins in Year 2 including an 82-80 defeat in which his team set the national record for yards in a game with more than 900…as the losing team.

And then St. Stanislaus broke through, going from 0-10 to 10-0 and eventually 12-0 during a playoff run.

After that, he took over at Baton Rouge Catholic High – where he first met Norvell when the coach was on the recruiting trail – and established a power. He won two Division I LHSAA titles in four seasons, and fell in-love with the way the program melded holistically with the school as standards were very high in the classroom in addition to the football field. Then an opportunity came to be an analyst at Louisville.

"I felt like I had hit the lowest of the possible lows I could hit, and I hit the highest of the possible highs I could hit," Fertitta said with Dickens-esq syntax that's probably rooted deeply into his days as an English Major. "It felt like it was time to take a bet on myself."

So he took a pay cut and moved his wife and three children more than 700 miles north out of the Gulf region to a city that's a bridge away from being in Indiana.

That was in early 2021.

FSU had just finished its first season under Mike Norvell with a 3-6 record in which it played freshmen and redshirt freshmen at about the highest rate in the country.

The future of the program, externally, wasn't very clear. And, as we know, it was going to get murkier before it got clearer.

But that didn't cause Norvell to waiver. At all. His staff from 2021 was the exact same as the one in 2020.

"We didn't point fingers" said Johnson, thinking back to that Sunday after FSU's 0-4 start. "If anything, we pointed at ourselves personally to say I have to do better. What can I do better? And we did that as a staff. That's why so many of us have stayed."

Said Norvell: "I think it shows that we had the right guys. In tough and challenging times, it's really easy to look out for number one and to really just to get absorbed by self-preservation. We had a group that believed in what we were doing, how we were doing it, who we were doing it with. It was just, I guess, the comradery that they had, the belief in each other that they had, and, you know, being able to stick with each other throughout the challenging times that I think showed the true substance and identity of the guys that we have coaching here and just overall belief in what we were trying to do.

"And I do think that's a huge component of what allowed us to continue to grow through that. because I think players are always gonna be a reflection of the guys that are leading them, when you have that type of mindset within your coaching staff, it's a higher likelihood that that's gonna carry down within the players. It was critical that you never saw offense, defense or special teams going at each other when trying to figure out whose fault it was. It was just an opportunity for all of us to get better and to try to have each other's back."

Therein lies a part of the formula that's made Norvell successful in assembling one of the premier coaching staffs in college football: He's emphasized the human aspect of a profession that doesn't always churn out well-balanced individuals.

For example, within days after Curtis Johnson was fired at Tulane – and thus David Johnson, too – Norvell was hired to be the head coach at Memphis. His second hire along with Dan Lanning (who coached in high school for three seasons before catching on as a GA on the Pittsburgh staff where Norvell was a position coach…Lanning is now a premier coach in college football at Oregon) was Johnson. Within a month after taking the Memphis receivers job, Johnson was offered a position to coach running backs at LSU.

Norvell understood that Johnson should take the job.

"It's a chance to get home and probably get more money."

"Nah, Coach, I'm going to stay with you."

"You're going to turn down this opportunity to go to LSU?"

"Coach, you gave me a job when I didn't have one. Now, you're going to have to explain this to my wife."

And so Norvell and his wife, Maria, flew to New Orleans on their anniversary to take Johnson's wife out and show her the vision they had for taking the Memphis program to new heights.

"We stayed at Memphis," Johnson said.

Fuller, after several strong seasons at Marshall – including putting together a Top 25 unit when he was a coordinator – got on Norvell's radar when he needed a new defensive coordinator at Memphis. The Tigers were playing Wake Forest in a bowl game, and Wake head coach Dave Clawson – who Fuller coached with at Richmond – had mentioned Fuller to Norvell during a function for both teams.

But Norvell already was looking into Fuller. They had their first call and it lasted about an hour, with topics ranging from how Fuller views the function of a coach, how he builds relationships, even just asking about his relationship with his wife and family

"It was more, just, people," Fuller recalled. "I honestly got off the phone and I told my wife, 'I want to work with him.' And it had nothing to do with football."

They had a few more calls, but really, never a formal interview. Meanwhile, coaches from the community around Fuller kept getting calls from Norvell while the coach did his homework.

Football rarely came up in direct conversations.

"I would say that's not the typical interview," Fuller said.

It was a similar story for Atkins, who had worked with Fuller at UT-Chattanooga about 10 years earlier. Norvell was planning to bring Ryan Silverfield with him to FSU as the offensive line coach – Silverfield got his start as a prep coach in Jacksonville and then worked at a D-III program for five years – but Memphis retained Silverfield to be its head coach. Norvell already knew he was taking Fuller with him to FSU the night after they won the AAC Championship in a rematch against a powerful Cincinnati program, and Norvell had a look on his face a few days later that prompted Fuller to ask if the coach was OK.

Fuller mentioned Atkins, then an OC at Charlotte, to Norvell – "As a person, he's somebody I'm going to bring up and stand up for. And I don't do that very often," Fuller recalled – and so that process started.

"People were calling, letting me know that Norvell was asking about me," Atkins said. "I didn't know, I was like 'what?"

Even for Fertitta, who was offered a similar job as the one he had at Louisville, Norvell called the coach to assure him that this wasn't a favor to Atkins or anything like that. Norvell knew Fertitta from the recruiting trail and valued the work he did at Catholic as a coach, and as a leader.

There's a consistent way that Norvell treats coaches, and that comes with a human element to go along with extremely high expectations. But it's consistent, and that trickles down to players and the entire program as a whole.

"For Coach, it doesn't matter what the arena is, the expectation is always the same, " Fertitta said. "Whether they're in the classroom, whether they're in the community, whether they're on the practice field, in the meeting room. All those places, the expectation is the same. The culture is the same."

"The consistency of that, I think, has a way of accelerating and multiplying a kid's development."

Norvell developed a reputation as a coach's coach and a coach developer back at Memphis.

It helped that his team won a lot, sure.

But the coaching community – even if it didn't have immediate ties to Norvell or his staff members – saw the way the program developed players and maximized results with inherent recruiting restrictions at Memphis.

Johnson got a job at Tennessee. Lanning at Georgia. Marcus Woodson at Auburn, and same with Kenny Dillingham (who started shadowing Norvell back when he was a high school coach).

Norvell, who had to break into the FBS level after starting his career at Central Arkansas (then a Division-II program where Norvell was a productive slot receiver), didn't limit his personnel searches to certain coaching trees or conferences. He leaned on contacts he made throughout his own career to vet coaches, but the person was just as important as the resume.

"Everybody has got their own way," Fuller said.

Perhaps it's subconscious, it's what he knows because he's lived it.

"Coach is a small-school guy, but he's big on opportunities," Atkins said. "So I think there's a method there, but I don't think it's like 'I only want small-school guys.' I don't think that's behind it.

"I think that's probably just drawn to him because of his circles, where he played and where he came up and the jobs he's taken. …I don't know that it's intentional, but I know he's all about development. Maximizing potential. Developing coaches, he takes a lot of pride in it."

Atkins' hunch is correct, Norvell is keenly aware of the path coaches take before he brings them into his program.

"For me, the two things that for everybody I hire, one, they gotta be relationship-based, I mean it's gotta be part of their heart for people," Norvell said. "And then second, is just the work. When you find guys that have done a lot of different jobs, guys that have had to work their way up, sometimes the appreciation for opportunity, the variety of skill sets of what they've had to do, what they've had to teach, how they've had to teach it, I think are all things that are really good dynamics.

"And I've been around both types of coaches, some guys that have just started at a very high level, but then a lot of guys that have had to work their way up through a variety of positions. Because it's very similar to kind of how I came up, it's something that is attractive to me in a coach if they have it, and if it also fits the position that we're looking for."

Norvell is going into Year 5 at FSU and his original coaching staff is still largely intact with only three coaches leaving. All three got promotions in titles at other Power Four programs. Continuity of coaching staff is something Norvell often brings up or is asked about, and he considers it a strength, something to be proud of.

"I'm sure a ton of us could've left and worked other places," Johnson said. "But it's a great situation for us, we understand that, and we try to fight for each other.

"And I think the kids can see that."

It isn't necessarily a traditional route, especially for a major brand in college football like Florida State.

But it has worked.

Atkins, however, bemoans the thought that the path Norvell took – and that his two coordinators took as well – is probably going to become less common as college football shrinks to fewer conferences while the gap between the haves and havenots increases.

"We praise this route, but are opportunities still coming from this route? Is there a JUCO coach at Itawamba that's possibly going to become the OC at Florida State? Back then I don't think it was as far-fetched," Atkins said.

The process comes first, but the results speak for themselves with 23 wins over the last two seasons and another year coming up with high expectations in Tallahassee. There are dozens of factors, maybe hundreds, that you can bring up when trying to pinpoint this type of success, especially when the starting point was so bleak.

But Norvell has shown, repeatedly and in more ways than one, that it's not the start that matters. Rather, it's what you take with you from there.