By Harry Minium
At 39, Old Dominion University's Ricky Rahne is one of the nation's youngest major college head football coaches, and when he hired his staff, he also embraced a youth movement.
Rahne is the oldest on his staff. Running backs coach Tony Lucas, at 38, is the elder assistant coach. Special teams coordinator Kevin Smith and offensive line coach Kevin Reihner are just 27.
The average age of the assistant coaches is 31.4 years, and when the coronavirus is finally under control and the Monarchs take the field, ODU will do so with the youngest coaching staff of any of the nation's 130 Football Bowl Subdivision schools.
Some have begun referring to the staff as ODU's "Diaper Dandies," a phrase ESPN commentator Dick Vitale coined to refer to teenage college basketball stars.
The nickname is appropriate in another way: Rahne's assistant coaches and their wives are doing what young couples do – having babies.
Call it ODU's Baby Boom.
Defensive coordinator Blake Seiler and Smith recently had babies. The wife of offensive coordinator Kirk Campbell is due any day. Strength and conditioning coach Dwight Galt, while not one of ODU's 10 assistant coaches, is going to be a new dad this summer, as is Lucas.
That's five little ones who will eventually be toddling around the L.R. Hill Center complex, along with several other children born in recent months and years.
Rahne, who ODU hired this winter away from Penn State, where he was offensive coordinator, is a dedicated family man and has encouraged his assistant coaches to bring their wives and kids to the office while they work. His wife, Jen, and boys, Ryder and Jake, were frequent visitors to the Penn State football complex.
Ryder and Jake called the Nittany Lions players their "uncles" Rahne said. "And our players here will be their uncles, too," Rahne said.
"I told my kids when you guys are running around the office here, you have to watch where you're going," Rahne said. "We don't want you stepping on any babies."
Senior Associate Athletic Director Bruce Stewart, the administrator for ODU football, says Rahne's emphasis on youth was something he learned from Penn State coach James Franklin, for whom Rahne worked with at Kansas State and worked for at Vanderbilt and Penn State.
"Coach Franklin hired a lot of young, energetic guys who wanted to win, and they turned Vanderbilt's program around," Stewart said. "His formula worked."
Will it work here? Only time will tell. But while Rahne isn't Franklin and ODU isn't Vanderbilt, Franklin's youth movement was indeed a huge success at Vandy, a perennial SEC bottom dweller.
After going 6-7 his first season at Vandy, Franklin had 9-4 records the next two seasons. All three teams went to bowl games.
When he was hiring his staff, Rahne said, "I wanted guys who were great teachers and who were intelligent. And quite frankly, I leaned toward the guys who were a bit younger.
"I know (his young staff) is a bit different, but I felt like that was the direction that I wanted to head. Everyone here at Old Dominion has been supportive of that."
Rahne said his bottom line was that he wanted to hire coaches he knew and trusted, guys he knew shared his philosophy and work ethic.
"That was very important to me," Rahne said. "It's a lot easier to sell someone I know well and really trust to recruits. And during recruiting, I am selling these coaches.
"This is exactly the staff I envisioned in my head when I was going through the interview process. These are the guys I wanted."
Coach is Young but Experienced
Some ODU fans have expressed concerns about the youth movement in on-line message boards. Yet this staff is much more experienced than it first appears.
Seiler is the most experienced. He coached nine seasons at Kansas State, including a stint as defensive coordinator, before moving to West Virginia last season.
Rarely does a Group of 5 school hire a defensive coordinator who was also a defensive coordinator in the Big 12.
He took a pay cut to come go ODU and did so for the chance to work with Rahne. "I knew we could win here with the support this program has," he said.
The clincher was Rahne's family-friendly approach.
"Coaches work long hours, and sometimes you go a day without seeing your kids because you leave so early in the morning and come home so late at night," he said.
"I was happy to hear Coach Rahne say that he's strongly in favor of having family in the office. Honestly, I probably wouldn't have come here without that.
"Being a dad is the most important thing in my life."
Defensive line coach and defensive recruiting coordinator Andrew Jackson, who was hired away from James Madison, previously coached at Mississippi State and Penn State.
Cornerbacks coach Leon Wright, an All-ACC cornerback at Duke, coached with the Jacksonville Jaguars, Duke and LSU.
Campbell was the offensive coordinator for five years at Alderson Broaddus in West Virginia before being hired as the head coach. He was hired as an offensive analyst at Penn State.
When Rahne left for ODU, Campbell was named Penn State's interim quarterbacks coach for the Nittany Lions' bowl game.
Six coaches either coached with or played for Rahne at Penn State while Seiler played at Kansas State when Rahne coached there.
"In one way or another, we all knew each other pretty well before we came here," Campbell said.
"We get along well. And we were all on the same page here pretty quickly."
"Football is a Young Man's Game"
Seiler said that experience is important, but that in the modern game, where social media and nearly constant contact with players is a huge part of recruiting, youth is nearly as important.
"Football is a young man's game," he said. "Recruiting never ends. It's all about social media and relating to kids 24/7.
"I go home at night and talk to recruits and text or Twitter message with them. I also see my kids. You've got to do both.
"If you look at our staff, it's not like we're green. They've had a lot of experience at a lot of difference schools in a lot of different leagues. And they've all been well trained.
"Most of them have coached at a high, high level."
Four of ODU's new coaches were graduate assistants last season, but don't let the term "graduate assistant" mislead you.
Power 5 schools are officially limited to ten assistant coaches, but Ohio State, for instance, has a football staff of 57 people. Although graduate assistant coaches have typically been young coaches paid paltry wages, Power 5 schools are hiring graduate assistants essentially to be assistant coaches.
Decoster was a graduate assistant at LSU last season, but that didn't stop him from going to the White House with the 2019 national championship team.
Wide receivers coach Mark Dupuis was a graduate assistant the last three seasons at Penn State. But the four seasons before that, he was the wide receivers coach at Fordham, where he coached three Football Championship Subdivision All-Americans. He is among several assistants who left FCS schools to become graduate assistants in order to live out their dream of moving up to FBS.
Rahne said that "while a lot of these guys are young, they're not necessarily young in experience. They've been to a bunch of different places and had a lot of great experience in their careers. And they've all been well-trained."
ODU's staff is also filled with guys who chose football over more lucrative jobs in the private sector, including the head coach.
After graduating from Cornell, an elite Ivy League school, Rahne worked a couple of years in the private sector.
"I was miserable without football," he said. "I realized that coaching is what I wanted to do the rest of my life."
He did so even though he knew that he would have to pay his dues by working long hours for meager wages in his first few years.
Jen, then his girlfriend, helped him draft hundreds of letters to college football coaches seeking a job. Rahne worked at Holy Cross and Cornell before landing a graduate assistant coach at Kansas State, where he eventually was named a full-time coach.
Decoster was an IT project manager out of college who was very good as his craft but bored to tears.
"I just wanted to be a part of a football team again," said Decoster, who began his career in 2013 as a graduate assistant at Nevada.
Seiler graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering from Kansas State and had a high-paying job in Wichita designing parts for Cessna planes. But after a while, he said, "I found it very difficult to work in that cubicle."
Kansas State coach Bill Snyder hired him as a graduate assistant at a far more modest salary than he earned in Wichita.
Safeties coach and assistant defensive coordinator Remington Rebstock had a handful of lucrative offers when he graduated from Kansas State. Instead, he became a graduate assistant.
"I had a lot of good job offers that excited me, but they all seemed like work," he said.
"Being a coach is more of a passion than a job."
Rahne said he loves the passion, the youth and the togetherness of his coaching staff.
"Our guys have risen to the occasion during the coronavirus shutdown and are doing a great job communicating with our players," he said.
"This is a great staff. I can't wait for all of us to get on the field together."
Contact Minium: hminium@odu.edu
Minium: Once Coronavirus is Under Control, ODU Will Hit The Field With the Nation's Youngest FBS Coaching Staff
