Minium: Three Men Who Sacrificed Good Salaries and Left the Corporate World to Coach Football Wound Up at ODU

By Harry Minium

Ricky Rahne had an Ivy League degree from Cornell and a great job with Cintas, a Fortune 500 company that most recently reported $5 billion in annual revenue. He was in the manager trainee program and his bosses told him his future with the company was very bright.

"My first job was to integrate a company that Cintas bought," Rahne said. "I was involved in catalog sales and for another six months, ran a portion of the factory. I actually drove some of the trucks for a while when we were down a few employees.

"It was an awesome experience and I learned a lot."

But after 14 months, he was unhappy and could not figure out why. So, he put in for a transfer to his home state of Colorado, where he promptly found that although he worked for a great company, his work was still not satisfying.

"I thought I was homesick," he said. "But I wasn't.

"I just hated my job."

Blake Seiler also had a great job. With Kansas State degrees in mechanical and nuclear engineering, he was working for Cessna Aircraft in Wichita, Kan. Shortly after graduating, he began designing parts for private jets.

Cessna was a great employer, he says, and he was doing meaningful work, but he was also bored.

So was Tony Lucas. After graduating from Columbia, also an Ivy League school, he was working for a New York City law firm and heading towards a career as a corporate attorney. After two years on the job, as he started to look into applying to law school, he began to question if this was what he wanted to do long term.

Then, at age 28, he decided to change course and pursue a career where he found his passion..

He wanted to be a football coach.

At different places times and places, Rahne, Seiler and Lucas did what friends and some family members counseled them not to do – they left safe, secure jobs that promised financial security to become college football graduate assistants.

Their salaries dropped in some cases by 95 percent, all to join a profession that promises little job security, a ton of stress and a lot of 60- and 70-hour work weeks.

The vast majority of college coaches take the traditional route, becoming a graduate assistant right after graduation. It is rare for someone to drop out of corporate America to risk a career in coaching with lousy pay and outlandish hours.

Even though it was difficult at first, all three found their place in coaching and also their way to ODU.

Rahne is the head coach, Seiler the defensive coordinator and Lucas coaches running backs.

All three have different stories with one similarity – they all took a huge risk and are happy they did.

It wasn't until Rahne's girlfriend, Jennifer Neuberger, gave him the verbal equivalent of a wakeup slap, that he truly admitted to himself that he wanted to, actually needed to, go into coaching.

"I think I'd figured it out," said Rahne, who eventually married Jennifer. "I just wasn't willing to say it."

Rahne played a lot of sports as a child and in high school and at Cornell, he was known for his work ethic and his coolness under pressure. He graduated as Cornell's all-time passing leader.

"I was playing in three or four flag football leagues. I played softball and basketball. I was searching for a way to use that competitive energy," he said.

"Finally, Jen said, 'You're really not yourself anymore. Something has to change.' "



Knowing he had his significant other's unqualified support made him realize he had to pursue his dream while he was still young enough.

"She helped me write letters to every NFL team and every college you could possibly think of," Rahne said. "She was just awesome."
 
He heard back from Holy Cross, an elite Catholic school in Worcester, Mass., where he was hired for $6,000 per year and lived in a small house with a ton of roommates.

"The housing was free, but there were a lot of us in a three-bedroom house," he said.

Jen, who was then working in Maryland, took shower curtains and made drop curtains to create "rooms." Rahne's was in the foyer while another graduate assistant slept in the kitchen.

"It was an interesting house," Rahne said. "I came home one day and found a worker, a yard keeper for the university, asleep on our couch."

After a year at Holy Cross, he moved to Cornell for a season as a graduate assistant, and then to Kansas State, where he continued living the spartan life of a GA for two more years.

He said he never regretted his decision.

"I didn't doubt what I did for a second because I'd been on the other side and realized that's exactly what I did not want to do," he said. "Coaching was exactly what I wanted to do."

After he was named a full-time assistant coach at Kansas State, he rose quickly through the ranks.

He met James Franklin at Kansas State and after five seasons, followed him to Vanderbilt when Franklin was named the head coach of the Commodores. After three seasons in Nashville, he followed Franklin to Penn State, where Rahne was eventually named offensive coordinator, and was quickly in demand as a head coach.

In December, at age 39, he became ODU's second head coach and within two months, had recruited the best incoming class of freshman in school history.

For Seiler, his decision to pursue a coaching career was not the first nor the last time he would make one that involved taking a pay cut or a risk.

As a high school senior, the Goddard, Kansas native accepted an invitation from Kansas State football coaches to walk-on without a scholarship. But Seiler was also a stud wrestler who was swayed to instead take a scholarship to Oklahoma State.

Oklahoma State coach John Smith is among wrestling royalty. He was a two-time Olympic gold medalist, a four-time world champion and had won two NCAA national championships as a wrestler. As a coach, he's won five NCAA titles and 22 Big 12 crowns.

"I had a four-time world champion sitting in my living room, telling me I'm going to be his next national champion," Seiler said. "And my other option was to walk-on at Kansas State to play football.
"I looked at my Mom and Dad and told them 'I know this wasn't how I'd planned things, but I'd be crazy to turn this offer down.' "

He redshirted as a freshman at Oklahoma State and loved his time there.

"I wrestled with a bunch of guys who were on the Olympic team and are now fighting in UFC," he said. "We won a national championship. It was a great experience.

"But I had to go where my heart is."



And that was with Kansas State's football team.  He gave up his wrestling scholarship and took out student loans to walk-on the Kansas State football team as a defensive lineman.
During his sophomore year at K-State he became a starter at defensive end. He then earned a scholarship that offseason. As a junior, he had a career high 34 tackles and was chosen to receive the Nancy Bennett Award for his fighting spirit and positive attitude.

By the time he was a senior, he was voted a team captain and named the Kansas State Male Scholar-Athlete of the Year.

Rahne arrived as a grad assistant during his senior year, and even though Rahne was coaching offense, they became friends.

Seiler then worked two years for Cessna while earning his MBA at Wichita State University.

"I had a great job with a high ceiling, but I missed the game," he said. When legendary Kansas State coach Bill Snyder returned after a three-year absence, Seiler approached him and was quickly hired as a graduate assistant.

"I think you learn a lot working for nothing," Seiler said. "You found out how badly you want to do this."

He worked for two seasons as a GA before being hired full-time by Snyder. In all, he spent 10 years at K-State, including his last season in 2018 as defensive coordinator, where his team finished third in Big 12 scoring defense and fourth in total defense.

When Chris Klieman was named successor to Sndyer in late 2018, Seiler was retained but not as a coordinator.

So, Seiler moved on to West Virginia in 2019, where he coordinated the special teams for the Mountaineers and coach Neal Brown.

He and Rahne had coached together at Kansas State for two years and had become close. When Rahne asked him to be ODU's defensive coordinator, Seiler said yes.

He took a cut in pay to come to ODU, but the chance to coach under Rahne, and rebuild the University's football program was worth it.

"I came here in part to become a defensive coordinator again and to work with coach Rahne," Seiler said.

"But that was only half the battle. When I did my research on Old Dominion, I realized this is a place where we can win and compete for championships.

"There are a lot of resources here, a lot of support, that you won't find at other Group of 5 programs," he said.

Yet Rahne was the key to taking on the task of rebuilding what has traditionally been one of the worst defenses in the Football Bowl Subdivision.

"We coached together for two years at Kansas State and we've been close ever since," he said. "He's not just a good friend, but someone I knew I would love to work for down the road. He's a great leader and a winner and he's all about the right things and you have to be selective about these things in this business.

"You invest so much time away from your family as a coach that you want to know you're working with good people because you'll be spending a lot of time with them. You're hitching your wagon to your head coach and you want him to be the real deal when you have mouths to feed at home.

"Coach Rahne is the real deal."

Lucas was the oldest when he decided to go into coaching, six years removed from his career at Columbia.

"I was 20-something living in New York City, enjoying my life there," he said. "And I was getting paid pretty well. It wasn't easy to walk away."

Like Rahne, he played flag football "to get my adrenalin flowing." It was while playing football that he realized he didn't want to go to law school. He wanted to coach.

He first considered coaching high school football, but then realized getting off at 2 p.m. for practice wasn't practical given his job. "So, I decided to go all in," he said, and began contacting former coaches for guidance.

Columbia is an expensive school that does not offer football scholarships so he and his parents had made quite the investment in his education.

"When I was thinking about what to do, I decided to take money out of the equation, the perception that you wasted money going to an Ivy League school," he said.

"Then I asked myself, 'what do you want to do? Do you want to keep heading down this road or do what you enjoy doing?'

"Football was a huge part of my life. I enjoy working with kids. I missed it."

He also had a fallback plan.

"If it didn't work out, I knew I could come back and sit at a desk and crunch numbers and knew that I'd be fine. A lot of people do things because they have to."

He was hired as a graduate assistant at Trinity College near his hometown of Bloomfield, Conn., and served two seasons as a GA and earned a master's degree.

At age 30, he accepted a defensive quality control/academic coordinator position at Bowling Green, where he worked for Dave Clawson, now the coach at Wake Forest.
From there, he moved to his first full-time position at Georgetown for two years, four at Delaware, two at Temple and then 2019 he worked at Elon.



His life has not been without heartache. In 2014, his wife, Sarita Lucas, collapsed and died in their home as a result of complications from pregnancy. Their six-month-old unborn child, Claire, did not survive.

He remarried four years later to the former Natasha Harrison and on May 15, they welcomed their first child into the world at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital – Sage Lucas, now six months old.

Lucas said it's unlikely any other FBS program has three coaches who took such a huge chance to live out their dreams of coaching.

"It's kind of ironic that all three of us wound up at ODU," he said. "We were all doing so well before we decided to go into coaching."

He said many of his friends from Columbia, his old law firm and the business world live vicariously through him.

"So many of my classmates and peers are envious of what I'm doing," he said. "They're punching the clock, they're making good money and have status and titles. But they're always wondering what I'm doing on a Saturday night.

"In some respects, it's like, 'I want what you've got.'

"We all had to make sacrifices. There were hard times. But we all love what we do.

"We're all happy that we made the right choice."

Contact Minium: hminium@odu.edu