SAN ANTONIO -- Former UTSA offensive coordinator Kevin Brown is back in football after being out of coaching for a year.
Brown has been hired as the new head coach at San Antonio Christian, succeeding Carl Gustafson, who resigned last month to become head coach at Texas Lutheran.
Brown, 36, met with his new players Monday afternoon. He will start work Jan. 2, but will be on campus interviewing coaches and getting settled for the rest of the month.
“I’m ready to go,” Brown said. “I’m ready to get back to work.”
San Antonio Christian went 5-6 overall and 2-4 in TAPPS Division II / District 3 play last year, finishing in a three-way for fourth.
The Lions lost in the first round of the playoffs.
“Coach Brown is a man of faith who is a hard, hard worker,” SACS athletic director Brandon Parrott said. “He rose in the college ranks really quickly. He put in 13 years and his smarts, combined with his work ethic, jumped him up the ranks at a really fast pace. The opportunity to bring in a coach at his age with experience that is far greater than most 36-year-old coaches was great for us.”
Brown was hired as tight ends coach by Larry Coker at UTSA in December 2010, and was on the staff for the Roadrunners’ first five seasons. He was promoted to offensive coordinator in February 2012, after Travis Bush resigned to go to University of Houston, and was fired by Coker after UTSA’s 3-9 season last year.
Brown said he took the job at San Antonio Christian because he had an opportunity to become a head coach for the first time in his career.
“That’s been a goal of mine since I started coaching,” he said. “The opportunity to influence kids and to mold kids, athletically, academically, spiritually, at a school like this also was important to me. At this age, you can mold kids. You spend a lot of time in college recruiting guys that you’re never going to get."
“You spend so much time doing that. Can that time be spent better elsewhere? I’ve talked to a lot of people that have done them both. You get to spend all your time on these high school kids. That was a big part of it. This is the right thing for my wife [Erika] and me right now. We love San Antonio.”
Being away from coaching for a year, Brown said, was good for him and his wife.
“It was 13 years, from being a G.A. (graduate assistant) to my last year at UTSA,” Brown said. “There was no finish line. I was always working because recruiting doesn’t stop. Being able to recharge the battery, so to speak, and reassess some things, was helpful. Erika and I visited and said, hey, let’s take a year, let’s reassess some things, figure out what we want.”
A TCU graduate and former Horned Frogs wide receiver, Brown was an assistant coach at Texas State for four seasons (2007-10) before he joined Coker’s staff. He started his career with a four-year stint as a graduate assistant under Gary Patterson at TCU. Brown played high school football at Waco Midway, where he graduated in 1998.
Did Brown miss coaching during his sabbatical?
“I tell you what, I missed Saturdays,” he said. “That’s one of the things I wanted to do, see if I could sit through college football on Saturday without it killing me. The first few were tough, but the more time went on, by the time I got home from church on Sunday until the next Friday, didn’t miss it that much. Game day, that’s just the glimpse of what goes on during the week.”
Still, Brown missed the heat of competition.
“You’re in this for two reasons,” Brown said. “You’re in it to be a positive influence on the kids and the people you work with. But you’re also in it to win. Whatever level, you take your best 11 against their best 11 and see if you can beat them. I missed that part of it. I missed the relationship part of it.”
Brown said he has “no doubt” he will be a better coach because of his year out of football.
“You’ve got to evolve,” he said. “That’s one of the things I wanted to do. If you have an opportunity to stop, evaluate and when I say evaluate, I had plenty of time to evaluate what I was doing personally, professionally and all of it."
“There are some things we did right at UTSA. There are some things we should have done better at UTSA. I’m talking about me. You get better with experience.”
Brown said he’s pumped for his former players at UTSA. He didn’t attend a Roadrunners home game this season, he said, but he’s kept up with the team. UTSA plays New Mexico in the New Mexico Bowl on Saturday in Albuquerque.
“I’m pumped for the current players, but I’m probably more pumped for the former players,” Brown said. “I’ve talked to a few of them and told them that they need to go to that bowl game. That’s the culmination of a lot of years."
“I’ll say this: I’m not surprised that they did as well as they did. Those kids are good kids. They play hard, have good character. I think Coach Wilson and his staff did a good job, but I’m not surprised.”
Brown said he stays in touch with Coker, who was fired in early January after going 26-32 in five seasons.
“I see Coach Coker about once every two months or so,” Brown said. “He taught me a lot, how to handle relationships, how to treat people. Coach Coker is the best at developing relationships because he’s so genuine.”
