Channeling his inner Knute Rockne: Charlotte 49ers’ coach Will Healy is raring to go
Will Healy hopes to make Thursday afternoon as normal as it can be.
With a 7:30 p.m. kickoff for the Charlotte 49ers’ season opener at Richardson Stadium against Gardner-Webb just hours away, Healy figures he will spend time at home and maybe hit some golf balls with his 4-year-old son, Eli.
“Eli could care less if it’s game day or not,” said Healy, the 49ers’ first-year coach. “But I’ll hang out for a few hours.”
What might — or might not — be on Healy’s mind is the locker-room message he’ll deliver to his team as they prepare to play their first game under his leadership. Healy was hired last December to pump new life (and victories) into Charlotte’s young program.
“I’ll give my best Knute Rockne speech,” Healy joked. “But I really don’t know. Wherever the wind blows me. I never write a speech down because I don’t think it would be authentic. You won’t hear me say the same thing twice. I’ve got no idea which direction I’m headed.”
Actually, Healy, at 34 the second youngest coach in the NCAA’s Football Bowl Subdivision, knows full well where the 49ers need to be pointed. He’s wasted no time in seeing to that, even before the first game has been played.
Charlotte is among the newer programs in the country, entering its seventh season of existence and fifth on the FBS level. Former coach Brad Lambert successfully got the program up and running, but a sense of ennui had set in. He was fired in 2018 after never having a winning season.
Enter Healy, who had turned around a struggling program at Austin Peay, where he was named the FCS’s national coach of the year in 2017. His thumbs-up, all-access, all-enthusiasm style has quickly won over his players and a Charlotte fan base starved for excitement.
“To sum it up in one word, it would have to be ‘energy,’ ” senior linebacker Jeff Gemmell said about the tone Healy has brought. “I think the whole outlook of our program has shifted from a ‘no’ culture to a ‘yes’ culture. We focus on positive things.”
Loud music is pumped into practice. Players often dance to it in between drills (Healy says his dance skills aren’t sufficient enough for him to participate). The 49ers are also required to shake hands with at least four people after each practice (which is open to the public).
“I think this is the greatest profession ever invented,” Healy said. “You get a chance to go celebrate and enjoy things with people from all different cultures (and) backgrounds and watch them have success and fight through some walls they never thought they’d have to fight through before.”
Here’s something that might seem counter-intuitive about Healy’s fixation on positivity: If he thinks his players don’t celebrate a great play in practice with enough vigor, they’re punished by doing “up-and-downs” (a more strenuous version of push-ups).
“They looked at me with crazy eyes at first,” Healy said. “But they understand your message is that we work really hard, so we need to celebrate those times we do have success. If you don’t, why are you doing it?”
Said senior tailback Benny LeMay: “Coach Healy definitely emphasizes passion, energy and just being yourself letting loose and having fun. At the end of the day, we play this game to have fun and enjoy it. That’s the one thing I love about him. Just letting us be ourselves.”
There is, of course, more to running a major college football program than what’s happening on the field. Healy comes to Charlotte with the reputation as a top-notch recruiter, the primary way he was able to turn the Austin Peay program around so quickly.
He sat in the football team’s main meeting room one day recently and talked about the task he faces in making the 49ers program relevant to high school players in a market long dominated by the ACC and SEC, as well nearby Appalachian State.
The 49ers’ Judy Rose Fieldhouse is barely 7 years old, but there are changes and upgrades that need to be made — even if it’s something as mundane sounding as sprucing up a meeting room with more modern furniture and a new paint job. A brand assessment and multi-million dollar facilities master-plan vision for the entire athletics department are scheduled to be completed soon.
“What I’ve done is run the fine line of ‘we need more, we need more,’ vs. being thankful for what we have,” Healy said. “But we’ve got to understand that the guys we’re recruiting against have it. It’s an arms race in uniforms, gear, stadiums, all that type of stuff. It matters to recruits.
“We have to make decisions based on what’s best for our current team, but also what will help get great players here. We love what we have, but we’re never satisfied and want to keep working at trying to have the best of the best. Not just for recruits but for the guys who are here.”
This story was originally published August 28, 2019 at 3:01 PM.