“I love it when a plan comes together”
George Peppard in the 1980s television hit “The A Team”
By John Heisler
Glen Elarbee, UCF’s offensive line coach, remembers those early days.
The Knights had finished a 12-0 regular season in 2017 and were off to the Peach Bowl to play Auburn. Head coach Scott Frost, after his team won the American Athletic Conference title game over Memphis on Dec. 2, took his entire UCF staff with him to take over the Nebraska program.
Three days later, Josh Heupel became the new Knights’ head coach after two seasons as the Missouri offensive coordinator, bringing Elarbee and Jon Cooper (tight ends) with him from that Tiger staff under Barry Odom.
And the work in Orlando began, even if it meant figuring out how to turn on a computer and make the copier work by yourself.
And Elarbee loved the way the plan fell together.
“Walking around the first couple of days, there was hardly anyone else here in the offices,” he recalls.
“It was amazing, one, how fast Josh was able to assemble a staff and then, two, put in a plan for us to get to work. With the team going to the Peach Bowl and how it all unfolded, you’re dealt a hand pretty late in the game.
“That was also the first year of the early signing date (in December). We had a week’s turn-around for that, so it was a little crazy. The first recruiting weekend was already set up and we couldn’t change much.
“Working with Heup, there’s no person who was better prepared to be a head coach in terms of having a plan, his organizational skills and knowing what he wanted to do.
“I don’t know if anyone else could have come in here and done all that so well the first year because he knew exactly how he wanted it organized. There was always feedback on how to do things, but he had the plan ready to go and it was executed quickly.
“We were able to create relationships with the kids, install what we were going to do football-wise, character-wise and growth-wise--also keep a lot of what had been here--and put it all together. Keeping some of the terminology the same gave the players a little bit of comfort that these new guys were coming in here and we were all going to work together.
“Looking back on it, it was fast and furious. There were a lot of crazy times, but it was fun, too.”
A year later, the first-time head coach and his staff and team had crafted an unbeaten regular season and won the 2018 AAC championship.
UCF vice president and director of athletics Danny White consistently calls the job Heupel did amazing, given the fact he took over a team in the process of putting the finishing touches on a perfect season. Those aren’t the normal circumstances inherited by new head coaches.
Yet Heupel thrived in his first go-round in Orlando—and now he and his Knights try to do it again in 2019.
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Maybe Heupel was born for this—the son of a football coach, growing up in the small-town environment of Aberdeen, South Dakota.
“It’s kind of the middle of nowhere,” says Heupel of his hometown.
“And I kind of figured I would always get into coaching. Truly, from the time I can remember, it was riding to training camp with my dad (Ken, head coach at Northern State in Aberdeen) at 5:30 in the morning.
“It’s pitch-dark out everywhere . . . me falling asleep once I got myself into the car and waking up on the ride over. Serving Tang out of the cooler for breakfast . . . working in the equipment room.
“I can’t imagine a better childhood. I absolutely loved it.
“I remember leaving school early in first grade to get on the team bus and driving two hours to a game. I was on the sidelines being a ball boy—I had all the coaching gear. It was a blast. A lot of those guys are still really good friends of mine—the players and even some of the coaches.
“As far as high school sports, my closest football game was an hour and a half away. You’d drive three and a half, you’d drive five hours—that’s just how you grew up.
“My dad’s mom and dad had a farm about an hour and a half away in Ashley, North Dakota. In the summertime, we’d go up there and work, fix fences and that type of stuff. My grandpa still had a bunch of cattle at that time.
“My mom was a high school principal as I was growing up. Her family is from Coos Bay, Oregon, so we would go back and forth there, too, to visit.”
Not surprisingly, Heupel always dreamed of playing football. And though he has built his collegiate resume as an offensive play-caller, his early exposure to the game came on the defensive side.
“My dad was a defensive guy—everybody assumes he was an offensive guy because I am,” he says. “But he was a defensive coordinator, he coached linebackers, coached corners.
“I never saw an offensive practice until I started playing in middle school. I was always with my dad on the defensive side. So, I had a different perspective sitting in those meetings and listening to how defenses were installed.
“My sophomore year I became the starting quarterback and the sixth man in basketball. We had a really good basketball team—we were a perennial power. It was a basketball town, not a football town.
“After my sophomore year I kind of pushed toward football. I liked the power and control you have as a quarterback—I liked the position. Ultimately, I spent most of my time and energy on that from then on.”
Heupel laughs now when he thinks about how his college recruiting played out.
“You had to come see me play. I sent out my own VHS tapes. I had an offer from Houston, another at Wyoming—then Houston fills the spot the day before I’m going to take my official visit.
“At the end of the day I was a left-handed quarterback from Aberdeen, South Dakota, and I wasn’t anyone’s first pick. I was not the most fleet of foot, so I wasn’t everybody’s number-one draft pick. I went to Weber State because they had a good track record—they’d had three quarterbacks that went on to the NFL and they threw it all over the field.”
After a season at Weber State and another at Snow College (where he threw for 28 touchdowns), Heupel landed in Norman, Oklahoma. Two seasons later, he had helped the Sooners win 20 combined games while throwing for 53 TDs and 7,456 yards. The 2000 Oklahoma team won the national championship, and Heupel was the Heisman Trophy runner-up (while winning the Associated Press and Walter Camp Player of the Year awards).
A troublesome wrist injury thwarted any serious thoughts of a longstanding professional career.
“Ultimately I couldn’t play without surgery,” he says. “At that time, no thrower, that we could find, had had this surgery. Getting range of motion back and all that, I just could not get to the point where I could pass a physical anymore.”
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Initially, Heupel struggled with post-NFL options.
“There were no doors open any more and I struggled with that,” he says. “What do I do next?”
Then, those South Dakota memories of all the time he spent with his father—not to mention all the football he’d picked up along the way—kicked in.
“Ultimately, a graduate assistant spot came open,” says Heupel. “It was like, ‘This is what you’re supposed to be doing.’ I haven’t looked back.”
Heupel credits current Washington State head coach Mike Leach, who spent one season as the Oklahoma offensive coordinator in 1999 and recruited Heupel, for giving him his shot in Norman.
“It’s all about intrinsically how you see the game, and that was Mike’s first coordinator job,” Heupel says. “Offensive philosophy—how you view the game, how you want to play the game, what kind of pressure you want to put on a defense. I definitely took some things from him. I owe him a bunch.”
After accompanying the Sooners to the national title game in 2004, Heupel went to Arizona for a year to coach tight ends, then returned to Oklahoma in 2006 to coach quarterbacks. Five years later he became co-offensive coordinator.
“When I first started at Oklahoma, we got beat by West Virginia in the Fiesta Bowl—we played no-huddle with Jason White,” he says. “Then we had a great run in 2008, set NCAA records and had a Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback in Sam Bradford.
“When I took over as coordinator, we were transitioning from an experienced quarterback to a young quarterback and we dialed back the tempo portion of it.
“I like playing at a tempo—I think it creates a competitive advantage, the pressure it puts on the other side of the football. I also think it’s intrinsically fun to be a part of. I think our players (at UCF) like that.”
After four more years with the Sooners, one season at Utah State and two at Mizzou (all as offensive coordinator), becoming a head coach became more of a priority.
“I always ultimately wanted to be a head coach, but I never wanted to take a bad job,” Heupel says. “With my track record as a player I ended up being at different places. You see the battles you inevitably are going to have to fight at different levels—not just Division I but within the scheme of where you’re at within that level.
“I had some opportunities at other places, but I didn’t feel it was the right time, right place, right leadership, right campus to do the things I wanted to do.
“I want to win, and I want to do it the right way. I want to provide a great opportunity and platform for student-athletes to become the best in every area of their lives. Every place you’ve been you take away things you want to do—you also take away things you definitely don’t want to do. Those are things I don’t want to become a part of our culture—so every stop has been great for me. I was not going to just jump at jobs.”
It was simply a coincidence that Danny White’s younger brother Brian was a senior athletics administrator at Missouri. Younger brother suggested to big brother that Heupel deserved a look.
“Brian’s perspective of me as a coach and also knowing my wife Dawn--interacting with him and knowing who we are--probably helped spark this opportunity,” says Heupel. “It gave me an opportunity to talk to Danny and interview with the decision-makers here, and I’m pretty glad it worked out the way it did.”
Heupel may not have ranked as a household name in the state of Florida, yet he had a comfort level doing business there.
“Being in middle America sometimes you almost feel like you get stuck in a region,” he says.
“But I’d recruited here. At the end of the day you’re trying to find the right fit--with the leadership and vision of what they want the program to look like and the style of play. They were looking for the right fit, too.”
Heupel’s initial season with the Knights had its share of challenges, but the end result—a 12-1 record—suggests the first-year head coach had answers for most of the questions.
“Every day there was something you were dealing with that you were not expecting,” he says. “I was fortunate that I think I’ve hired good people who are about the right things. We have a great blend of youthfulness and experience within our program and that helps me navigate the day-to-day things that inevitably come up.
“The hardest thing in year one is that you always have to be a season ahead. It’s being efficient with your players’ time and energy because that correlates to the kind of culture and atmosphere you’re creating inside your building.
“I’d never practiced in the morning, so everything was flipped. I’d never done that anyplace I’d been.
“It’s how you create buy-in. Communicating with players—finding who and what they are. Also giving them a voice.
“I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do. But if you come in and do that with a program that’s been successful, how do you create the buy-in? You have to give them advice in the process and strike that balance. That last team was 13-0, had some great players that went to the NFL, yet there are voids you have to fill. You have to get your football team to buy in to a vision that’s a little different. They had had success doing it a certain way.
“The game-planning portion was the easiest part. That’s what I had always been doing—giving your kids a game plan that they could go execute at a high level. I love that part.
“When I initially got into the business, that’s a big piece of it, the competitive side of it, the analytical side. How you digest all the information and put a plan together. But you step into this role (as a head coach) because you want to give kids a great experience, not just the football side of it. How do you impact them for the rest of their lives, too?”
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Heupel is not prone to give away many secrets about his football team or his personal life. But here are a few of his priorities:
--Coffee: “I’m going to have a couple of cups . . . early in the day, maybe some in the middle of the day, too.”
--Religion: “The spiritual side is important to me—it’s part of the foundation of who and what I am and our family as well. It holds a piece inside our program as well.”
--Golf: “I don’t play a lot, although I like going out there. I’ve started playing more the last couple of years because my daughter is into it. My wife Dawn is super-competitive and super-athletic, and she will go out and do anything. So, we’ve gotten to the point the past three years where we’ll go out and jump on the course, and hopefully no one is behind us and we can play at our own pace. We play from 200 to 250 out and just have some fun.”
--Family: “The best part of it is our kids—name the activity and they are into it. My daughter—it’s dance, piano, artistic. Any sport she can get her hands on she will play . . . basketball, volleyball, golf, tennis. My hope for her is that she finds her passion. She is the most competitive person I’ve ever met, which is saying something. She got the best of that from her mom and dad. My son is into baseball, football, basketball, and he plays a little bit of golf and swims, too.”
--His parents: “My mom and dad, since he retired, have been at every game of mine for the last seven years. They like to travel. If they’re not going to football games, they’re still traveling somewhere. They’ll be at every game. They come out for training camp, my mom takes care of the kids, and they have a great time. They’ll stay if we have two home games in a row. The most influential person without a doubt was my dad--he’s still a sounding board. And leadership style and communication, I’ve taken from my mom, how to deal with people.”
--His wife: “Dawn was from my hometown—we dated in high school on and off. She was a good athlete and involved in a million things. She was a violinist, she played basketball and volleyball in college and got an architecture degree. We ultimately got back together—we’ve known each other a long time.”
--Aberdeen: “It’s a place with conservative ties in terms of geography and politics—25,000-plus people, and yet it’s one of the bigger places up there. Everybody knows everybody. As a kid I’d walk outside in the summer after breakfast and go to baseball practice and not come home until it was dark. Riding your bike with your buddies, playing every sport imaginable, going to the pool. We had a big light and the best basketball court on our block, so all the best neighborhood basketball games were right in front of my house.”
--Lunchtime basketball at UCF: “In April, May and June we’ve got lunchtime hoops going on here. It started out as the young guys in the football building. Now it’s grown into some administrators, young guys and then some of the basketball coaches come out, too. That’s when the trash-talking picks up. Most of the time I stay outside the three-point line.”
He doesn’t have or take much time to revel in his surrounding, yet Heupel appreciates what the UCF experience has been all about.
“You don’t have much chance to look at it in the day-to-day battle,” he says. “When I drive home every night, I’m thankful for where we live, who we get to work with and what we are building every day here. I truly don’t feel like it’s work, and I know people say that’s a cliché. I just come in here and have fun and compete. I get to do this. You want to be part of something bigger, more than just a paycheck.
“So, I love what we get to do. It’s been so much fun. It’s gone so fast. It’s been a blink. I remember my kids driving in here on December 23, my first month on the job. We took a family photo here with the dog, and I hadn’t seen them for a while.
“I remember that moment, and you blink your eyes and it’s been a year and a half and you’re getting ready to kick off in year two. It goes really fast. And yet so much has happened in that time span. I’m really thankful for what we get to do and proud of what we’ve done.
“I do like recruiting. It’s about the kids we can get here on campus and build the infrastructure and keep kids here. These are a lot of kids who are from here, from Florida, and they are going to live here and stay here. That’s a unique story.
“The conversation you have now in recruiting, the perception of this program, it’s completely different than it was five years ago. That’s reality. I’m thankful for everybody that has laid the foundation for that. We constantly push it forward. That’s the fun thing about being here.
“Everyone here loves what we’ve done but everyone is constantly pushing—how do we do it better? We’ve got a fan base that’s young--they are thankful but at the end of the day they are appreciative of every win. You can feel it. Your players are different because of it, too. It’s a unique energy.
“It’s the purpose and vision and aggressiveness I saw in Danny White. He believes in the people and creating a brand, and that’s what he’s done.”
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And, so, a second football season dawns in 2019 for Heupel and his staff.
“I did not understand the power of UCF as a university, the power of the logo, when I first came here. I don’t think anyone can until you come here,” Heupel says. “You see the reaction of the ESPN Game Day crew when they came last fall. There was a big difference how they viewed us before and after their visit. It’s one of the most unique things in college football.
“There are a lot of blue-blood programs that have histories back into the ‘30s and ‘40s and ‘50s. There are not many areas in the country where you can start a new program, relatively new at 50 years, and realize the power of what it is and what it is becoming.
“There aren’t many of those stories left in college football. So many things have to be tilted in your favor. It’s the passion and energy, the youthfulness of our fan base. There are so many things to take advantage of here in terms of Florida and Orlando.”
Elarbee says words don’t do justice to the difference between their first year at UCF and the official start of their second campaign in Orlando.
“The comfort level the second time around is so much easier,” he says. “Now, the second time around, it’s . . . . phew . . . . you don’t feel like you’ve just run a marathon.
“The trust level was great—we walked in the room in January (2019) and the players have been through a full year with us. They know us, we’ve all been through the fire.
“When things are tough at halftime, nobody’s panicking, coaches are coaching and everybody’s rallying. It was a similar environment that they’d been used to, and that’s why we were able to be as successful as we were.
“This year it’s just a focus on the details and the things we value. It’s the things we do every day and continuing to build the relationships with the players. Just because we went through the year, you want to make sure they understand you are there for them as a coach and a mentor every single day.
“Then it’s going through everything schematically with a fine-tooth comb, what was good, what could be better.
“He (Heupel) is always pushing to find what’s the best way to do something. It’s never, ‘Well, that’s good enough.’ He wants to know the absolute best way to do something. ‘Is there a better way?’ That helps us get a little better every year.”
That’s what Josh Heupel, the kid from South Dakota, is all about.
After 12-1 in 2018, if the Knights can find ways to get “a little better” in 2019, UCF fans will have plenty to celebrate.
Just one more step toward that plan coming together.
John Heisler is the senior associate athletics director for strategic communications at UCF and has worked in the college athletic communications business for more than four decades.