Coach Mac: some things you may not know, from people who do know – The Union Leader
SOME THINGS you may not know about Sean McDonnell, who announced his retirement last Wednesday after spending the last 23 years as the head football coach at the University of New Hampshire:
If you played for him you paid the price when you broke the rules. …….
SOME THINGS you may not know about Sean McDonnell, who announced his retirement last Wednesday after spending the last 23 years as the head football coach at the University of New Hampshire:
If you played for him you paid the price when you broke the rules. You paid the price for just bending the rules as well …
“I have one pretty good story here,” former UNH quarterback Trevor Knight said. “It was before our Homecoming Game my freshman year and I was set to play a lot of minutes in that game. This is when (quarterback) Sean Goldrich got hurt. They put in 10 to 15 plays just for me to run, so it was going to be my big breakout game.
It was a Thursday night and one of my roommates was injured and he was having a bunch of people over for a party. I wasn’t starting that week, but I was going to be going in the second series and playing most of the game. So I wanted to get out of a bad situation and thought I was doing the right thing by sleeping somewhere else and not getting into any of that (the party).
“I’m walking to the fieldhouse the next morning from wherever I stayed the night before and Coach Mac is driving by me, slams on his brakes and yells at me to get in the car. I’m like, ‘OK. Maybe Coach Mac is just giving me a ride.’ And then he starts reaming me out for … I guess they got caught for the party.
“He was reaming me out because we have a 72-hour rule where there’s no drinking and no going out 72 hours before each game, and even though I didn’t stay at my apartment that night I got in trouble. But it wasn’t because I didn’t stay there, it’s because I didn’t stop it (the party). So it was basically a great lesson to be a leader. I was suspended from the game. I think I had tickets for about 20 family and friends coming.
“It was not a good situation, but it was a great learning point. He definitely got his point across on what kind of leader I needed to be.”
“We butted heads every day, like brothers,” recalled former UNH assistant coach Chip Kelly, now the head coach at UCLA. “Our relationship was that if I took one side, he always took the other. He’d be like, ‘These guys are really good.’ And I’m like, ‘They stink.’ Then, because he’s such a …….
