WVU football: Adrian returns to old stomping grounds

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- When Pete Adrian last coached a football game on the West Virginia campus, he was 21. It was Oct. 31, 1969, and Penn State won 9-7.

He was a WVU senior with two very bad knees and a really big passion.

Adrian is still living the dream today, and Saturday he will bring his seventh Norfolk State team to his old stomping grounds to face 19th-ranked WVU (1-0) in a stadium that's foreign to him, but on very familiar ground.

"No, I didn't think I'd be in coaching this long, but then if I weren't, I don't know what I'd be doing," Adrian said Monday from his office on the 7,000-student NSU campus. "It's my 43rd season. I still enjoy it, have fun ... although I don't know how much I'm going to enjoy Saturday."

Adrian's goal while a student-athlete at WVU was to get his degree, teach history and coach high school football. He came to WVU from river-hugging Brilliant, Ohio, and at 6 feet 1, 205 pounds, played linebacker, middle guard and on the offensive line.

"I started every game at inside linebacker on the (1966) freshman team," Adrian said, "and then in the Penn State game I tore up my left knee, lost everything in there, wiped out. It was supposed to be career-ending, but I came back and played nose guard and linebacker the next year.

"My junior year, I redshirted, then went to the offensive line. The week of the Cincinnati game (season opener in '69), my senior year, I hurt my knee again and they pulled me out. I never played again. I had hurt my right knee in '67, too, but there wasn't any surgery.

"But that's how I got into coaching. I was a senior, and Coach (Jim) Carlen knew I wanted to coach, so I started with the freshman team (as an assistant to Dale Evans). I was an offensive guard one day and a defensive line coach the next."

Those '69 varsity Mountaineers went 10-1 and won the Peach Bowl. Carlen left for Texas Tech. Bobby Bowden moved up from offensive coordinator, "and I could have stayed with Coach Bowden in 1970, but I went to Rhode Island as a graduate assistant," Adrian said.

"George Henshaw and I were in the same situation and he stayed. You're 21 and you don't know the different levels (of programs). At Rhode Island, I was going to be a grad assistant with the varsity; if I had stayed at West Virginia, I'd have been coaching the freshmen, so I went up there for my masters.

"It's been a long time, but I don't really think about (retiring). I just keep going. I stay in touch with Coach Carlen, and I still see Coach Bowden quite a bit. You ask me about continuing to coach. About a year ago, I saw Tommy (Bowden) and he asked me, 'You're not going to pull a 'Dad' on me, are you?' "

Adrian hasn't been back to Morgantown much since his 1970 graduation. He did come back several years ago for a springtime Fellowship of Christian Athletes dinner to honor Carlen.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- When Pete Adrian last coached a football game on the West Virginia campus, he was 21. It was Oct. 31, 1969, and Penn State won 9-7. He was a WVU senior with two very bad knees and a really big passion.

Adrian is still living the dream today, and Saturday he will bring his seventh Norfolk State team to his old stomping grounds to face 19th-ranked WVU (1-0) in a stadium that's foreign to him, but on very familiar ground.

"No, I didn't think I'd be in coaching this long, but then if I weren't, I don't know what I'd be doing," Adrian said Monday from his office on the 7,000-student NSU campus. "It's my 43rd season. I still enjoy it, have fun ... although I don't know how much I'm going to enjoy Saturday."

Adrian's goal while a student-athlete at WVU was to get his degree, teach history and coach high school football. He came to WVU from river-hugging Brilliant, Ohio, and at 6 feet 1, 205 pounds, played linebacker, middle guard and on the offensive line.

"I started every game at inside linebacker on the (1966) freshman team," Adrian said, "and then in the Penn State game I tore up my left knee, lost everything in there, wiped out. It was supposed to be career-ending, but I came back and played nose guard and linebacker the next year.

"My junior year, I redshirted, then went to the offensive line. The week of the Cincinnati game (season opener in '69), my senior year, I hurt my knee again and they pulled me out. I never played again. I had hurt my right knee in '67, too, but there wasn't any surgery.

"But that's how I got into coaching. I was a senior, and Coach (Jim) Carlen knew I wanted to coach, so I started with the freshman team (as an assistant to Dale Evans).



I was an offensive guard one day and a defensive line coach the next."

Those '69 varsity Mountaineers went 10-1 and won the Peach Bowl. Carlen left for Texas Tech. Bobby Bowden moved up from offensive coordinator, "and I could have stayed with Coach Bowden in 1970, but I went to Rhode Island as a graduate assistant," Adrian said.

"George Henshaw and I were in the same situation and he stayed. You're 21 and you don't know the different levels (of programs). At Rhode Island, I was going to be a grad assistant with the varsity; if I had stayed at West Virginia, I'd have been coaching the freshmen, so I went up there for my masters.

"It's been a long time, but I don't really think about (retiring). I just keep going. I stay in touch with Coach Carlen, and I still see Coach Bowden quite a bit. You ask me about continuing to coach. About a year ago, I saw Tommy (Bowden) and he asked me, 'You're not going to pull a 'Dad' on me, are you?' "

Adrian hasn't been back to Morgantown much since his 1970 graduation. He did come back several years ago for a springtime Fellowship of Christian Athletes dinner to honor Carlen.

Many of his teammates were there, "and we had a whole lot of fun," he said. "It was the first time I'd seen so many of them as a group since we played, guys like (then-Gov.) Joe Manchin, Terry Snively, the whole group."

Adrian has brought respectability to Norfolk State, going 35-33 in the FCS (former Division I-AA) program after taking over a team that had won only twice in two years prior to his 2005 arrival. NSU is picked to finish fifth in the 11-team Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference this season.

Since he left that 1969 WVU freshman team that went 3-1, he's only seen the Mountaineers play twice in person - at the 1994 Sugar Bowl against Florida and a game in 1982 against Rutgers, when he drove to the Meadowlands from Rhode Island, where he was a defensive coordinator.

He's been a head coach at Bloomsburg (Pa.) for seven years and for four seasons at Deltona (Fla.) High School, where he coached his two sons. He's been an assistant and coordinator at Rhode Island, Idaho State, in the XFL and at Bethune-Cookman before moving to Norfolk.

"When I was back (at WVU) a few years ago, the biggest thing that amazed me was going to see the (football) facility," Adrian said. "There's so much there we didn't have. I checked out the visitors' locker room and saw it wasn't what the home team's was like and said, 'What's up with this?'

"The whole place, the whole campus has changed. We used to ride those yellow school buses around to get to class. Now they have the train (PRT). The golf course was where the football stadium is now. What's the basketball arena (WVU Coliseum) was our practice field.

"But I really enjoyed playing at Mountaineer Field. There was nothing greater than running out of the locker room at the old place, in that bowl, and there may have been only 38,000 there, but they'd all stand up and that place would absolutely roar."

Told there's considerably more spectators at the replacement Mountaineer Field, and they still roar, Adrian said he's already been hearing from his old gold and blue buddies in different fashion leading up to Saturday's game.

"All the guys I played with, quite a few of them are what you'd call 'money guys,' big supporters there," the Spartans' coach said. "The thing I'm getting a kick out of is they're all blowing me up with e-mails the last few days.

"What do you expect? That's all part of it. It's all in fun."

Contact Sports Editor Jack Bogaczyk at ja...@dailymail.com^[1] or 304-348-7949.

References

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