Football

Dontae Wright didn’t want to stay away from Tennessee Tech for long.

After serving on the Golden Eagle football staff for the past two seasons, when presented with the opportunity to reprise his role as the program’s special teams coordinator, Wright already knew his decision.

After all, he had a lot of good reasons – all clad in purple and gold.

“I am excited about it,” Wright said. “Anyone who knows me and has been around me knows I love these guys. That’s the only reason I coach is because of these young men and we’ve got a special group. I just couldn’t get away from them. I’ve been blessed with Coach (Dewayne) Alexander asking me to come back and offering me a job and being a part of it again. We’re trying to make things right and get things going in the direction we want them to go and know it can go.”

Alexander wanted Wright on the staff as soon as possible.

“He’s a lot like Sam Williamson and how I feel about him,” Alexander said. “Dontae has a tremendous relationship with his players and what we’re looking for as coaches. He’s a great X’s and O’s coach and is a good teacher of the game. Those guys play hard for him. There are a lot of players on this team from when I was here previously, and they all talked about Coach Wright and what a positive influence he was on them.”

And Wright has gotten a quick lesson in the kind of coach Alexander is.

“Coach A called me one day and we just started talking,” Wright said. “He was raving about all the things guys were saying about me and I was raving about all the things I had heard about him. We just talked and he said, ‘Man, just take as much time as you need. I want you to be a part of this staff. I know you have other things going on, other options, but I know you have a desire to be back as well. You’ll have a spot here in whatever you want it to be.’

“It was great. He has been great – he didn’t try to pressure me into anything, didn’t try to make me give a quick decision.”

Alexander continued, “He really wanted to stay here. He had some strong relationships with some players and he wanted to stay and see some positive things happen for them. We both realized that we were both very much on the same page. We hit it off pretty well and it was a no-brainer to me to have him on this staff.”

But it’s the character of Tech’s young student-athletes as well as some of the support staff that drove him to want to return for a third season in Cookeville.

“It’s not all about the talent,” Wright said. “Yes, we have a bunch of talented young men, great young men that I love and care about and they’re special to me. But at the same time, it played a lot into that. But it’s the relationships I have built with Chip Pugh, Coach (Sam) Williamson and other guys that are here that made me want to be here. There’s a lot of really good people here. Cookeville is a great place to live and I am really excited.”

Wright spent the past two years with the Golden Eagles as a member of Marcus Satterfield’s coaching staff, overseeing special teams and defensive ends.

He was previously the defensive coordinator at Morehead State from 2013 to 2015, following a season at Centre College and two seasons at North Alabama, where he helped coach the Lions to the NCAA Division II playoffs with four all-conference and one All-American selections.

Wright was a graduate assistant at Kentucky from 2007 to 2009, working with the linebackers his first season and the defensive line the following two. During his tenure, Kentucky reached the Music City Bowl twice and the Liberty Bowl once.

Wright played on two Mid-American Conference East Division championship teams at Miami (Ohio), winning the MAC In 2003 with a GMAC Bowl berth, followed by an East title in 2004 and an appearance in the Independence Bowl. He started at linebacker in his senior campaign and played on special teams as Wright was a teammate for Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger in his tenure with the RedHawks.

While there will be a lot of old and new faces on the staff, especially to Wright, who will meet some of the familiar names and for the first time when Coach Dewayne Alexander’s staff is finalized, the goals are still very much the same.

“There’s a lot of new faces,” Wright said with a laugh. “I don’t even know all of them yet. I’ve met Taylor (Hennigan) before, I met Coach A last week, I know Sam and I know Tre (Lamb), but there’s a lot of new faces. But it’s football. This is what we do. We want to be tough and physical. We want to win football games. We want great academics. We want to create better men.

“The theme doesn’t change. Maybe the words and the way they’re delivered change, but we’re all in this for the same reasons – create better men, give these guys an education and, at the end of the day, win championships.”

Having a sense of continuity between coaching staffs helps the student-athletes acclimate a little bit better, but Wright notes that’s nothing new for most players.

“They’re doing that all of their lives,” he said. “They’re going from 7-on-7 teams to high schools and all that, and not to downplay it, but it’s not as hard as it used to be. They’re more resilient and they understand how to handle adversity a lot better than even when I played 10 years ago. It’s a different ball game, but, at the same time, it’s nice for them when they have some guys they know and trust already to make the transition smoother.”

Wright will oversee the special teams, which has been one of Tech’s strong suits in recent years.

“I’m really excited because we do have a great group of specialists returning,” Wright said. “With Nick Madonia and Riley Patton, Haidar Zaidan, Aidan Panni, all of those guys are great. We just have to continue to get better and we will. That continuity of them understanding what I expect and I know what their limitations are and what they do well – that’s going to make things easier to keep going.”

Alexander said, “Dontae does a tremendous job with that. He has a passion for it. You get 10 assistant coaches and the FBS level just added that 10^th assistant coach and that’s what a lot of schools are adding. If you take special teams – and I’ve been a part of it for many, many years – and you divide those duties amongst your staff, a lot of times their primary roles override the amount of time they spend on special teams. It’s a huge part of the game, but you can’t say that and not give it the attention that it deserves either. Dontae has a passion for it and has a very good plan for it. With how our special teams have performed the last couple of years, it just seemed to be a perfect fit.”

It’s a long way to go before spring practices and summer camps start, much less the 2018 campaign, but there’s still goals to accomplish.

“We have to get our grades up,” Wright said. “We dropped off last semester and that’s unacceptable at all. We have to get our lives cleaned up in certain aspects of it, and the football part will take care of itself. Anyone who knows me knows I’m a firm believer in that if you can handle A and B, which is life and academics, C – football – will take care of itself. That’s the focus. The season will be the season. If we can handle those things, we’ll be successful.”