Skip to main content

Wilcher and Roberts Will Be Co-Defensive Coordinators Next Season

It's never easy on a coaching staff when you lose a great assistant coach or coordinator.

And when Dave Kotulski announced that he was going to be headed to Stanford, head coach Andy Coen announced that he would be searching for new candidates "immediately".

Fortunately for all Lehigh fans, the best possible solution was reached in terms of replacing Kotulski - involving promotion of two existing coaches to co-defensive coordinators - and the return of a familiar face.


Defensive line coach Donnie Roberts and defensive backs coach Gerard Wilcher will be co-defensive coordinators, according to Coen:


“We’ve seen our defense develop schematically over the last four seasons,” said Coen, who enters his seventh season. “Our staff does a great job putting kids in the right position. We’ve developed a multiplicity to our defense that I didn’t want to lose. Donnie and Gerard, from working with Dave had a lot of input in getting our scheme to where it is today.

Coen continued, "It was hard to distinguish just one of those guys. I wanted to be able to reward both those guys for doing a great job over the last six years we’ve been here. They work very well together on a day-to-day basis and I’m sure they will here. That’s why I made them co-coordinators.”


Wilcher and Roberts, who have been a part of the Lehigh staff for the last six years, provides great continuity for this defense.  Between them, they have coached four all-Americans (Jarard Cribbs, Brian Jackson, B.J. Benning, Kyle Adams) and have been integral, along with coach Kotulski, in creating Lehigh's daunting defensive scheme that has helped the Mountain Hawks to back-to-back Patriot League championships.

Fortunately for Lehigh, too, a former coach that was on the staff a couple of years ago to pursue other opportunities outside of coaching was just waiting to jump right back into the fray: former outside linebackers coach Matt Sanders.

“When I made the decision to restructure the staff, Matt was one of the first people that came to mind,” Coen explained. “He did an outstanding job at Lehigh and proved to be a real good fit during his two years here. He really embraced our guys as student-athletes and helped them develop. Matt has a tremendous amount of energy; he has a very good football mind and is truly passionate about the game of football. I am happy to have him back on the staff.”

As linebackers coach he was a critical person in the development of  yet another Lehigh all-American, Matt Cohen.

The reality is, when you've been a successful coach at the Patriot League level, you're going to see some of your staff leave for better opportunities, and it's always a challenge to keep things stable.  With Coen's choices here, it doesn't look like this staff will miss a beat - and have a continuity that is rare when there are assistant coaching changes.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How The Ivy League Is Able To Break the NCAA's Scholarship Limits and Still Consider Themselves FCS

By now you've seen the results.  In 2018, the Ivy League has taken the FCS by storm. Perhaps it was Penn's 30-10 defeat of Lehigh a couple of weeks ago .  Or maybe it was Princeton's 50-9 drubbing of another team that made the FCS Playoffs last year, Monmouth.  Or maybe it was Yale's shockingly dominant 35-14 win over nationally-ranked Maine last weekend. The Ivy League has gone an astounding 12-4 so far in out-of-conference play, many of those wins coming against the Patriot League. But it's not just against the Patriot League where the Ivy League has excelled.  Every Ivy League school has at least one out-of-conference victory, which is remarkable since it is only three games into their football season.  The four losses - Rhode Island over Harvard, Holy Cross over Yale, Delaware over Cornell, and Cal Poly over Brown - were either close losses that could have gone either way or expected blowouts of teams picked to be at the bottom of the Ivy League. W

UMass 21, Lafayette 14, halftime

Are you watching this game? UMass had this game under control until about 3 minutes in the second quarter, and then got an interception, converted for a TD. Then the Leopards forced a fumble off the return, and then converted THAT for a TD, making this a game. It's on CN8. You really should be watching this.

Examining A Figure Skating Rivalry: Tonya and Nancy

It must be very hard for a millennial to understand the fuss around the Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding figure skating scandal in the run-up to the 1994 Olympics. If you're of a certain age, though - whether you're a figure skating fan or not, and I am decidedly no fan of figure skating - the Shakespearean story of Harding and Kerrigan still engages, and still grabs peoples' attention, twenty years later. Why, though?  Why, twenty years later, in a sport I care little, does the story still grab me?  Why did I spend time out of my life watching dueling NBC and ESPN documentaries on the subject, and Google multiple stories about Jeff Gilooly , idiot "bodyguards", and the whole sordid affair? I think it's because the story, even twenty years later, is like opium. The addictive story, even now, has everything.  Everything.  The woman that fought for everything, perhaps crossing over to the dark side to get her chance at Olypic Gold, vs. the woman who