Bill Belichick's Daughter Continues Coaching Tradition

In The Education of a Coach, David Halberstam chronicled Bill Belichick's journey from undersized center on the Wesleyan University football team in the early 1970s, to assistant jobs with a half-dozen NFL teams over the next two decades, to Super Bowl-winning head coach of the New England Patriots in 2001.

As often seems to happen, coaching runs in the family. Belichick's father Steve was an assistant at the Naval Academy and according to legend, taught his nine-year-old son to break down film.

So it's hardly surprising that Amanda Belichick, Bill's daughter, has continued the coaching tradition. The 25-year-old former Wesleyan lacrosse standout is now an assistant lacrosse coach at the University of Massachusetts.

Like coaching, lacrosse is a family affair -- Bill played it, in addition to football, in college. Amanda told the Boston Globe that, "Growing up we were definitely a lacrosse family ... I always loved it because I wasn't playing football, but it was a sport I could throw around with my two brothers and my dad. We have a goal in our backyard and we'd be playing catch.''

But Amanda's current gig has nothing to do with her last name and everything to do with her work ethic. "She always worked really hard,'' the father tells the Globe. "Her lacrosse career is her lacrosse career, not mine. She paved her own way. I'm really proud of that. I'm just glad she's happy with what she's doing. We talk sometimes. We talk about coaching no different than I would with [St. Louis Cardinals manager] Tony La Russa or [University of Florida football coach] Urban Meyer.''

The daughter elaborates: "He says, 'You should work on this, because if I was scouting you I'd do this.' Or, 'Figure out how to stop that.' Stuff that we kind of know, too, but it's nice because there are so many moving parts on the sideline it's always helpful.''

So while there are differences between them, there are also similarities: Amanda is stoic on the sidelines during games, the UMass head coach admits to throwing "her into the fire" (much like then-Colts head coach Ted Marchibroda did with Belichick during his first NFL job in 1975), and loyalty is valued above all else ("He's my dad ... I'm not going to give out the secrets. I learned from him that things that happened with your team don't need to be vented to everybody else.'')

And unlike a lot of fans, she understands why her dad's been so successful.

"He's smart, he's hard-working, and that is why he's become so successful, not because he's doing crazy things off the field. I think people are trying really hard to find those things and they're not going to because they are not there.''