Texas San Antonio, Coach Larry Coker Starting From Scratch

When Eric Soza occasionally takes a break from his studies and the film sessions and strolls along the River Walk in downtown San Antonio, people approach him or whisper as he walks by. In most places, only the most knowledgeable of the diehard college football fans would have any idea who he was, but in San Antonio they know.

He's their quarterback, and he can barely leave home without somebody telling him how excited they are for his next game.

That next game -- the first in the history of the University of Texas at San Antonio -- is nine months away, but that's just a matter of time to folks there. Soza is going to take snaps for the Roadrunners, their new favorite team, which makes him big man on campus and around town.

"Everything here is pretty unique," said Soza, a redshirt freshman transfer from Texas State. "Throughout this whole fall, we didn't think of it as a year off. Next year we are going to be playing and it will be for real so we've been getting ready. Everybody is ready. People come up to me all the time and say, 'Hey, we already got our season tickets.'"

In San Antonio, deep in the heart of the most football-crazed state in the union, is a growing university and a city that's never had a team of its own. So it's embracing a fledgling start-up program with a quarterback the big programs passed on and a coach that's been to the top, fallen and is determined to climb back up again.

Larry Coker won a national championship at Miami after the 2001 season and took the Hurricanes to three consecutive BCS bowl games. But after a 6-6 season in 2006, he was fired and stayed out of coaching until he was able to start over -- truly start over -- at UTSA in February 2009.

"We walk around with him and people ask for his autograph everywhere we go," freshman defensive back Crosby Adams, a San Antonio product, said. "I've never experienced it like that before. He's probably the biggest celebrity in town right now. On campus, I think I have 20 people a week asking about the football team and whatnot. They want to know if we are going to be good and they are getting so excited about it."

They say everything is bigger in Texas, and that includes its cities. San Antonio is the seventh largest city in the United States with a population of 1.4 million, but the NBA's Spurs are essentially the only game in town.

"We were in a major city in south Texas and the kids on this campus had grown up with Friday night football," said UTSA athletic director Lynn Hickey, who began exploring the possibility of bringing football to the school in 2000 after she arrived from Texas A&M, where she had served as an assistant AD and women's basketball coach. "Everything in south Texas is football."

The Spurs are beloved, but this is Texas and residents of San Antonio have been itching for big-time football for about as long as they have been remembering the Alamo. The stadium was in place -- the 65,000-seat Alamodome, which UTSA will call home when it begins play next fall -- and it had helped the city bring football at the highest levels to San Antonio, but never permanently.

The Alamodome was the setting for entertaining bowl games, high school all-star showcases, which brought the best prep players in the America to town, and even the NFL's Saints for a year after Hurricane Katrina. For a while there was a lot of talk that the Saints might stay or another team might move to town, but efforts to attract the NFL failed.

"I really don't see an NFL team coming here now," Coker said. "I think they missed the window a few years ago and there's no Division I team here. It's the seventh-largest city in the country and they are very, very hungry for football."

After the Saints went back to New Orleans, the Alamodome became the training camp home of the Dallas Cowboys and 15,000 fans routinely show up to watch preseason workouts. The Texas Longhorns are also only about an hour up the road in Austin. But those teams don't belong to San Antonio.

So now the citizens wait until next fall, when the Roadrunners kick off as San Antonio's team.

"There's a tremendous enthusiasm for UTSA taking the field next year," San Antonio mayor Julian Castro said. "San Antonio is one of the great football towns even though it doesn't have its own team. Watching football is just sort of a way of life, so I expect UTSA's team to have spectacular support."

When Hickey arrived at UTSA in 1999, football seemed like a long shot. In fact, during her job interview, Hickey told her future bosses there was no shot. UTSA was a school with $1.5 million budget for 14 varsity sports. Texas A&M, where Hickey spent the majority of her career before UTSA, works with an athletic budget of more than $70 million.

"I told them we could become a soccer school," Hickey said 11 years later. "But I was here about a year and knew I had told them the wrong thing."

UTSA was founded in 1969 and quickly grew to a student population of more than 30,000, making it the second-largest school in the UT system. But unlike Texas, Texas A&M and other, older institutions where the school loyalties are long-standing family traditions, UTSA is made up largely of first-generation college students who desperately want what the Longhorns and Aggies have -- a football team to cheer for and all the traditions and revelry that go along with it.

"I knew to ever pull our alumni back and really ever develop pride or visibility for the university, we really needed to make a run at this," Hickey said.

By 2002, Hickey and her staff began to seriously plan how to make football at UTSA a reality. As they went along, they followed the progress of South Florida, which began playing football in 1997.

The Bulls turned out to be an ideal role model -- a large and growing state school in a football-crazy metropolitan area. South Florida played four years at the Division I-AA (now FCS) level and then jumped to Division I-A (FBS) in 2001. After two seasons in Conference USA, the Bulls moved into the Big East and in 2007, they reached No. 2 in the AP Poll.

Intrigued, Hickey made several trips to Tampa to see for herself how USF had done it.

"They are in a city that, demographically, is a lot like San Antonio. They aren't playing on campus. They play in a stadium off campus like us. Really, if you look at where they were 13 or 14 years ago, there are a lot of similarities, and look at the success they've had."

But football isn't free, and UTSA had to come up with serious bucks to fund the new program. Excitement about the idea caused donors to step up and the school is working toward increasing its athletic budget to a respectable $20 million, but a good chunk of the money for football is coming directly from the students.

In 2007, the student body voted in a landslide to double the athletic fee, increasing it to $240 a semester.

"We had 2,000 at our last scrimmage and most of them were students," Soza said. "The whole student body is ready for us. They are the ones that brought this team here. They voted and it passed twice to pay for it with their tuition fees, and if it wasn't for them we wouldn't be here right now."

South Florida provided a nice blueprint, but UTSA has done a few things its own way. The Texas way.

Starting small worked out fine for the Bulls. They hired a little-known coach named Jim Leavitt and worked their way up from the bottom. But you don't start a football program in San Antonio without figuring out a way to make a splash from the get-go.

The opportunity came when Hickey returned to her office one day and found a note on her desk:

"Larry Coker called and he's interested."

At that point, up-and-coming coordinators or small school coaches looking to make a jump needed not apply. Coker had won a national championship, coached dozens of NFL stars and been seen on millions of TV screens as an analyst for ESPN. Here was a coach who was going to give UTSA instant buzz and credibility, and he was reaching out to her.

"People say you have to be at the right place at the right time," Hickey said. "And as opportunities came up, we grabbed them. Everything happened at the right time, and hiring Larry Coker was one of those things."

Coker made a name for himself at Miami and had great success in his early days with the Hurricanes. But even as he was winning championships and pounding in-state rivals, Miami was never the most comfortable fit for a man, who like folk music legend Woody Guthrie, hails from Okemah, Okla., and always felt more at home on the south 40 than South Beach.

Texas, though, that was more Coker's style. He met with Hickey, a rural Okie herself, and saw the work she'd put into building a foundation for a program and knew UTSA was where he wanted to get back into coaching.

"It's been an incredible challenge, and I've never done anything like this before," Coker said. "But Lynn's done about nine years of preparatory work and researched these starter programs at South Florida and others. She's really learned how to do this and it's been helpful for me."

UTSA has also turned heads with its scheduling. The prospect of playing in front of Texas recruits in the Alamodome helped convince several big-time programs to schedule series with the Roadrunners, who will play an FCS schedule their first two seasons before playing Oklahoma State, Arizona, Houston and Virginia on their 2013 non-conference slate.

Kansas State, Baylor, Arizona State and Colorado State have also agreed to play UTSA in future seasons, and every one of them will play at least one game in San Antonio.

If UTSA is following the South Florida model, it's trying to do it in fast forward. The Roadrunners will spend as little time as required as an FCS independent before jumping to the FBS and the Western Athletic Conference. South Florida was able to find a spot in a BCS conference when the ACC began expanding and forced a shakeup.

The Roadrunners are entering their football playing days in a similar climate, and don't think people in San Antonio haven't been dreaming of their team winding up in a major conference as well. The hope is that success in a new-look WAC and perhaps an upset or two of the big boys could help make UTSA attractive.

"We knew that when we developed this program, we needed to get to the FBS level," Hickey said. "San Antonio is a community that expects to do things really well. We don't just have parties here. We have big fiestas. To really meet the financial challenges of building a program and building a fan base, we needed to play at the highest level."

If you build it -- and win -- they will come. Hickey's been building for nearly a decade and it's nearly time to hand the project over to Coker and see if he can do the winning.

Recruiting became job No. 1 for Coker as soon as he arrived at UTSA. Last time he hit the recruiting trail, Coker was visiting the most coveted high school players in the country, trying to convince them they could be the missing piece needed to get Miami back to the national title.

This time around, he found himself walking into rural Texas high schools, trying to convince players and their coaches that, yes, UTSA had a football program. People didn't know the Roadrunners, but they knew of Coker, and his sparkling BCS championship ring got their attention.

"I'm undefeated right now and, you know, that helps your popularity," Coker said.

The coach's celebrity got him in several doors. He may not have been signing the caliber of players he had at Miami, but he was filling the Roadrunners' roster with some intriguing prospects.

The quarterback, Soza, is one of several transfers who came to UTSA enticed by Coker and the challenge of starting a new program. So far he's impressed everyone at UTSA with his play in practice and his natural leadership ability.

Defensive back Jeremy Hall from Brenham, Texas, might be the prize of the initial recruiting class. Brenham was a Rivals.com three-star rated recruit who attracted a bit of interest but not scholarship offers from programs such as TCU, Oregon and Nebraska. He originally chose SMU, turning down offers from Louisiana Tech, North Texas and others, but was denied admission at SMU and signed instead with UTSA.

Crosby Adams, a local product, was another three-star defensive back recruit who chose to stay at home and play for Coker.

"All of the students here were welcoming and the coaching staff that recruited me were so down to earth and seemed like they knew what they were talking about," Adams said.

"The whole team, almost all freshmen, is getting the kind of coaching that a lot of places you wouldn't get until you are a junior or a senior."
-- Eric Soza, Texas San Antonio quarterback The Roadrunners wouldn't take the field for another year, but spent each week this fall preparing like they were in the midst of a conference championship race. Players and coaches spent the week practicing and scheming for the weekend scrimmage, which at times had the intensity of a real game.

"The whole team, almost all freshmen, is getting the kind of coaching that a lot of places you wouldn't get until you are a junior or a senior," said Soza, who had a legendary high school career in Beeville, Texas. But record-setting numbers at a small high school and a 6-1, 195-pound frame weren't enough to attract attention from the state's Big 12 schools.

"It helps us progress so fast as a team. We have learned all the playbooks already because next year we are going to be competing against 21-, 22- and 23-year-old guys. We couldn't take this year off because we have to get ready."

The Roadrunners have a relatively easy schedule the first season, highlighted by games against Georgia State, Sam Houston State and South Alabama. But it's all building toward that 2013 season, when the Roadrunners will play a full WAC schedule to go along with the impressive non-conference slate.

By that time they will also have a veteran team -- all but four of the 84 players on the roster are freshmen and all but 15 are Texans -- that will be entering its fourth season playing together.

"What I hope for us is to be a Texas Tech or a Baylor-type school right here in San Antonio," Coker said. "As we start out, we really have to assert ourselves. I could sit here and say that in five years or 10 years we want to be like the University of Texas, but I don't think that's very reasonable. But I think we could have the kind of success of those other Big 12 programs in the state."