When Brian Bohannon was in seventh grade, he filled out a report detailing who he wanted to be, what he liked to do and what he wanted to be.
The answers: winner, football and coach.
It seems Brian Bohannon was born to be a coach.
His dream was fulfilled in late March when he was tabbed to lead Kennesaw State’s developing football program. Some people are blessed to know what they want to do before a choice has to be made. Some are doubly blessed when they get to follow that dream.
“When this opportunity came up, it just hit me right in the face,” Bohannon said. “It couldn’t have been clearer.”
He’s now full-bore into the job. He has made his first three hires. In addition to recruiting a staff, he’s into his first season recruiting high school players, selling potential Owls not only on his vision for Kennesaw State’s team, but the vision of all who worked to bring the program to life during a years-long process.
It’s been a long-time coming for Bohannon, who has been an assistant coach for 17 years, but it hasn’t been a long-time wanting.
Though he’s known that he wanted to be a coach, Bohannon isn’t a job hopper, chasing the rungs up the career ladder.
Instead, he has patiently waited, accumulating experiences at West Georgia, Gardner-Webb, Georgia Southern, Navy and Georgia Tech. He has taken copious mental notes on how he would do things should he move to the front of the room. Now, he gets his chance.
“To make your mark on a program and impact lives from the get-go and establish how you want things done is a unique opportunity,” Bohannon said.
Bohannon wasn’t pushed into the profession by his father, Lloyd, a longtime coach at Griffin High School. But the elder Bohannon said the same elements that made his son a good player for him and then at Georgia are the things that will make him a good coach: He’s coachable, and he’s a hard worker.
“He’s developed a lot of knowledge of the game,” Lloyd Bohannon said. “He’s been in a lot of places and been in a lot of good situations.”
In almost any conversation, Bohannon comes across as earnest. He usually takes a few seconds to consider his answer when asked almost any question. When he gets animated, his eyes open a little wider, sometimes making it difficult to tell if he’s excited or perturbed because he almost always looks his interviewer in the eye.
He looks like a coach.
Grant Chesnut, whom Bohannon hired last week as his offensive coordinator, saw that look when he was a player at Georgia Southern and Bohannon was an assistant coach.
Their introduction wasn’t ideal.
Chesnut missed a study hall, and it was Bohannon’s job to dish out the punishment. Chesnut knew then that he wanted to be a coach, too. He already was compiling his own list of best practices.
Bohannon showed up and good-naturedly began chiding Chesnut, asking him how a student from Brookwood High could miss a class. After a series of sprints and up-downs, the two began to form a bond.
“You could tell that he had what I call the ‘it’ factor,” Chesnut said. “He had a way of communicating with players that they responded well (to). He was intelligent in how he presented things. He had a presence about him. He separated himself from the pack even then.”
That ability to get across his message was affirmed by Tech coach Paul Johnson, who was Bohannon’s boss for the previous 16 years.
“If you’re going to be a coach, a lot of it’s teaching and being able to communicate with people, and he’s great at that, I think,” Johnson said.
Those attributes were reaffirmed in the 25 references compiled by athletic director Vaughn Williams during his vetting process. Williams said he called everyone from former teammates such as Florida coach Will Muschamp to former bosses such as Johnson. Williams called administrators at former schools and Bohannon’s former players to fill in details about his off-the-field character.
Williams was impressed, so impressed he chose Bohannon over two candidates who had deeper backgrounds that included head-coaching experience.
“I think we have a great opportunity to do this thing right, and he’s going to be a very successful coach,” Williams said.
Of course, no matter how much one wants to be a coach, the desire doesn’t determine the results, except in cliched motivational speeches. Bohannon has never been a head coach, nor has he ever had to build a program from the ground up. Those are immense challenges for the most seasoned professional.
Someone who knows a little something about coaching thinks he will do just fine.
Because of Bohannon’s 17 years as an assistant, legendary Georgia coach Vince Dooley said he thinks Bohannon is in a better position to succeed than he was when he was hired away from Auburn to lead the Bulldogs. The sum of Dooley’s experience had been as a position coach for five years and as leader of the Tigers’ freshmen team for three years.
“He has a lot more experience, been in a lot more places, and he knows this state better than I did,” Dooley said. “I had to learn this state from scratch. He’s got a big jump on that and a big jump on recruiting. I’m real impressed by him. Wonderful choice.”
