Copperas Cove borders Fort Hood, the large army post situated halfway between Dallas and San Antonio. The little Texas town’s economy is propped up by the nearby base, and most of its residents are linked to the military. One of the roads that leads out of town and extends over rolling hills is named Tank Destroyer Boulevard.
LaMar Morgan’s father was in the military, and the Morgan family moved to Copperas Cove when LaMar was very young. LaMar and two of his sisters were raised by his mother, Sydell Morgan.
There’s only one high school in Copperas Cove. It’s one of those communities where everyone knows everyone. High school football is a point of pride, as it is in many small Texas towns, and on Friday nights, the town crams into the bleachers to watch the game.
But growing up, LaMar’s best friends played basketball, so LaMar did too. It wasn’t until eighth grade, when he made a bet with one of his friends to try out for the football team, that LaMar began to enjoy the sport.
Yet almost as quickly as he started playing football, LaMar worried he’d have to stop.
“I worked a part-time job plus worked full time for the school district,” Sydell told The Michigan Daily. “It was the lack of transportation and getting him back and forth to his practices. So he told one of the coaches that my mom’s lifestyle is the reason why I can’t play football.”
Sydell worked as a teacher for the in-school suspension program while picking up part-time jobs at the same time to support her family. The coach at Copperas Cove High School saw potential in LaMar, and called Sydell. Soon enough, LaMar was getting rides from some of his teammates who lived nearby.
Whenever LaMar had a game, Sydell made sure to get time off to watch her son play.
“I felt bad, but I think I was doing the best I could for our family,” Sydell said. “ … No parent wants to deny their child an opportunity, but I was being realistic with what I could and could not do. I feel like I wanted his focus to be his education if he wasn’t able to play football. I was hoping things would get better so there would be a chance that, in the future, he could play football.”
Apart from working in ISS, Sydell also worked with students with dyslexia later in her career.
“I admire people that have obstacles in their lives and they still strive to do their best,” Sydell said. “… And so I just admire those students, they’re not giving up, they’re not letting that define them, they’re still striving to do their very best.”
LaMar didn’t know it at the time, but he’d eventually become the same way. Today, players who had never played defensive back, or maybe never even played a defensive snap, are some of LaMar’s favorites to coach. Same with players who might have less confidence, or players who have all the tools but none of the technique.
Players who want to make the most of what they have probably stand out to LaMar for a reason.
***
Mike Desormeaux watched from the stands. The details are blurry, but the play will stick in his mind forever.
He was still a senior in high school, on a recruiting visit to Louisiana-Lafayette, when LaMar was a freshman for the Ragin’ Cajuns. True freshmen didn’t just come in and play back then, but LaMar was different. He was also playing with one hand.
“He’s playing free safety, and he jumps a dig out, and they overthrow it, and he jumps up and snatches it,” Desormeaux told The Daily. “I mean, he’s got one hand open, one hand in the club (and) just snatches it and takes off. … That’s the kind of guys that you want to play with, that’s the kind of people you want on your team. That’s the way he played the game.”
LaMar had broken his wrist in high school, and re-injured it in college. He tore his ACL after his freshman year, and, following his rehabilitation, LaMar took snaps as a scout-team receiver from Desormeaux, then the scout-team quarterback at the time.
Desormeaux realized pretty quickly that LaMar saw the game on another level compared to most of his teammates. He knew his mom was a teacher, and he saw how much LaMar valued education. It showed in the way he played the game.
“He was one of the smartest football players that I’d ever played with, just the way he understood the game and his mental approach to it,” Desormeaux said. “… You can tell the guys that you play with that kind of see the game a little bit differently, and he was definitely one of those guys.”
***
After college, LaMar participated in some NFL Pro Days and CFL tryouts, even playing a single season for the Jacksonville Sharks of the Indoor Football League. Nothing stuck. He realized, laying on his mom’s couch back in Copperas Cove, that he had to do something.
LaMar was around 23 years old when one of his former coaches called him and pushed him to coach high school football. The school year was set to start in a few months, and taking all the tests to get certified as a coach wasn’t quick.
LaMar applied to some hundred high schools all around the state, and heard nothing.
Eventually, he got an opportunity at Loflin Middle School in Joshua, Texas, two hours north of Copperas Cove. He was hired just a few days before the season began. Apart from coaching the football team, he taught Texas history to a seventh-grade class throughout the week.
Today, 1.66% of Joshua, Texas residents are Black. LaMar was one of the few Black teachers on Loflin’s staff.
“You’re a young kid, you have a new face, you don’t know anything about them and you’re talking about history,” LaMar told The Daily. “… I was so connected to kids that were so young, really none of them looked like me at all, and they really liked me, and I really enjoyed coaching them and teaching them.”
But there were also obstacles of coaching middle school ball. There’s no recruiting, of course, so LaMar was coaching whoever showed up. Middle schoolers didn’t know any of the football terms that had become LaMar’s diction as a player, nor did they care. Most of the time, the biggest challenge was keeping them engaged. Not too dissimilar from the classroom.
So, as if he were back on the football field, LaMar picked up some new techniques. Complex defensive schemes could be shortened to a few buzz words for each player. Plays could be simplified, and LaMar would quiz his players on calls, snapping his fingers for a few subsequent seconds as he recited the shortened call.
If they couldn’t decipher the play after a couple of snaps, then LaMar hadn’t taught his players well enough.
“Teaching is coaching,” Desormeaux said. “There’s no separation at all. If you’re not an excellent teacher, you can’t coach. It doesn’t matter how much football you know, doesn’t matter how smart you are. If you can’t get it to the kids in a way that they can apply it, then you can’t coach.”
In the seven days of spring break LaMar had as a middle school coach, he drove in his maroon GMC Envoy with his girlfriend, Jazen, from Texas to Virginia, Virginia Tech, Louisiana-Monroe, Georgia Tech — any place where one of his former coaches worked.
He figured going in person would make the best impression.
***
Cullowhee, North Carolina — pronounced CULL-uh-wee — is a tiny town that sits along Tuckasegee River, which cuts and winds through the Appalachian Mountains from eastern Tennessee to northern Georgia. Before it was the home of Western Carolina University, the enrollment of which nearly doubles the local population, it was a historic Cherokee village dating back to around 1,000 CE.
Cullowhee is rural, quiet and one hour from the nearest airport. For prospective college football players and coaches, it wasn’t an easy sell.
“We did not have alcohol sale in the county at that time,” Mark Speir, former head coach of the Western Carolina Catamounts told The Daily. “So it was a hard place to recruit, because you’re out in the middle of the mountains, there’s nothing there but the college.”
In 2014, Speir was at the American Football Coaches Association convention in Indianapolis looking for a new member on his defensive staff. On Western Carolina’s tight budget, Speir had already scheduled three or four interviews in advance with coaches he knew personally. He had never heard of LaMar, but Shawn Quinn, the Catamounts’ defensive coordinator at the time and one of LaMar’s coaches at Louisiana-Lafayette, told Speir he needed to talk to LaMar.
The two sat down at a table at a restaurant in the Marriott at 7 p.m., Speir’s final interview of the day. Speir brought a little notebook and had LaMar draw up different schemes and looks.
“It didn’t take me long to figure out he knew ball,” Speir said. “The rest of the interview was about, ‘Is this guy going to fit in with our staff?’ ”
They talked about LaMar’s recruiting philosophy and how he communicates with players. They talked about his goals as a coach, as a person. They talked about character. Speir learned about LaMar’s background, where he came from, what made him tick. He saw someone hungry for an opportunity.
That LaMar had been a teacher, and that his mother was a teacher too, stood out to Speir. Speir’s philosophy was that guys who coached high school, many of whom taught in the classroom as well, were good at developing relationships with anyone. And once you developed the person, Spier believed, the football part would take care of itself.
Speir estimates they talked for three hours.
“You always go out with your friends, the other coaching friends at night,” Speir said. “I remember I was late … I kept telling my wife, ‘I’ll be there in a little bit.’ I was texting her ‘A little bit longer.’ ”
Speir did eventually hit the bars that night, finishing things up with LaMar without telling him when, or if, he’d call back. The next day, he offered LaMar the job.
In LaMar’s first season as the secondary coach, Western Carolina was fifth in the FCS with 11 interceptions, a number the Catamounts hadn’t touched in the previous five years. LaMar coached cornerback Trey Morgan and safety Ace Clark to All-Southern Conference First and Second team honors, respectively. But more than anything, Speir remembers the halftimes.
No matter the score after two quarters, LaMar was the same guy. There was no cheering on good plays, or hollering about bad ones. In Western Carolina’s locker room, LaMar spoke to the secondary as the whole defense listened. He would go over what the first series would be, and the necessary adjustments the Catamounts had to make. It was problem solving, through schemes and formations. Speir rarely saw that from a coach of LaMar’s age.
“Whether we were up or down, he was always the coach that kept it real,” Speir said. “He was never a hype coach, which a lot of young coaches are.”
LaMar’s maturity set him apart, and at a school like Western Carolina, retaining talented coaches is hard. After climbing the ranks through four schools in nine years, he joined Michigan’s staff as a defensive backs coach.
***
LaMar hates the word ‘smart.’
“It’s like poison when someone tells you you’re smart,” LaMar said. “… What does smart mean? Like, what did you do to be smart? Did you work? What are you praising? Just because you answer the questions, or did you study. Praise the stuff that you did to be there. Preparation.”
Talk to LaMar for a while, and you’ll realize his entire career is built on preparation. He still employs all of those teaching tactics he used as a middle school coach. In meetings at Michigan, he’ll never call on someone before asking a question. He’ll say the question first, then look out across his room for an answer.
“I want everybody in the room to be thinking, ‘Coach could call on me,’ ” LaMar said. “But if I just say, ‘LaMar, what do you have?’ Everybody else relaxes, and they stop listening.”
In the Wolverines’ defense, the plays are more advanced, but the teaching techniques stay the same. Long defensive playcalls are split up by player; one guy’s a seam-curl-flat, one guy’s a bang-to-buzz. Quick, memorable terms that are easy to teach.
At Michigan, halftimes are similar too.
There’s a big whiteboard in the Wolverines’ locker room, near the defensive players’ lockers. LaMar is always the first to write on it once the second quarter ends. Just like at Western Carolina, it’s all scheme and adjustments. But it’s not a lecture.
“I like to teach off the board,” LaMar said. “I like to ask them how they see it, too. Just because I see it, I’m not playing, I’m not making any tackle this weekend, it’s really what the kids see and how they see it. … The biggest thing I try to do is just like, see where they’re at, see how they see this play.”
Sometimes, the players see something he doesn’t, and a suggestion becomes an adjustment. Maybe a certain fit against a condensed set, or a different look on third down. As much as Michigan’s players are learning from LaMar, he’s learning from them. For those 15 minutes of halftime, he’s back in the classroom.
