March 26, 2005

Charleston, SC - New Citadel football coach Kevin Higgins' first month on the job will be a busy one.

Higgins, hired Thursday, must assemble a coaching staff, meet with his new players, come up with a plan for spring practice and squeeze in 15 spring workouts -- all before April 27, when The Citadel begins final exams.

"It's going to be very hard," said Higgins, who was hired after a search that took 41 days. "There are so many challenges when you are trying to start a program at this late date. But that's the nature of the beast, and we know that going in."

Higgins' first priority will be to meet with the coaching staff this weekend. Athletic director Les Robinson said Higgins is not required to keep any or all of the current staff, which has lost two coaches -- receivers coach Ken Kellahan and linebackers coach Shane Burnham -- in recent weeks. Higgins said he'd like to have "95 percent" of his staff in place before starting spring practice, which he hopes to begin late next week.

Given the division in the staff during the coaching search -- Robinson had considered promoting recruiting coordinator Danny Lewis, defensive coordinator Dick Hopkins or offensive coordinator Toby Strange to head coach -- it is unlikely that Higgins will retain the entire staff. But there was no official word on any departures from the staff on Friday.

Higgins, who spent the last four years as an assistant coach with the NFL's Detroit Lions, already has done what he can to learn about his players, who are on spring break this week and return to campus Monday.

He used the Lions' scouting tape of former Citadel running back Nehemiah Broughton, an NFL prospect, to get a look at the Bulldogs, who were 3-7 last year. He said he liked what he saw, especially in freshman quarterback Duran Lawson.

"Any coach is concerned with who is the quarterback and can he win for us," said Higgins, who oversaw a high-powered passing offense as head coach at Lehigh University and coached the Lions' quarterbacks for three years. "And the answer is, we know who the quarterback is and he has a chance to win for us. That's the good news.

"The rest of the story is I have to evaluate these kids and go eyeball to eyeball with them. But I know we have talented players and the staff has done a good job with them. We just have to make sure the profile of the players we bring in fits the scheme we'd like to run."

That scheme, at least for now, is the spread option offense that the Bulldogs ran some last year and that Urban Meyer has brought from Utah to Florida, where Higgins' son, Tim, is a sophomore receiver.

"The spread option is what we are looking at right now," he said. "But that could change. I'm concerned with the number of backs and receivers in the program right now. Can some of those running backs become slot backs and catch the ball and run at the same time?

"I don't know those things right now, and if we need to change and go in a different direction, we can do that if we get the right people in here."

The team is allowed 15 workouts during spring practice, and will have to get them in before exams start on April 27.

"We might have more practices back to back rather than giving them a day off in between as you'd like to," he said. "But that might not be bad. We'd have more teaching and more individual time and less hitting, less team time. We'll adjust our plan and it won't be the same as next year when we've been together for a year. But we'll make the best of it."

Citadel fullback Porter Johnson, who was at Thursday's news conference, said the long search was trying for the players.

"Of course it was," he said. "The team's been waiting and wondering what would happen next. But now we know who our coach is, and we can go from there."

The search also was hard for Higgins, who was let go by the Lions last month and had interviewed for a couple of other NFL jobs.

"I told my wife, this has been the longest search in the history of the NCAA," he said.

But Robinson, who is no stranger to long coaching searches, called the process "the most thoughtful and thorough search I've ever had.

"I'm extremely confident about the man we've hired," Robinson said. "I think we came up with the best available head coach in the country."

HIGGINS' RECORD

Year by year record of new Citadel football coach Kevin Higgins while at Lehigh University:

Year Record Comment

1994 5-5-1 Took over for CSU AD Hank Small

1995 8-3 Won Patriot League title

1996 5-6 First of two losing seasons

1997 4-7 Lost 5 by 7 points or fewer

1998 12-1 Won PL, beat Richmond, Wofford

1999 10-2 Won Patriot League title

2000 12-1 Won PL title, beat Wofford

Total 56-25-1 30-9 in Patriot League games