Once a National Park tour guide, Brian Newberry followed quite a path to reach his current role as the U.S. Naval Academy’s head football coach.
This year, during his first season in the leadership position, Newberry established his place guiding the next era of Navy football by leading the Midshipmen to a 5-6 record — including an impressive three shutout victories — ahead of the Army-Navy matchup on Dec. 9. in Foxborough, Massachusetts.
Following four seasons serving as the team’s defensive coordinator, Newberry took the helm of steering Navy’s football team when the school’s athletic director reportedly fired the previous head coach in the locker room immediately following the Mids’ loss last year in double overtime against West Point.
“The pinnacle for me was becoming the defensive coordinator here. That is what I had loved doing the most during my career,” Newberry said in a statement earlier this season. “Being a head coach was never the be-all, end goal for me.”
A native of Oklahoma, Newberry himself played collegiate football at Baylor University, where he graduated in 1998. He wound up taking a job as a tour guide at Glacier National Park in Montana for six months.
“I just wanted to do something different, be around different people and see a new part of the world. I also wanted to see how much I really wanted to get into coaching,” Newberry said in the statement.
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Prior to his arrival in Annapolis, Maryland he began his coaching career at Southern Arkansas University, later joining various other schools before serving as the defensive coordinator and secondary coach at Kennesaw State University in Georgia.
“We love the way [Newberry] took over – super calm and collected, handling things extremely smoothly, getting involved on both sides of the ball and special teams,” Navy senior defensive end Jacob Busic said in the statement. “We wanted a guy who knew the Naval Academy and could put us on the right track again and we…
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