Starting from Scratch

Starting from Scratch

His team might have lost the game, but Nichols’ emotions weren’t those of sadness or disappointment. Instead, they were of immeasurable pride.

Ending a season with a 1-9 record, it’s not common to see a coach so proud of his team that it moves him nearly to tears.

Then again, to fully understand why Nichols found himself uncharacteristically emotional at the end of the season, one would have to understand the journey it took just to get the Eagles onto the football field.

The Ground Floor

Football, at one time, seemed like nothing more than a pipedream for Faulkner University president Dr. Billy Hilyer.

After all, he thought, the sport is primarily for larger universities with astronomical budgets.

Faulkner, a small, private Church of Christ school that had an on-campus enrollment of 1,318 students on its Montgomery campus in 2005, didn’t seem to fit either category.

However, Hilyer started watching a phenomenon develop. Nearby schools of similar size such as Huntingdon College and Shorter (Ga.) College began football programs.

That captured Hilyer’s attention. How were these smaller schools operating football programs and not hemorrhaging money?

When Hilyer started gathering answers to his question, he was surprised by the results.

“Not many were starting football for the sake of startng football,” Hilyer said. “Most of them had as objective to grow their enrollment and trying to add to the college experience on a small college level.”

Faulkner happened to be examining its financial plan at the same time and wanted to find a way to increase its enrollment at the Montgomery campus. More enrollments would mean more tuition money.

A potential answer, Hilyer thought, could be football.

Nobody was more excited to hear about that possibility than Faulkner athletic director Brent Barker, a former high school football coach at Southwest Christian School in Fort Worth, Texas. Barker also previously served as an assistant coach at Southlake (Texas) High School, which has produced collegiate stars such as Missouri quarterback Chase Daniel.

Barker had helped Faulkner flourish as a strong athletics power in the NAIA. In 2006, the baseball team –coached by Barker – finished as the runner-up in the NCCAA World Series and the men’s basketball team reached the NAIA Fab Four for the eighth time. The volleyball team had also qualified for back-to-back NCCAA tournaments.

While Barker thought football could help Faulkner achieve some of its goals, he knew it could potentially have a greater impact.

“I thought it would add a lot for the area, too,” Barker said.

Once the decision was made to start an NAIA football program, Hilyer turned to Auburn head coach Tommy Tuberville for advice. Tuberville had experience at the NAIA level, having played for Southern Arkansas University.

It was during Hilyer’s first discussion with Tuberville that the Auburn coach mentioned a graduate assistant named Jim Nichols.

“Tommy told me he had purposely exposed (Nichols) to every aspect of coaching,” Hilyer said. “While (Nichols) was lacking in experience, (Tuberville) thought he had a lot of ability and could grow along with our program.”

A few months later, on June 13, 2006, Nichols was introduced in a press conference as the first head coach of Faulkner’s football program.

Nowhere to Go but Everywhere

On June 14, 2006, Jim Nichols left a meeting with Billy Hilyer – his first meeting as Faulkner University’s first head football coach – with nowhere to go and pondering his next move.

There was no football office for Nichols didn’t have an office in which to sit down and begin the intricate process of laying the groundwork for a previously non-existent football program.

There was no football field on which to envision his team playing. There were no uniforms or pads. There wasn’t a schedule.

Other than in Nichols’ mind, there wasn’t even a blueprint for what would, in less than a year, become a football program.

“You celebrate (getting the job) and, all of a sudden, it hits you and you wake up the next morning and you have this long process,” Nichols said.

The entire process was somewhat foreign to Nichols, whose only previous collegiate coaching experience was three years as a graduate assistant at Auburn. He would also be the lone member of Faulkner’s football program until August 2006.

Still, those plans slowly became clear-cut for Nichols, though he knew the path to the Eagles’ inaugural season wouldn’t be particularly pleasant nor would his role be particularly easy.

Nichols started by assembling a schedule for the 2007 season – a task that he admitted was not especially difficult because “everyone wants to play a team that’s just starting to play football.”

That was the easy part.

After putting together the schedule, Nichols was able to make his first addition to the program. He hired Justin Crews, another former Auburn grad assistant, as his offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach. 

Crews had been around Auburn for the majority of his life, having graduated from Auburn High School and Auburn University before becoming an offensive grad assistant.

He was about to be exposed to several paths out of Auburn.

“We just basically hit the road from August through December,” Nichols said. “We watched a lot of high school games and visiting a lot of schools. It was very important that we went to a lot of Christian schools as well.”

Over the coming months, Nichols was seemingly on the road with Crews, and sometimes Brent Barker, as much he was home with his wife, Haley, and children – daughter Gracie, 8, and son Peyton, 2.

The two-man coaching staff had the formidable task of undertaking roles that were part recruiter, part herald and part fundraiser on the way to even fielding a team for the 2007 season.

While the nights on the road were imperative for a program in its infancy, that fact was no solace to Nichols, a devout family man.

Mostly, Nichols credits Haley for being so understanding – and also taking on so much of the workload in his absence.

“The first year I was gone a lot, going out and recruiting a lot of kids,” Nichols said. “Any time in college football, it’s one of those things you have to work through. You have to have a wife who understands college football and my wife is a good one. You’ve got to have a good coaches’ wife who knows what it takes to win.

“I couldn’t give you a number, but I will say I was gone a lot.”

When Nichols was around, he made sure he was always home for dinner.

Living in Auburn at the time meant nearly 180 minutes of commuting each day – to work and back twice.

Still, Nichols knew there was a reason for all the time spent driving up and down Interstate-85.

“I did a lot of driving, but I felt like this was my thing and I wanted to make sure it got off on the right foot,” he said.

Small Victories

Little by little, Jim Nichols, Justin Crews and the Faulkner administration began piecing together a football program.

A few days after Nichols’ original meeting with Billy Hilyer, he had been given his first Faulkner – a room in the Bible Building. In August, Nichols moved into a modest, single-wide trailer that had enough room for two offices, a bathroom and space for a secretary.

It might not have been much, but at least it was something the football staff could call its own.

Not long after the coaches moved into the trailer, Nichols received a surprise visit.

Frank Chinoski, a former Marine who had twice been to war – once voluntarily, entered Nichols’ office to ask about the football team.

“He came in and said ‘Coach, I want to play football. I’m willing to do whatever you need me to do,’” Nichols said. “Frank has always been our biggest leader since we started.”

Chinoski was also the very first player to become a member of the Faulkner Eagles football program.

Shortly thereafter, Nichols selected the design and colors of both the uniforms and helmets his team would wear the following year.

Additionally, Nichols knew he had to find a place for the Eagles to play their home games since a new stadium wouldn’t be ready by the start of the 2007 season.

The university quickly struck a deal with the Cramton Bowl, a 24,500-seat stadium in downtown Montgomery.

Those steps might have been small, but slowly, Faulkner’s football program was becoming a reality.

Finding a Team

Over the course of recruiting, Jim Nichols, Justin Crews and Brent Barker spoke with thousands of high school football players.

There were two major problems facing the Faulkner staff, however.

First of all, the NAIA permits programs to distribute just 24 scholarships. That makes it difficult to persuade droves of prospective athletes to come play anywhere.

Secondly, there is no National Signing Day for NAIA players. With no signed contract, coaches are left taking 17- and 18-year-olds at their word.

“You don’t know who’s going to show up,” Nichols said. “A guy might tell you one thing one day and then not show up.”

That worry ended when the spring semester began and approximately 60 men decided to come out for the football team.

Still, there was no field on which to practice.

One day, Nichols was driving in Montgomery and saw an empty playground field at Dozier Elementary School. After Nichols received permission from Dozier principal Cindy McKenzie to use the field, Faulkner had its first practice field.

Nichols admitted the situation was far from ideal. The players had to carpool to practice and transport equipment back and forth, but at least they had a place to practice.

Still, the program had no weight room – and therefore, no weight-training program, and the players didn’t have pads yet.

Instead, Nichols and his coaching staff focused on conditioning.

“One of the things I learned at Auburn was if we’re not the best, we’ll be the best-conditioned team and we’ll play four quarters and win some games just because we’re more conditioned,” Nichols said. “We really stressed conditioning. We didn’t really have an offense or defense, but we tried to give them something to do.”

Of those approximately 60 players, Nichols estimated that 20 remain on the team.

Early Dividends

The road life might not have been ideal for family life, but Jim Nichols now thinks the time he spent talking about Faulkner football is working to the program’s benefit.

After all, the team had 160 players come out for the first day of practice.

More importantly, Nichols and Justin Crews helped Faulkner go from entirely foreign in the football community to a better-known program.

“Now people know about Faulkner football, which is good,” he said. “That’s what we wanted – to get the word out.”

Nichols and company didn’t just get the word out about Faulkner football – they got the word out about Faulkner University.

That was the original reason Billy Hilyer initiated the football program.

Hilyer’s hopes that football would increase enrollment were realized immediately.

“We had the largest entering class this fall that we’ve ever had in the history of the school,” Hilyer said. “Now we have just under 3,000 students with almost 1,800 on the Montgomery campus.”

With 130 football players enrolling – 30 players didn’t enroll after originally practicing – that were previously not on campus, it seems obvious that enrollment would have increased. But Hilyer said Faulkner would have had its highest enrollment even without football, “and football blew the previous totals away.”

Hilyer is focused on increasing enrollment, but not even for football players, he said, will the university compromise its academic standards.

“(Our standards) are not what they are at Harvard, but still, a young man has to be able to show he has a reasonable expectation to finish a college education,” Hilyer said. “We want to find young men who love to play football and have ability, but our primary goal is for them to obtain a college education.”

It wasn’t just enrollment that improved at Faulkner, either.

The college experience Hilyer talked about when first considering football kept people around campus more often. Nichols estimated that between 5,000 and 6,000 fans attended Faulkner’s home games.

Furthermore, the entire Faulkner athletic department received upgrades because that wouldn’t have been fathomable without a football team.

“We’ve got a fantastic weight facility and that’s something football has added and all sports are benefiting from it,” Brent Barker said. “It took football to add it.

“I’ve been amazed at what one thing, football, can do for the school. We’ve redone all of the men’s dorms. We moved the men to the women’s dorm and built new a women’s dorm. We redid the multiplex because of football. When you add one program and add 130 students, it jumpstarted a whole lot of things on our campus. It changed, in my opinion, for the better on campus.”

Preseason Expectations

As it turned out, Jim Nichols succeeded in getting players interested in his football program.

It was a task that Nichols discovered was actually easier than expected.

“Where we are, location-wise, is football crazy,” he said. “South Alabama, south Georgia, people just love football. A lot of kids just want to play at some level, whether it’s Division I, Division II, Division III or NAIA. A lot of them get here and realize what it was in high school, but at least we give them that opportunity.”

After no real spring practice to speak of, Nichols and his staff, which had expanded to four full-time members and four more volunteers and assistants, had the tough challenge of evaluating 160 players during just two-plus weeks of two-a-days.

The coaching staff had seen several of the players in high school, but nobody knew exactly how they would react to stronger competition.

With a completely unknown commodity, Nichols decided he didn’t want to set goals as a team – focusing instead on playing hard and being competitive in games.

There was one goal, however.

“My whole goal was for us this year to look like we know what we were doing when we got off the bus,” Nichols said.

The First Season

It didn’t take long for Jim Nichols’ team to look like it knew what it was doing once it got off the bus in the first game of Faulkner’s inaugural season.

The Eagles’ first possession yielded a five-play, 73-yard drive that ended with Frank Chinoski completing a 13-yard touchdown pass to Frankie Padula.

Faulkner missed the ensuing extra point and ended up losing the game 30-6, but it also sent a message that it would not be a helpless program.

Three weeks later, the Eagles won their first game, claiming a 20-12 victory over Kentucky Christian.

That would prove to be Faulkner’s lone win of the season, but the Eagles scored in every game and were often competitive through the first halves of games.

Chinoski, who started the season as a part-time quarterback, ultimately became a star defensive player at linebacker while Chad Kilgore, a transfer from Division I-AA North Dakota State, gave the Eagles a stronger passing threat.

The season also gave Faulkner new traditions, such as Sunday scrimmages.

With so many players wanting to play, Tommy Tuberville had advised Nichols to hold weekly Sunday scrimmages between the red-shirt players with some other players he wanted to watch closer.

Since Faulkner still had no field on which to practice, the team held its practices at Goodwyn Junior High’s field – where the team sometimes had a pair of fans watching: Gracie and Peyton Nichols.

With Jim Nichols’ attention primarily focused toward the season – and not on recruiting – he was able to spend more time with his family than in the previous year. It also helped that the family moved from Auburn to Montgomery.

There were, however, also growing pains during the first year.

Nichols estimated that, for discipline reasons, he had to kick two or three players off the team, and added “I helped some kids” decide to quit.

“I guess it’s a Tuberville attitude,” said Nichols, who still text messages his former mentor frequently and talks to him approximately twice a month. “I even called to ask his advice on a lot of that stuff. When it came to stuff like that, it made a lot of sense to me – cut your ties now because those people will come back and still not help the program.

“In four or five years from now we might be able to work with a kid and suspend him and get him back on track and that’s what I want to do. I love kids and I love working with these guys, but right now I can’t afford that. When you’re starting a program you can’t have problems.”

Brighter Days Ahead

A few weeks ago Jim Nichols and his staff – now up to five members after Alabama Christian Academy coach Gregg Baker joined as the offensive line coach and running game coordinator – started moving into the new field house.

As Brent Barker said, there is also a weight room now and defensive coordinator Eric Howell doubles as the strength and conditioning coach, meaning there is also a program in place.

Thanks to sizable donations, Faulkner could have also had a grass field in place for the beginning of next season, but decided instead to pay more money for a Pro-Turf field.

Billy Hilyer said that decision means the Eagles will again play their home games at the Cramton Bowl instead of their own stadium, but he and Nichols agreed that the plan makes more long-term financial sense. 

The football team will share the field with both the men’s and women’s soccer teams and all three can practice on the field without worrying about destroying the turf for games.

Since Faulkner is still looking to raise money for the stadium, it has created a Your Name Here Stadium effect. 

“We need another $2 million to finish stadium,” Hilyer said. “We’d love to find somebody who would take interest in our program and take a step forward with a major gift. We can name the field separately or we could name entire stadium (for them).”

Regardless of where the Eagles play in 2008, Nichols said winning immediately becomes a larger focal point than it was last season.

That will likely prove a challenge for Faulkner, which is moving into the NAIA’s Mid-South Conference. Nichols called the Mid-South “the SEC of the NAIA.”

Both Hilyer and Nichols thought the conference affiliation was necessary to give the players a better sense of goals and improvement.

While a tough conference slate might make a dramatic turnaround difficult, Nichols remains optimistic – especially since he will have an off-season program this year.

“It’s going to be a big difference when we walk on the field next year,” Nichols said. “Winning becomes a bigger factor. To make your program succeed, you’ve got to win games and do it the right way. We’ve got to make a goal about winning more than one. Our goal this year is to win our side of the conference.”

Ending the First Season

Jim Nichols said it was sometimes hard to remember how far the program had come in such a short amount of time.

Those memories all stormed back to the first-year head coach during that final game on Nov. 10.

Looking onto the field at his team, Nichols could remember everything – the single-wide trailer, the day Frank Chinoski walked into his office and the day Nichols left the Billy Hilyer’s office with nowhere to go among dozens of other thoughts.

All the flashbacks were too much for Nichols to hold back.

After composing himself, Nichols remembers addressing his team and having a sense of pride he had never previously felt about a football team.

“Even though we lost, I’ve never been more proud of a team than I’ve been this year,” Nichols said. “I told the team in Texas, ‘I don’t care if we win two national championships in 10 years, I’ll always remember this first team. Y’all set the foundation of Faulkner football for years to come.’”

This article previously appeared in the Montgomery Advertiser

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