Curry finds energy in Georgia State job

By Bob Keefe

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

WASHINGTON — Since the first day he went to work with a borrowed desk and a borrowed phone and little else, every day has come with its new adventure for Georgia State’s first football coach.

There were problems with getting equipment on time, the difficulty of recruiting players to a school that never had a football team, the unusualness of picking up a coaching career that he left 11 years ago — and this week, finding a practice field that isn’t flooded.

But after two months on the job, at age when most folks are starting retirement, one of the most surprising things Bill Curry says he’s experienced as an old coach with a new team is a newfound vigor.

“I am grateful to have received a burst of energy that I haven’t felt in a long, long time,” Curry, who will turn 67 next month, said before a speech at the National Press Club here.

Back in has last career as an analyst with ESPN, Curry had a different feeling in his bones.

“ESPN was fun, but there was always an empty feeling after the game,” he said. “I would watch the guys celebrate or sob or do whatever they did and they would go in the locker room with their teams and I’d go to the Holiday Inn by myself and get up at 4 a.m. and take a plane and go home. That’s not like having a team.”

Having spent his entire career with big-time football programs, it was the opportunity to start one from scratch that attracted him to GSU, he said. But if not for ties to the Atlanta area — his wife Carolyn went to Georgia State and he attended College Park High School and Georgia Tech — he said he would have never taken the position.

So what’s the toughest thing about starting a new team?

Freshman, Curry said. Save for a few transfer students, almost all of his roster of 70-plus players are freshman.

“I didn’t count on the absence of leadership,” he said. “It’s like the coaching staff has to be the seniors.”

And the most common question Curry gets?

“Everybody wants to know why we scheduled Alabama so early,” he said. GSU plays the Crimson Tide on Nov. 20, 2010, in Tuscaloosa.

Partly, there’s the exposure and the money. The fledgling program will get a national stage and the $400,000 for its share of the game.

Curry, who coached Alabama from 1987-1989, still has friends there who offered to play his new team. He said he would’ve much rather faced Alabama in a few years but the only date the school had open was in 2010.

“You can’t learn to play against the top programs if you don’t play the top programs,” he said.