For Notre Dame’s Kelly, Grand Valley State Remains Near

Joe Raymond/Associated Press

Brian Kelly has shown the ability to adapt as a coach at Grand Valley State, Central Michigan, Cincinnati and now at Notre Dame.

Before Brian Kelly restored the luster to Notre Dame, he coached the Lakers. These were not the Los Angeles Lakers; more like the complete opposite. These were the Grand Valley State Lakers, a Division II football team in Allendale, Mich.

This was not a brief stopover for Kelly, a steppingstone on the usual itinerant career path, a place to spend a year or two and beef up the old résumé while keeping one eye cocked toward somewhere better. Kelly built the foundation of his career at Grand Valley.

There, he became a coach.

He arrived in 1987 as a graduate assistant, a bachelor and glorified gofer who pocketed $4,000 annually the first two years and $12,000 after that. He left for Central Michigan after the 2003 season with 118 victories and 2 national championships, with a family and a system he believed in, a system he knew would work at the highest level. Even at Notre Dame.

At Grand Valley, Kelly met and married his wife, Paqui. They used to run together at lunchtime (she set the pace). They had three children there. He became a defensive coordinator and a head coach, both for the first time. He learned how to recruit, adapt, ignore those who clamored for his job. He also learned a special class of players could transform a program, long before it happened again this season at Notre Dame.

His former players and assistants and support staff have watched Kelly on television. They saw the undefeated regular season that will culminate in the Bowl Championship Series national title game against Alabama on Monday.

They see the familiar beet-red face, the temper, the wrath, the familiar schemes and tendencies.

Mostly, they see their coach, in charge of perhaps the nation's most storied program, so much changed and yet so little different.

"He was born and bred at Grand Valley State, small town, Division II," said Curt Anes, the quarterback who helped Kelly change it all. "He might be at Notre Dame now, but I'll tell you something: he hasn't changed a bit."

Well, he has changed some. The Kelly who drove his Ford Escort through the cornfields was younger, slimmer and poorer than this version.

He fit in well immediately at Grand Valley. Staffers described the young Kelly as intense, a climber, but not so much that he overstepped. They noticed his intelligence, confidence and charisma. They insist they knew he would do big things, great things. But Notre Dame? Head coach? Undefeated?

Of course they did not expect that.

"I needed to learn how to be a head coach," Kelly said in a phone interview. "Everybody wants to be one, but Grand Valley provided me on-the-job training. It prepared me for everything that came after."

It's almost surreal now how all the dots connect. How Tom Beck, the man who hired Kelly, left to join Lou Holtz at Notre Dame in 1991. How three candidates emerged as potential successors to Beck. How Kelly beat them out for the job at 28.

In his second game in charge, Kelly's Lakers played at North Dakota State, the undefeated defending national champion, winner of an obscene number of consecutive home games. Grand Valley could not afford a hotel and flew in the day of the game. Yet when the Lakers recorded an upset, Don Thomas, the former longtime sports information director, remembered that Kelly just stood there, alone and dumbfounded.

Grand Valley made the playoffs in 1991 and again in 1994, losing its first game each time. In 1996, an athletic director named Tim Selgo arrived from Toledo, where he had worked with another promising young coach — Nick Saban, now at Alabama, Kelly's counterpart in the national title game.

Selgo asked Kelly to a Detroit Tigers game. He insisted they drive together, some five hours there and back. Kelly reminded Selgo of Saban, and while Selgo could not remember the score of the game, he could recall the impression Kelly made.

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