Wilkins has long been preparing for coaching opportunity at Lafayette
The Title IX meeting was starting in about five minutes and Donte Wilkins needed some coffee. His phone started ringing. He glanced at who was calling.
An unknown number. He never answered unknown numbers.
“I tried to ignore the call, because like, ‘I don’t know who this is,’” Wilkins recalled. “But I accidentally answered it.”
That slip of the thumb last month at the McCue Center proved fortuitous.
“I actually kind of answered it with a little attitude,” Wilkins admitted. “He was like, ‘Hey Donte, how are you doing? This is Mike Saint Germain.’”
Wilkins’ tone changed immediately.
About a decade ago, Saint Germain spent two years as a graduate assistant on the Virginia football coaching staff. His second season at UVa, in 2013, coincided with Wilkins' first year as a defensive tackle with the Wahoos.
Saint Germain is now the defensive coordinator at Lafayette College, an FCS-level program in Easton, PA, that plays in the Patriot League. The Leopards were preparing for a potential staff opening at defensive line coach. Saint Germain wanted to gauge Wilkins’ interest in the job.
Wilkins shared that story by phone Wednesday evening from his new office at Lafayette. He interviewed with Saint Germain and Leopards head coach John Troxell over Zoom two weeks ago and, after a few stressful days of waiting, was offered the position early last week. His first day on the job was Monday.
“When he told me he wanted me up here on Monday, I was like, ‘Say no more. I am on my way right now,’” Wilkins said. “It’s the start to a new journey, and it’s gonna be a great one.”
It’s a role that Wilkins says he’s been preparing for since he was a freshman at Patriot High School in Northern Virginia. His playing career first brought Wilkins to UVa, where he made 85 tackles and 7 1/2 for loss in 45 career games and, as a senior in 2016, served as a captain and helped to establish a cultural foundation for new head coach Bronco Mendenhall. After a stint on the football performance staff at UCLA, Wilkins returned to Charlottesville in 2019, first as a regional recruiting scout before two seasons as a graduate assistant coach.
Even if he didn’t realize it initially, Wilkins had spent those last nine years building a coaching network. He played for three defensive line coaches in his four years at UVa—Vincent Brown as a freshman, Jappy Oliver for two years and Ruffin McNeill as a senior. The Wahoos had two defensive coordinators in that stretch—Jon Tenuta for Mike London’s final three seasons as head coach and Nick Howell under Mendenhall. As a grad assistant, Wilkins worked with Clint Sintim, who at the time was coaching the defensive line under Mendenhall.
Each of those coaches brought his own style and personality to the practice field, his own strategies and philosophy to the gameplan. Tenuta’s defenses ran a four-man front; Howell and Mendenhall preferred a lot of three-man fronts. Wilkins has already experienced some call-backs to previous terminologies and schemes as he learns the multiple-front defense that Saint Germain has installed at Lafayette.
Wilkins was part of his first position meetings at Lafayette on Monday. He spent Tuesday meeting individually with each of the defensive linemen on the Leopards roster. His message to those players: the goal is to build a family atmosphere among the D-line group and help each other succeed.
“That’s what I got from all the coaches I’ve been around and talked to,” Wilkins said, “just being able to have a great room where people are comfortable and they feel like you care about them.”
“That’s one of the reasons I wanted to become a coach,” he added. “I’ve had some great coaches and I’ve had some bad coaches, and I know what it feels like to have a coach that cares about you. That’s what I want to be for those guys.”
Wilkins estimates that he applied for more than 20 college coaching jobs; Lafayette was the first school he heard back from. Even that contact took a few weeks: Keenan Carter, who preceded Wilkins as a defensive lineman at both Patriot and UVa and is now London’s D-line coach at William & Mary, first told the young coach about the possible opening at Lafayette and reached out to Saint Germain on his behalf back in January.
Carter was one of a long list of coaches who had been working behind the scenes to help Wilkins land his first full-time job.
“So many people helped me to get to where I am,” Wilkins said, “whether it was calling coaches or being a mentor, just learning from different coaches and being under the different coaching trees.”
Both Mendenhall and London, the two head coaches he played for, made calls on his behalf. Wilkins suspects that every coach from Mendenhall’s UVa staff—both offense and defense—made at least one call as well. Howell, now the defensive coordinator at Vanderbilt, is at the top of his list of references. Penn State co-defensive coordinator Anthony Poindexter, a Hall of Fame safety at UVa and former coach at his alma mater, is also on that list. (“Dex is the reason I even went to Virginia,” said Wilkins.)
UCLA running backs coach DeShaun Foster and Tampa Bay Buccaneers assistant Thad Lewis, who was also on staff at UCLA during Wilkins’ west-coast tenure, had also been reaching out to coaches. Wilkins caught up with Vic So’oto, another former UVa D-line coach, shortly after getting started at Lafayette. Sintim, now UVa's linebackers coach, first started sending off Wilkins’ resume two years ago.
Wilkins even had praise for the new Virginia coaching staff that has only been in place since mid-January. He studied the way Tony Elliott approached the job after he took over, and got strong advice in one-on-one conversations with the first-time head coach on how to advance in the profession. New defensive coordinator John Rudzinski offered suggestions on questions to ask during the job interview with Lafayette. Defensive tackles coach Kevin Downing kept finding ways to boost the grad assistant’s confidence, including one day telling Wilkins, “‘You’re gonna be the defensive line coach here one day, at Virginia.’”
“And I’m like, ‘Dude, you’re the defensive line coach at Virginia. What are you talking about?’” Wilkins said. “Just the humbleness and the generosity. Real ‘salt of the earth’ people. I’ve been blessed to be around some great ball coaches.”
Wilkins compared the scramble of his first few days as a full-time coach to drinking water from a surging fire hose. The Leopards open spring practice later this month, with the spring game scheduled for April 30th. His wife and kids will make the trip to Easton for the first time that weekend, when they’ll begin the search for a home in the area.
Leading a position group for the first time on the practice field is a moment that Wilkins can’t wait to experience. It’ll be a day that he has spent more than a decade preparing for.
“There’s so many coaches in the world who think they deserve a shot,” he said. “I’ve been taking it in here. Talking to the players every single chance that I get. Talking to the coaches every single chance that I get. Every day, just not taking it for granted and being humble and not forgetting how I got here.”
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