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MORGANTOWN -- It was one of those moments that come about strictly from happenstance, a moment that made you do a double take and simply add to the value of the story you had been planning to write out of West Virginia’s football interviews on Friday.
Offensive line coach Rick Trickett had just finished his turn at the microphone and gathered his 78-year-old body to take back into his office to watch film from the day’s practice.
Being 78 and still an active on-field coach was reason enough for a story but circumstances had set it up so that this gray-haired man/child was put in position to get a college freshman, probably 19, ready to start for the Mountaineers.
It obviously was the ultimate generation gap story of the year in college football, but something was missing to make it sing.
Then, as Trickett was leaving, senior wide receiver Jaden Bray came in for his interview. He was wearing a yellow T-shirt with the lettering reading “Just a Kid From Norman.”
If that didn’t illustrate where we were going today, that being how does a 78-year-old coach from the Vietnam War era, who had seen the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show and watched Jim Brown run with the football, communicate with today’s kids who sing different songs, send texts and e-mails rather than writing letters and play a game that seems similar to one Trickett grew up with only in that they block and tackle.
The emphasis increased dramatically when Bray talked about what it’s like for him to be the oldest guy in the receiver’s room and how he was helping the young players through their learning curve while the message Trickett had left from his session was still echoing through the room.
“I’m still a kid,” he said. “I just went and bought me a new motorcycle and I was coming back from Romney and I was buzzing by these cars at about 80 miles an hour and hitting those curves and thinking, ‘If they knew that was a 78-year-old football coach for West Virginia, they’d probably die.'”
Trickett understands that times have changed, but he’s not ready to admit that football has.
“I’ll tell you what I did the other day. I came in and I told them you guys don’t understand when I was 18, there was a difference. That’s a 60-year gap between when you are 18 and I was. So I put on a video about what it was like when I was 18 and them … Vietnam, the hippies and all that,” he said.
“I told them I know what it’s like to be 18. I don’t know what it’s like to be 18 now. I wouldn’t want to be kid right now. Those phones! I lost two of them the other day. Still ain’t found one of them and the other got picked up over by Ruby (Hospital) and was turned in to the (West Virginia) State Police and they got it back to me.
“They live on those cell phones. There’s no cell phones in my meetings, earrings,” he continued, not differentiating the jewelry earrings from the ear rings of a phone. “When I first got here they said they were all eating together and they were, but they were all talking on the phone, so I got on them a little bit and now they are still eating together but they are talking to each other.
“I just think if we can teach them to communicate and not rely on that dadgum thing they will be better off, because you still have to deal with people. You have to learn how to do that.”
But he isn’t worried about the generation gap as much as he is about the B-gap in football.
“I let the worry about handling it,” he said, laughing. “We know what wins. I know how to win and I’m not going to lower the bar for anybody.”
But Trickett admitted he wasn’t being totally truthful there.
“Sometimes you explain to them a little bit more. You have to show them why. It’s just like pro guys. If you go up and show a pro player why something will make them better, then they buy into it. I think these kids know they’ve seen improvement in themselves.”
The freshman Brown, of course, is the big prospect of camp as he tries to get him ready to open the season as a true freshman starter.
“He’s physically ready, but more than anything, he’s got a certain level of maturity, football maturity that you don’t typically see in a true freshman,” head coach Rich Rodriguez said. “I kind of knew that when we signed him. He’s been what we thought he would be. He’ll keep getting better, too.”
The chore of preparing him for that isn’t as daunting as it may seem.
“I think I’ve had 13 freshman All-Americans,” Trickett said, rattling off names until he got so far back even he couldn’t remember the names. “I had two true freshmen start for me last year at Jacksonville State. I’ve known how to dumb it down a little bit for the kids to keep it simple for them to pick up.”
Someone asked Trickett about Brown, who committed to Penn State originally but switched to West Virginia when the Nittany Lions fired James Franklin, and if he had a chance to be a great player.
“You guys throw that word great around an awful lot,” he answered. “He has a chance to be a good player right away, a chance to be a good player. In another year or so he has a chance to be a really good player. He’s a competitive guy. I love his attitude. He’s the first guy out for everything, one of the first guys in the building every day, but again, he’s a freshman and has a lot to learn.”
And he’s got three weeks to teach it to him.