New Kent State football coach Darrell Hazell working to add long-lost shine to the Golden Flashes
5/17/2011 12:00:00 AM | Football
KENT, Ohio -- Aside from a go-cart he patched together as a kid, Darrell Hazell hadn't built anything in his life.
But the summer before last, his son wanted a tree house, so Hazell dug in and got to work. There were no directions. All he had was a hammer and nails, a hand saw, an old circular saw and the self-induced pressure of not wanting the project to linger all summer.
He talked a forklift operator into loading the frame into his tree, then he and a neighbor finished the shingles in a thunderstorm.
The tree house was done in 16 days.
Now he's faced with another construction project -- again with no owner's manual, no lessons learned from having done it. In December, Hazell, 47, became head football coach at Kent State after nine stops as an assistant, most recently molding Ohio State's top pass-catchers into NFL wide receivers.
He left a program where four-loss seasons are volcanic to coach a program that hasn't won a conference title or played a bowl game in almost 40 years. There's much work to be done.
Like the tree house, he couldn't wait to get started.
Read the entire article here.
And about how Darrell Hazell ended up in Ohio here.
And what others are saying about Coach Hazell here.
