New safeties coach Joe DeForest's journey to NC State
NC State football’s new safeties coach Joe DeForest had a bit of an unusual path to reaching Raleigh, as he explained to Jeff Gravley of GoPack.com.
For one, he was a two-sport player in college. He was drafted out of high school to be a pitcher but chose to go to what was then called the University of Southwest Louisiana (now Louisiana at Lafayette), so he could play both football and baseball.
He played well enough on the gridiron to get a shot with the Houston Oilers and New Orleans Saints in the NFL coming out of college, and he played a little bit with the Calgary Stampeders of the CFL.
From there he moved to Titusville, Fla., and like many in the town he went to work for NASA.
“I was a logistics engineer at NASA,” DeForest explained. “Titusville, Fla., is like a coal-mining town for NASA. Fifty-thousand people, 40,000 work at NASA or a subsidiary of NASA. My wife’s father was a big-time, higher-up at NASA.
“Got involved in it and loved it, started working at NASA. What I did is I handled everything that went from the launch pad to the firing room, but I handled people. I’m not that smart. I managed people.”
While doing that, DeForest began as a volunteer assistant at Titusville High School, and as he described it, “got the bug.” He took a friend up on an offer to become a graduate assistant at Rice in 1990 when Fred Goldsmith was the coach. Goldsmith went to Duke in 1994, and DeForest came with him as the linebackers coach/special teams coordinator.
In 2001, DeForest was hired as the defensive backs coach/special teams coordinator for Les Miles at Oklahoma State. Miles left after the 2004 season to take a job at LSU, and DeForest had a decision, and he decided to pull off a rarity in college football coaching.
“They gave me an opportunity to be the assistant head coach [at Oklahoma State], and I decided I was going to stay,” DeForest recalled. “When I did stay, I told my daughter I would promise you I would keep you in the same school if I can help it.
“My greatest coaching accomplishment is she went from the first grade to 12th grade at the same school.”
After stops at West Virginia, Kansas and Southern Cal, DeForest was hired in December to become NC State’s new safeties coach. He noted most of his family lives in Florida, so returning to the East Coast was a plus for him.
“I’m excited to coach the secondary again,” he added. “The last couple of stops I was a special teams guy, outside linebackers guy. I love coaching the secondary.”
DeForest is also hoping to help recharge NC State on the recruiting trail with a simple pitch to prospects: come visit.
“My job is to get you on campus,” he explained. “If I can get you to come on campus, I expect the campus and the atmosphere and the people to sell the program, not me.
“You got coaches from every way of life telling you this is the best place to be. Well, let you come on campus and you figure it out. It’s a gut feeling. Recruiting is a gut feeling.”
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