Besides coaching sports at Ohio, baseball coach Joe Carbone, golf coach Bob Cooley and club hockey coach Dan Morris share at least one other commonality: Their alma mater is also their employer.
All three head coaches spent their undergraduate years in Athens and later returned to take on a different role on their former teams.
In addition to returning to their teams, they also moved back to Athens. Though they returned for different reasons, all have similar feelings about the city.
Cooley has the closest relationship with Athens. He grew up in the city, and he and his family experienced the successful Ohio athletic teams of the 1960s, he said.
The university's always kind of dominated everything as far as things to do in this town because we're out in the middle of nowhere
Cooley said. When I was growing up we went to the basketball games; we went to the football games and did all that.
After graduating from Athens High School in 1966, his desire to be a part of the thriving Ohio athletics program prompted him to enroll in the university and join the golf team. He played for three years and helped the team earn two Mid-American Conference championships.
When Carbone came to Ohio from a small town in Pennsylvania in the mid-'60s, the size of the university overwhelmed him, he said. But after four years as an undergraduate student and 17 years as a coach, Carbone has warmed up to Athens.
To me coming to Athens - this is probably hard to believe - coming from a real small town of like 1
000 people ... the university was big to me
Carbone said. Now to me it's not nearly as big. It's very comfortable -- small
but comfortable.
When Morris was a student-athlete in the mid-'90s, he spent so much time in Athens that people thought he was from the area.
One of the things that I wanted to do when I came down here was not just be a student and kind of feed off of what the student life had to offer
Morris said, but also to get involved with the community. A lot of my friends
roommates
were from Athens. We'd hang out together
and people would assume that I was an Athens native.
Carbone, Cooley and Morris all had different motivations for coming back to Athens. After graduating, Carbone signed with Kansas City and played in their organization for awhile before spending 17 years as an assistant coach for Ohio State, Marshall and Toledo. He returned to Ohio to take the head coaching job in 1988.
I had the best four years of my life here as a student
Carbone said. I had a great experience as a student and as an athlete. When I had the opportunity to come back here and coach
