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Pete Thamel, ESPN
ANNAPOLIS, Md. — Brian Newberry, the first-year head coach at Navy, reads a meditation from Marcus Aurelius every day. His summer reading list included “The Inner Game of Tennis” — long endorsed by Pete Carroll for the thinking football coach — and he’s a devout follower of John Wooden’s sporting philosophy.
With a bushy white beard and a résumé that includes amateur photography and being a tour guide at Glacier National Park, Newberry’s background isn’t from the academy handbook. After all, he’s from a landlocked state (Oklahoma) and once left the football coaching profession for six months and pondered applying to the Rocky Mountain School of Photography.
Newberry’s affinity for photography, nurtured from his time at Glacier, has taught him that light can often change perspective. And while he doesn’t fit the buzz-cut portrait of an academy coach, he has the opportunity to deliver Navy football into a new light.
The country will get a high-profile close-up of Newberry on Saturday. His debut after being elevated from Navy’s defensive coordinator comes in Dublin, Ireland, against No. 13 Notre Dame, the highest-profile game of Week 0 of the college football season.
While his look may be out of the military school paradigm, his hard-earned path to this spot and mentality will resonate with Navy fans.
“My philosophy and mentality is the same as when I was a defensive coordinator,” Newberry said. “We’re going to be super aggressive. We have nothing to lose.”
Newberry’s path here came after a modest playing career at Baylor was curtailed by injuries. By earning his degree in education there in 1998, he became the first member of his family to graduate from college.
His first job was at Glacier National Park in Montana, giving guided Red Bus tours in vintage 1930s convertible buses. Newberry would drive a nearly 35-mile road through the park, through the Rockies, over the continental divide and deliver a Going-To-The-Sun Road Tour.
He had about two weeks to prepare, which is a short time for a park with a long history. He admits to fumbling his first few attempts. “I was a horrible tour guide,” he said. “I got better as I went.”
He also picked up photography, joking that he joined Instagram back in 2011 when it was more of a place for photographers to showcase their work than a social media platform. His Instagram features snowscapes, skies with a kaleidoscope of colors, rustic farms, beaches at sunset and the occasional breathtaking mountain landscape, along with portraits of his family, including his wife, Heather, and three daughters.
He still has a Nikon 750 that he fiddles with in his free time. But he began experimenting in and around Glacier, where the area near the Many Glacier Hotel remains his favorite.
“The way you look at light and the way it hits things, and it just changes you,” Newberry said. “You’re more perceptive of your surroundings a little bit.”
The hobby shines a light on Newberry’s coaching style.
“I think I’m a little more Type B than the Type A, which is probably unusual for coaches,” Newberry told ESPN in his office this spring. “Most of them are pretty organized, and that’s not a strong suit for me. It hasn’t been, and I’ve had to develop. So I think the creativity piece is something that I may be pretty good at.”
And Newberry realized after dabbling in teaching that he could perhaps apply some of that creativity in coaching. He was recruited to Baylor by Grant Teaff, who helped him after Newberry sent letters to nearly every coach in the country.
Southern Arkansas coach Steve Roberts answered, and Newberry began a bootstrap career in Magnolia, Arkansas. While the surroundings and pay were modest, the experience was invaluable.
Roberts’ program ran the wishbone, as option football in some form has wound through Newberry’s career. And he soon found out how to operate as an underdog.
“We didn’t have the biggest budget, the best facilities,” Roberts said in a phone interview. “We did a lot of that ourselves — painting the fields or building meeting rooms or making 125 lockers for a locker room. We did it all. Brian was a part of that.”
Newberry’s path includes nearly two decades at lower levels before his first FBS job at Navy, which hired him as the defensive coordinator for the 2019 season. He bounced through Washington & Lee, Lehigh, back to Washington & Lee, Elon, Sewanee, Northern Michigan and Kennesaw State.
Newberry is appreciative of his long and winding path.
“I needed to be a GA and get beat down and cut grass and paint fields and clean bathrooms and locker rooms and do all that stuff,” Newberry said. “But it was awesome for me because as a GA at Southern Arkansas, I had a recruiting area. I ran a room early on. Most don’t get to do that. In retrospect, that was the best thing that could possibly happen to me. ‘Cause I got humbled a little bit and I did a lot of groundwork, which I needed to do.”
Newberry worked as the defensive coordinator for Ken Niumatalolo, the former Navy coach for whom he holds a strong appreciation. Newberry’s team will have some traits of those Navy teams and also new twists: an aggressive defense under new coordinator P.J. Volker and some new wrinkles in the option offense under new offensive coordinator Grant Chesnut, who comes from Kennesaw.
“I’ve coached a lot of places where we had to do more with less, so to speak,” Newberry said. “And that’s certainly the case here. The players know that we have to be the closest team in the country. We have to be the most disciplined team in the country. We got to be tougher than everybody else. We’ve got to play harder than everybody else.”
Whether or not those intangibles come together will unfold in front of millions on Saturday. Navy is a 21-point underdog to Notre Dame, as Newberry has a grand stage to unveil the new-look Midshipmen.
“In the right light at the right time,” Newberry said of the lessons from photography, “everything is extraordinary.”
And on Saturday in Dublin, Navy will try any way possible to deliver a memorable picture in the first snapshot the country will get of its first-year coach.