Liam Coen, 39, is the new coach of the Jacksonville Jaguars. The NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars.
But you probably knew that since he’s been in the sports news for about a week now.
What you may not know is that Liam Coen’s football roots run deep right here in Rhode Island.
His grandfather, Phil Coen, was a legend on Aquidneck Island, the football captain at Boston College during his career from 1947 to 1951, a high-school coach and a part-time coach at Brown University for years.
His dad, Tim Coen, coached at South Kingstown High and La Salle Academy and started the successful football program at Salve Regina University in Newport. Talk about role models.
Liam grew up with football. One long-ago day at South Kingstown, Tim was meeting with his staff when an assistant coach noticed Liam drawing on a blackboard. Not doodling, but carefully drawing a perfect Wishbone formation. He was 4 years old.
There’s more. Instead of watching kids’ movies, he watched South Kingstown High game tapes and pretended to call the play-by-play. He put cushions on the floor while his dad watched TV and asked for passes so he could make diving catches.
“He grew up with this. He didn’t want to play with trucks and dinosaurs,” Tim told me last Friday when we spoke on the phone two hours after the Jags announced the hiring. “He loved this game. He played all day. It was fun for him. It’s what he liked to do.”
This story was reported by The Public’s Radio. You can read the entire story here.
