Military ties help mold USF's Leavitt

[Guest HowieP1]

Interesting article about Coach Leavitt in the St Pete Times today by Greg Auman:

Military ties help mold USF's Leavitt

By GREG AUMAN, Times Staff Writer

Published October 11, 2004

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Jim Leavitt was in the third grade when he played his first football game. His team lost, and the way Lois Leavitt tells it, her son was so disappointed that when the other boys lined up at midfield to shake hands, he ran in the other direction and hopped a fence.

It's no surprise that Leavitt's father, Pierce, brought him back and taught him an early lesson in sportsmanship. Where the game took place is more unexpected. It wasn't in Harlingen, Texas, where the USF coach was born in 1956, or in St. Petersburg, where he grew up. It was a small field near Ramstein Air Base in Germany, where his father was stationed before moving the family to Florida.

A decade later, Leavitt nearly entered the military himself, instead choosing a path in college football. But growing up in a military family helped shape the coach Leavitt has become, making him a child of adventure, a man of discipline and the leader his family expected him to be.

"Being around the military when I grew up, it made me gain an appreciation for it," said Leavitt, 47, whose Bulls host Army on Saturday. "I do recognize that these guys at Army now are doing something very, very special."

* * *

The instinctive response to Leavitt's military upbringing is to suggest it accounts for his sense of discipline and order, his adherence to rules and proper conduct.

"In a lot of ways, he's like the military, in that he doesn't take a lot of excuses and expects and demands a lot out of his players," said senior defensive tackle Matt Groelinger, who came to USF after a year at the U.S. Military Academy Preparatory School, a common precursor to West Point. "He doesn't let a lot of things slide, and he doesn't cut corners."

Leavitt's parents have a different theory.

"I think in the military, you make close friends fast, you get to know people fast," said his mother, Lois, 79, from the St. Petersburg home she and Pierce have lived in for 38 years, sitting in the same rattan chair the Leavitts bought in the Philippines when Jim was only a year old. "When he first moved here, we went up to register for school, and he was kind of discouraged the first day. He came home and said "Mom, they're not very friendly here."'

"Civilian community is a little bit different than a military community," added Pierce, 82.

Leavitt found friends in St. Petersburg, of course, and showed his first glimpse of athletic leadership when Lois got a call from his sixth-grade physical education teacher at Northwest Elementary.

"I'm talking to his teacher, Mr. Cugler, and he says, "We get these kids on teams, and Jimmy will be one of the captains, and I'll give him all the worst players, and darned if he doesn't whip them into shape,"' she said. "The idea is that he played to win, no matter who he had on his team. Anybody could win if he got them enthused enough."

Thirty years later, people would say the same thing about Leavitt as he launched a program at USF in 1997. The Bulls leapt to Division I-A in 2001, joined Conference USA in 2003 and will join the Big East in 2005.

As Lois sees it, that well-traveled sixth-grader who grew accustomed to making fast friends of strangers is the same coach who can sit in a recruit's living room and in two hours convince a family he's the man they should entrust their child to for the next five years of his life.

* * *

Pierce Leavitt went into the military because he liked to fly, and the U.S. Army Air Force, as it was called until 1947, suited him well. He flew P-51 Mustangs all over the South Pacific in World War II, running cover for bombers and supporting troops from New Guinea to northern Japan. He logged more than 7,000 hours of combat flight time, enough to earn the prestigious Command Pilot badge, and after 23 years in the Air Force, he retired as a major in 1966.

"It's a good rank," Pierce said. "They don't expect you to know anything, but they still treat you with respect."

Through his career, Leavitt's family got a taste of the world as they grew up. All four children - Randy, Diana, Rusty and Jim - were born in Texas, but when Jim was 8 months old, the family moved to Taiwan for a year, then four years in South Dakota, two in Massachusetts and a year in Germany.

"My dad, wherever we were, his big thing was observe, observe, observe," said Diana, a mother of five who lives in the Central Florida town of Mount Dora and has been married 30 years to an Air Force pilot, Ron Richards. "Every place we went had something to teach us."

Diana recalls how the family took a trip to Italy during its year at Ramstein, how she and her mother waited in the car on a rainy afternoon as Pierce and the boys went up Mount Vesuvius, then went down the wrong side. They showed up hours later, driving up to the worried Leavitt women in a limousine, having the luck to wander into the yard of the president of a local bank.

Jim Leavitt has fond memories of Ramstein, from how thick the woods were behind his family's home to how exciting and scary it was to walk down the dirt road to the local German town with his brothers. Ramstein was the place he earned his Bobcat badge, the first rank in Cub Scouts.

After Germany, Pierce wanted to retire where his children could stay in one place, and the Leavitts chose St. Petersburg to be near Lois' parents. Pierce and Lois, married 56 years, haven't moved since.

The family's military commitment would continue. Leavitt's oldest brother, Randy, flew OV-10s for the Air Force in Vietnam, commanding the small planes that served as spotters for jets. Randy is a missionary in his native Texas, and another brother, Rusty, is a Lutheran minister in Bradenton.

Jim Leavitt nearly followed Randy into the military. His grades at Dixie Hollins High were good enough that Jim was accepted into the U.S. Naval Academy.

"He got accepted Nov.10, and he had all the way until May1 to decide, and that was the Navy's mistake," Lois recalls with remarkable clarity. "Jimmy was not about to pay for college. He was going to get a scholarship, and he got one from Missouri the last weekend in April."

Asked why he opted against a future in the military, Leavitt said he knew "the discipline would be severe."

"I was pretty wild, wasn't very disciplined. I was the one in the family they couldn't figure out," he said. "I didn't know if I wanted to go in the service or not, but I respected it a great deal."

He starred in football and baseball at Missouri, then began a career in coaching there as a graduate assistant. His early years as a coach were a bit like his childhood, bouncing from Missouri to three schools in Iowa to Kansas State before settling down.

* * *

Leavitt said his best asset as a coach is his honesty, his desire to tell his players the truth whether they want to hear it or not, something instilled in him early on.

"It was always important to my dad to do things right, to be honest, to never lie," Leavitt said. "The Lord was very important. Church was very important. My brothers and sister are very good people. My parents are good people. I wouldn't say that about me. I'm more the distraction."

As healthy distractions go, few things bring the Leavitts together like Jim's football team. It's an Air Force family, but gathering at Raymond James Stadium on Saturday to see his Bulls play Army will be special. Leavitt tried to schedule Air Force at one point, said Diana, who had two of her children born on Army bases overseas.

Pierce and Lois haven't missed a home game in USF's eight seasons, and some combination of their 12 grandchildren is always there with them, "cheering for Uncle Jim," as Diana says.

Leavitt regrets that during the season, that's often as close as he gets to his family, that the same program that brings them together keeps them apart.

"My dad never needed anything more from us than to do our best," Diana said. "Just don't let anyone down by doing less. ... That's the military way we knew."

Jim visits his parents often, stopping in for a bologna sandwich, a bit of conversation, perhaps to drop off tickets before a game.

"You can't paint this picture that I'm something that I'm not," he said. "I should set other priorities. I should be more about family, should be more that way, but to be honest, what drives me more than anything else is trying to do everything you can to win football games. It's not the way most people live their life, but it's what makes me happy."

http://www.sptimes.com/2004/10/11/Sports/Military_ties_help_mo.shtml

[bulls96go]

good story

[lotsofbull99]

His team needs some Military discipline

[smazza]

oh please

our team sure doesn't play  Ã‚ like it is coached by a military man

we seem to be coached like that brat that didn't want to shake the other kids hand

how much bs does leavitt think the fans will take