Wake Forest head coach Jim Grobe coaches a team of Air Force Airmen at Joint Base Balad, Iraq.

By Zach Barnett, NFF Correspondent

Summer, in the calendar of college football, is dead time. Coaches typically take vacations, shave a couple strokes off their golf games, run summer camps, and take time to relax before the grind of the season begins in August.

However, a select group of coaches chose to spend a part of their off-season not in a sand trap, but in “The Sandbox” that is Iraq.

Two groups of coaches, totaling 11 in all, representing ten conferences and two divisions made the cross-continent trip to Europe, Africa and the Middle East to visit troops stationed on the battlefront and in hospitals and hopefully raise morale in the process.

Beginning in 2008, Morale Entertainment, in conjunction with Armed Forces Entertainment has organized the trips. This year, Mack Brown (Texas), Troy Calhoun (Air Force), Jim Grobe (Wake Forest), Rick Neuheisel (UCLA), Houston Nutt (Ole Miss), Jim Tressel (Ohio State) and coach emeritus Tommy Tuberville made the eight-day trip from May 27-June 4.

Another trip, organized by the U.S. Army and Koeberle & Associates, featuring David Bailiff (Rice), Bobby Hauck (Montana), Rich Ellerson (Army), Rob Akey (Idaho) and Mickey Matthews (James Madison) arrived back in the United States in mid July.

All coaches went into the trip hoping to impact the young men and women they met overseas, and they will certainly use their experience abroad to influence the young men they interact with on a daily basis.

“We play a game; those guys are fighting a war,” Bailiff told RiceOwls.com. “When you see an 18-year old on the flight line and you see some of the responsibilities these young people have, I think it’s going to increase the responsibilities I’m going to place on some of our 18-year-olds, because they sure can handle it over there.”

One trait that the coaches and servicemen and women shared was leadership. As Brown reflected in his blog about the trip on MackBrown-TexasFootball.com, he received just as much knowledge as he gave on the excursion. Like Coach Bailiff, Brown believes he can use this to improve his team.

“I do think without a doubt I learned more about being a leader and therefore teaching others to do the same,” Brown reflected. “It was also reinforced that teamwork, passion, work ethic and family make it all work. Everyone must buy in to a common purpose. You need people who trust each other and want to be there. I do think those are key reasons we've been a consistent winner at Texas, and we can improve in all those areas.”

While in “The Sandbox” as it is called overseas, the second group of coaches ran into some heat, and it wasn’t the kind that is measured by a thermometer.

“Things have heated up for us over here in the past few days, which have been pretty tense, to say the least,” Akey told NMNathletics.com. “But it seems that having a piece of ‘back home’ over here enables them a distraction for a moment.”

For Wake Forest head coach Jim Grobe, the most impactful moment from the trip came from a conversation with a soldier who uses football to inspire him to perform a life-threatening duty day after day.

“I talked to the soldiers that their primary job was bomb diffusion,” Grobe said. “I was talking to one young man; he was a college graduate, who was doing that. My first thought was, ‘Why would you choose bomb disposal?’ I was just asking him what led him to do that. He said, ‘Coach, I’ve got to be honest with you. I look forward to doing my job every day. When I go to bed at night, I can’t wait to get up the next morning and do my job.’

“I was just blown away. I couldn’t imagine why he would want to do that. He had related to me that he played high school football and was not big enough to play at the next level. He said, ‘To be honest with you, this is the only thing I’ve found that gives me the same thrill as playing Friday night high school football.’ I just thought what a blessing for us to have guys like that who are willing to do that job.”

Air Force head coach Troy Calhoun has a connection to the armed forces that most of the other coaches do not. After his players exhaust their eligibility, they become the very people he traveled so many miles to see.

“You realize how vital leadership is,” Calhoun wrote in response to questions submitted to him. “That is what our guys study and ultimately that is what our guys will do. For the enlisted members to be well-trained, to have exceptional guidance and to have former football players that understand teamwork, diligence, respect and caring for others and do it in a way that is poised, it just puts it all in the right perspective. Ultimately it is why you coach at a service academy. It is to get our guys ready to be exceptional leaders on active duty.”

All 11 coaches would likely say they received from the troops they visited just as much as they gave to those troops, and “valuable” would not even begin to describe the experience they received from the trip. Even if they had to sacrifice some time working on their short game.

NFF