Bob Davies, the newly appointed Head Coach for Hamline Football, has approached the program’s rebuild with a peppiness that has not been there before. Davies has had a plethora of coaching experiences, from Princeton as a quality control coach to an offensive coordinator at Carlton. The Hamline football program is focused on the process. Under Coach Davies’ guidance, the Hamline football program has focused more on the process, taking things day by day.

Davies has had a long history with football. From childhood, he was hesitant to play, but that all changed when his neighbor asked him to throw the ball for him.

“My neighbor across the street started playing for the high school team. […] he needed somebody to throw him the ball out in the street to practice,” Davies said.

Those reps of throwing the pigskin made Davies change his opinion on playing at just 13 years old.

“I would just go out and throw the ball around and really fell in love with it from there,” Davies said

That was the catalyst to make Davies start playing constantly throughout middle school and high school. After that, he joined the team at Monmouth College as a quarterback, “then just didn’t want to get a real job,” Davies said.

“I got into coaching, and here we are,” Coach Davies said.

Davies is grateful for the opportunities afforded to him throughout his career.

“I’ve been incredibly fortunate in my coaching career. I’ve been around a lot of people who are a lot smarter than me, and I’ve been even more fortunate that they took the time to teach me,” Coach Davies said. The mentors who have helped him especially were Dennis Goldman, Mike Willis, Marvin Clidura, Steve Thomas, and Jamel Matunga. As well as an additional plethora of exceptional coaches and mentors.

Before coming to Minnesota, Davies helped build a startup program at Franklin Pierce University in New Hampshire. Then he began his career in Minnesota at Carleton College, where he helped engineer one of the most dramatic offensive turnarounds in school history.

At Carleton, the Knights went from an 0–10 season to three straight 7–3 finishes, breaking every major offensive record in the process. Davies later became one of the youngest Division I offensive coordinators in the nation at Marist University in New York, where he helped revive one of the lowest-ranked offenses in the country.

While coaching at Marist University, Davies’s fiancée, now his wife, had a family member experience a health complication, causing her to go back to Minnesota.

“I finished out the season in New York, and then when the season was over, I went into my boss’s office and said, ‘Hey man, I got to go back. My wife’s in Minnesota.’ So we moved back here, and I didn’t have a job lined up or anything. It was just, well, we got to go back, and we’ll figure it out,” Davies said.

While back in Minnesota, the unknowns took over, and Davies started the job search.

“I was literally on an HR call for a sales job, for a digital marketing company, when Gustavaus called, when I got the opportunity there, and that opening came up, and thank God. So [I] ended up becoming the offensive coordinator at Gustavus Adolphus College,” Davies said.

After Davies was appointed as the Head Coach at Hamline through a rigorous hiring process, he suggested the idea that he was perfect for this position, as the relevant experience he had from programs comparable to Hamline’s current situation.

“[It’s] like taking over a startup, right? There might be guys with 10, 20, 30 years of coaching experience, but they’ve never been in that position before. I have, I was a part of a startup program out in New Hampshire. It’s been 30 years since our last winning season. I was at Carlton, where it had been 13 years since the last winning season, where they had just come off a 0 –10 season,” Davies said.

Each program has faced some sort of adversity, strengthening the coach Davis is today. His mentality comes down to this:

“Our goal is not about outcomes. Our goal is about the process. We just want to get 1% better every single day. […] Execute at a high level, to be the best version of ourselves that we can be. So much of winning and losing and football is out of your control,” Coach Davies said when asked for the team’s goal for next season. This step-by-step mentality may be the key to success that will change the future of the program.

The approach for next season can be best summed up by this:

“Turn the scoreboard off. Who cares what the scoreboard says? It’s about how you’re going about your work. Our goal is to constantly get a little bit better every single day, show up every day with a positive attitude, and be invested in what we’re doing. That’s how we’re going to approach it,” Davies said.

However, the credit for a successful season can not all be on Bob Davies; it also relies on the commitment from players, students, and the general Hamline community to be invested as well.