 "Photo: Gary Coronado (The Palm Beach Post)")
Howard Schnellenberger is 74, and he doesn’t plan on retiring any time soon. He isn’t walking away early this time.
The legendary coach, who has made a career resurrecting football programs from the depths of near-death, is once again working his magic. Where before his mantra was rebuilding ailing programs from ash heaps, Schnellenberger is now building his own program at Florida Atlantic. And though he is nearly three-quarters of a century old, he doesn’t plan on leaving — not until he sees out the plan he started 10 years ago.
He laid the foundation to build Louisville an on-campus football stadium, a stadium that would help an emerging program grow out of the looming shadow of its historic basketball program. And though today Louisville has their own stadium, including a Howard Schnellenberger football complex, the man who built that stadium
was never able to coach his hometown Cardinals at the house he worked so hard to build.
This time, he is planning on seeing it through.
Schnellenberger ’s current team, FAU, calls Lockhart stadium, a 20,000-seat high school stadium down the road in Fort Lauderdale, home. While Saturday they will be the first team to experience the newly renovated Darrell K Royal Memorial Stadium, they soon Texas hope to someday have an on-campus stadium of their own.
FAU must travel down the road from Boca Raton, a community known more for retirement
communities and early bird specials than college football, to nearby Fort Lauderdale to play, but Schnellenberger is changing that too.
In the 10 years since Schnellenberger was brought in as FAU’s director of football operations, he has started a team from scratch, risen to the ranks of Division- IAA (now the playoff subdivision), and, only three years after entering Division-I, led the team to a banner year, winning a conference championship and a bowl game last season.
As Schnellenberger tries to better last year’s high mark he is making a final fundraising push. For his Owls to have their own nest, more money will have to stream in this season — something an upset, or even a strong showing against a national power such as Texas would certainly help. Though plans call for FAU’s stadium to be opened for the 2010 season, if more money isn’t wrangled up quickly, the timetable could be extended — knocking the opening back to the 2011 season.
But whenever the stadium opens, you can count on Schnellenberger leading his team onto
the new field — after all, Schnellenberger is the only leader the Owls have ever known. Schnellenberger was the perfect fit for a South Florida university that hasn’t yet been around a halfcentury. The former University of Miami head coach resurrected the Hurricane’s program from nearly being dropped to a national championship in his fourth season by a simple strategy: recruiting only South Florida and owning that region — a region he is now trying to milk once again to build another program.
So while he will continue to utilize the same strategy he has capitalized on for decades, Schnellenberger knows that his current situation at FAU is different.
“This one is so different,” he told ESPN last December before the Owl’s first-ever bowl game. “The others, we were working with adopted kids. These were our kids.”
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