When Caleb Small left Ben Davis last winter to pursue a head coaching position, our defending state champion football team was in need of an offensive jolt.
Enter Tyler Campbell.
Coach Campbell has an impressive resume coaching-wise. He started coaching at a middle school in Lafayette, Indiana then moved to Lafayette Jeff.
Over that same summer, he was offered a job at Jackson State University and after that, he moved to Illinois Wesleyan University. After Illinois, he got offered a coaching position with the Dallas Renegades, an XFL team. He came back to Indiana and was a head coach at two different high schools and now he is at Ben Davis leading our defending state championship offense. That’s a lot of miles for this young coach.
“I got to know coach (Russ) Mann through some video conferencing and it just seemed like a good fit when we talked about me coming here,” Campbell said. “I’m excited.”
Campbell met coach Mann at a few coaches clinics last winter and they got to know each other and helped each other improve as coaches. Once coach Small left, Mann reached out to Campbell about the position and him potentially joining the BD coaching staff. Coach Campbell liked where he was at and wasn’t particularly interested in a new job but he says “When a football program like Ben Davis reaches out and it’s one that’s statewide and you get a chance to go work in that program, you do so.”
Coach Campbell played at a small high school in Attica, Indiana. He says that small-town football is very different from what we have here at BD. There were around 30 players on his team compared to Ben Davis’s 100+ players. At Attica, most players played both sides of the ball, And it’s completely different from the football played at the Ben Davis level.
Although he comes from small-town football, he says he loves BD football and our culture here. He feels like he fits in well with the coaching staff and the players here at BD and the staff has welcomed him in and let him fit in with what the team has been doing. He also says that the players are very coachable and have a very good work ethic, which lets him coach them the best that he can.
He plans to implement a faster tempo and a heavier passing game for the Giants, who return one of the state’s top running backs in Alijah Price and a two-way player in Mark Zackery. The quarterback is new in senior Isaiah Rogers.
“We have a lot of weapons,” Campbell said. “We will get the ball into our play maker hands.”
So you can expect to see mostly the same type of play style but with a little more throwing and a faster pace in this upcoming season. The Giants host Westfield this Friday at 7 p.m. in a preseason scrimmage and then host Cathedral on August 16.