Home schooled: Connor shines at PSU

Jeff Rice

Before Justin King and Derrick Williams made the jump from high school stars to impact freshmen at a school that simply didn’t play freshmen, a linebacker from a Pennsylvania power paved the way for them, coming to Penn State a semester early, turning heads in spring practice and seeing significant time on the field the following autumn.

He had announced his commitment to Penn State during the summer between the worst two seasons of Joe Paterno’s tenure, choosing the Nittany Lions over the likes of Michigan and Notre Dame.

“It’s a teaching environment,” Dan Connor told the Centre Daily Times in August of 2003.

That’s not an answer you hear from many recruits. Most say they chose a school because they felt they would win a national title there, or the coaches made them feel comfortable, or they were impressed with the school’s academic reputation. Rare is the player who shows excitement about the prospect of being taught the game at which he has almost always excelled.

But then, Connor had been in a teaching environment his whole life.

— — —

It was time for Jim Connor to declare a major.

It was his senior year at Widener University, a few months before Jim, an offensive lineman, would captain the school’s football team to a Division III national championship. He had studied psychology to that point. But Carol, his girlfriend at the time, knew how good he was with all kinds of people, especially young people.

“You should be a teacher and a coach,” said Carol, who was then working toward a degree in special education herself.

“All right,” Jim replied, and a teacher was born.

After graduation, Jim took a job as an assistant football coach at Swarthmore High School. Two years later, at age 24, he was the head coach. Three years later, the school merged with another and became Strath Haven High School, where Jim coached for eight more years. He made a dip into the college coaching ranks, as an assistant at Penn, Widener and Swarthmore College, before returning to Strath Haven, this time to coach the defense for his good friend, Kevin Clancy. Jim had enjoyed coaching in the college game but decided he would rather stay in one place. It was easier to do that as a high school coach.

Besides, there were enough opportunities to coach in the family. Jim had married the girl who led him into teaching, and three sons — Jim, Mike and Dan — came along. As they grew, Jim’s coaching duties expanded.

Young Jim was built like his father and was similarly at home in the trenches. A two-time all-county lineman at Strath Haven, he played center and guard at Boston College. He just finished his first season as the head coach at North Quincy High School near Boston, where he teaches history. The team, which hadn’t had a winning season in 15 years, finished 6-5.

Mike, two years younger, was a big, versatile quarterback, leading Strath Haven to a record of 41-1 as a starter before going on to play at both Delaware and Lehigh. He is currently a graduate assistant on Paterno’s staff while he works toward a degree in special education. He, too, has designs on coaching in the high school or college ranks.

Dan was the runt — so to speak. He would grow to 6-foot-3 — an inch shorter than his dad and Mike and two inches shorter than Jim. But he never played at much more than 200 pounds during high school, and was a lot lighter than that when he started playing backyard football with his brothers and their friends. Carol remembers her youngest son getting into a football stance not long after he started to walk.

“He wanted to mimic what they were doing,” Carol says. “If he wanted to play with them, he had to do what they were doing. Usually, he would mess up the game.”

But Jim and Mike and their peers didn’t mind too much. Like most older and larger siblings, they were willing participants in Dan’s football education.

“Taking a beating was not unnatural for him growing up, at all,” says Mike, “but then he got to deliver some of his own beatings to kids his age.”

Dan’s toughness came from being the youngest and the smallest in those backyard games. His knowledge of the game came both from watching his brothers and from his days as a water boy for his dad’s Widener teams.

“Dan couldn’t help but suck all that up,” his father says. “In addition to that, he was a special athlete.”

Jim had been a very good high school player, as had his two eldest sons. But, after Clancy finally convinced his reluctant defensive coordinator that Dan belonged in the starting lineup as a ninth-grader, Jim and his two elder sons began to watch the smallest Connor do things on the football field that they had never done.

“We all looked at each other like, ‘Wow,’” Jim says.

— — —

Jim Connor doesn’t yell or scream or swear at his players. He believes he can get much more accomplished by teaching them what to do the next time.

“Some coaches take on this Varsity Blues, in-your-face type style,” young Jim says. “That’s not what he’s like at all.”

If the fiery Paterno seems to fit the latter description more than the former, it’s telling to hear the elder Jim describe Penn State’s linebackers coach, Ron Vanderlinden, nearly the same way his son described him.

The Connors first met Vanderlinden, then the defensive coordinator at Maryland, when young Jim was trying to decide on a college. When Dan pondered the same decision five years later, they were pleased Vanderlinden had been charged with the restoration of “Linebacker U.”

Dan, who had been impressed with Vanderlinden at Penn State football camp, saw someone who approached the game the same way he did.

“As soon as I came here, he was exactly as I expected,” Dan says. “He’s a great coach, an attention-to-detail guy, and makes you play to the best of your ability under any circumstances. I owe everything to him.”

Dan thanked Vanderlinden as he accepted the Bednarik Award on ESPN earlier this month. It was the first time since 2004 that the award, which goes to the nation’s top defensive player, had been won by someone other than Paul Posluszny, who enjoyed a superlative linebacking career at Penn State and played alongside Connor for three seasons.

Watching Posluszny become something of a folk hero during his senior season of 2006 was one of several factors that went into Connor’s decision to pass up a shot at the NFL last spring and play his final season at Penn State.

“For three years he was kind of in Paul’s shadow,” says his brother, Jim. “He owed it to himself to come back and feel the love a little at Penn State. He wanted to be ‘the guy’ a little bit.”

He has been. Besides the Bednarik, Connor has also claimed first-team All-America honors from three different outlets, received first-team All-Big Ten honors and was named the team’s most valuable player at Penn State’s year-ending banquet.

But the title that came long before those awards -— his role as one of the team’s three captains — might have meant the most.

“He was one of the guys on the team, but he took a lot of the burden of the team on himself,” says Mike, who had a unique viewpoint as a coach and a brother. “He didn’t lead vocally or get in anyone’s face, but the guys really responded to his work ethic.”

“When Dan does speak, everybody listens,” Penn State kicker Kevin Kelly says. “Everybody takes it seriously.”

That’s because no one takes it more seriously on the field, on the practice field or in the weight room. As a leader, as a football player, Connor was a Posluszny clone.

Off the field is another matter entirely.

“Dan’s an enigma a little bit in his own right," says his brother, Jim. “He’s exactly what everyone wants as a football player. Off the field, he turns the switch and there’s not too many guys like that. Is he the class clown or a straight-arrow guy? He can show both sides, and that’s a little confusing for some people if you haven’t been around a guy like that. You might feel like you’re close with him at one point, all of a sudden he shows up in class with a fake mustache on.”

A fake mustache? Really?

“He’s got a whole box of facial hair.”

The goofy, screwball side of Connor doesn’t come out much in public, particularly since his sophomore year, when he and some teammates made prank telephone calls to Joe Sarra, former Penn State assistant. A furious Paterno suspended Connor for the first three games of the 2005 season, and Connor’s fast-rising career was abruptly put on pause.

“Here he is, on one of the big premier Division I football teams, starting as a freshman ... you could tell it got to his head a little bit,” young Jim says. “Not to the Jim McMahon and sunglasses point, but he had a little bit of swagger that he didn’t have (before). I think he would admit to that a little bit.”

But Connor, remember, came to Penn State to learn. This lesson?

“I could be a screwball,” as young Jim put it, “but I gotta watch what I’m doing.”

— — —

The Alamo Bowl will be the final game in a Penn State uniform for the Nittany Lions’ all-time tackles leader. Then it’s on to the NFL, which will likely prevent Dan from taking part in what has become a summer tradition — working with the linebackers at Strath Haven’s summer football camp.

“The kids love him,” says Mike. “And he knows the game inside and out.”

Connor’s parents and brothers could see him coaching one day. When he came to Penn State, he was leaning toward an education major. But during his sophomore year, he began to take an interest in criminal justice, and picked up his degree in that field of study last week. He’s received some good-natured family teasing for veering off the well-worn path.

“We’re a family of teachers and coaches,” young Jim says. “We don’t push it just because it’s the lifestyle that we’ve known and seen and liked ... we all kind of chose that path based on what we’ve seen.”

The elder Jim Connor never encouraged or discouraged any of his sons to become teachers.

“There are a lot of problems with this profession,” Jim says with a chuckle. “You’re never gonna get rich. But you live a nice comfortable life, and make a difference in kids’ lives. I just think it’s a pretty noble career.”

Carol admits she had some misgivings about Dan’s choice of major, but that many of them would be allayed if he decided to go into a specialized field — the FBI or the Secret Service, perhaps.

She pauses.

“My gut feeling is Dan will do something else,” she says.

Hey — she’s already identified one teacher. And that worked out pretty well for the Connor family.