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CliftonAve · 05-11-2016 08:14 AM

Great write-up by Bill Koch on UC OL Coach JB Grimes.

By Bill Koch
GoBearcats.com

CINCINNATI – JB Grimes’ path to coaching began in a dusty cotton field in Clarendon, Ark., when he was six years old.

He was working on his parents’ rented farm, riding a board on the back of a planter to make sure the seed continued to flow freely. He felt the dirt in his face and the hot sun beating down on him.

“It’s like Daddy told me one day,” Grimes said, as he tried to explain how hot it was, “‘I saw a dog chasing a rabbit and both of them was walkin.’”

Before long Grimes was chopping cotton, picking cotton and disking fields. That was all he needed to tell him he didn’t want to work in a cotton field for the rest of his life.

“I believe this,” he said, “that sometimes kids don’t know what they want to do. I’m a firm believer that you’ve got to realize what you don’t want to do first…I didn’t want to be on that cotton farm anymore and I knew I had to go and get an education to be able to do the things that I wanted to do.”

Grimes, the University of Cincinnati’s new offensive line coach, is a long way from the Arkansas cotton fields now, at least physically. Mentally, the experience has never left him. It’s the starting point as he recounts a football journey that began as a walk-on offensive lineman at Henderson State in Arkadelphia, Ark., and led to a coaching career that has spanned 40 years and taken him to 10 different schools, from the NAIA to the Southeastern Conference.

Wherever he’s been, he has always been content to coach the offensive line.

“I’m not a very good fisherman and I am a terrible golfer,” he said, “but one thing that I know how to do is I know how to teach a kid how to block somebody.”

That’s not the only reason he’s confined his career to the offensive line. A man who had to struggle to get into coaching – he calls himself “a walk-on coach”- never takes having a job for granted, so he figured if he could master the teaching of one phase of the game, he would always be marketable.

His strategy worked. He and his wife, Jennifer, have lived comfortable, if transient lives. “I tell people my wife has a drug problem,” Grimes says, “because I drug her all over the country.”

Their four kids all have college degrees and are successfully making their way in the world. His son, Nick, is tight ends coach at UC. His office is next to his dad’s.

Grimes, 60, started his career as a high school coach in Nashville, Ark. He spent one year there before moving on to Des Ark, Ark., where he also taught ninth grade girls physical education, a job that was so bad he considered getting out of coaching and enlisting in the Marines.

But before the military beckoned Grimes landed an interview for a job as a graduate assistant at Northeast Louisiana (now Louisiana-Monroe) under former Heisman Trophy winner John David Crow, who was the head coach. He was told after the interview that he had the job only to learn that the offer had been rescinded.

“I came back and was going to finish out the school year at Des Ark,” he said. “I got a call from the offensive line coach down there and he says, ‘Look, I know we told you that you have this job but you don’t. Something has happened.’ I’ll never forget this, I went down behind the gym at Des Ark and cried. It was a tough deal.

“And then I went back in and I wrote a letter to John David Crow. There must have been something in that letter – I couldn’t tell you what all I said – but I sent that handwritten letter to John David Crow. Within 10 days he was on the phone with me and they had created a position for me.”

Grimes was on his way up the coaching ladder, but that didn’t mean there weren’t more hard times ahead. At Division II Delta State in Cleveland, Miss., where he worked as the offensive line coach and dorm supervisor, he also taught four classes and was in charge of watering the fields.

“I thought that job was going to kill me,” he said.

He left for Missouri where he worked as a volunteer coach. He was married with a child, living in a trailer while Jennifer worked to support the family. When the staff was fired after one year, he was out of a job. He decided to move back to Arkansas to work in one of his brother’s restaurants when, on moving day, a dash of fortuitous timing kept him in coaching.

“We had an old Ryder truck backed up to that trailer and we loaded everything on that truck and the last thing that we took out was that phone,” Grimes said. “Just as I was fixing to pull the plug on that phone it rang and it was the head football coach at Northeast Louisiana, and he offered me a job.”

He has coached at Louisiana-Monroe, Arkansas, Delta State, Missouri, Virginia Tech, East Carolina, Mississippi State, Arkansas State, Auburn and now UC. He has coached in 17 bowl games and has seven championship rings from six different conferences - the Southland, Sun Belt, Southwest, Big East, Big 12 and SEC. He keeps the rings at a farm he and his wife own in Arkansas – no, it’s not a cotton farm – and hopes to add more rings from UC and the American Athletic Conference.

Grimes, who left Auburn after three years to work with UC head coach Tommy Tuberville, says his coaching philosophy is simple and so is his approach.

“I believe in teaching defense and fundamentals,” Grimes said. “There’s the who, there’s the how and there’s the why in coaching. Who do you block? How do you block them and why am I doing what I’m doing? The how part of it, to me, that’s the essence of coaching. That’s where it all starts.

“I believe what players are looking for is somebody that knows how to help them do their job better if they’re the right kind of player. I still love coaching. Other than pick cotton and chop cotton, it’s probably what I was born to do.”

Bill Koch covered UC Athletics for 27 years - 15 at The Cincinnati Post and 12 at The Cincinnati Enquirer - before joining the staff of GoBEARCATS.com in January, 2015 as featured columnist. Follow him on Twitter @bkoch.

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