Student of the game

Russellville football coach draws inspiration from variety of sources

By Eric Moore

LITTLE ROCK — Russellville head football coach Jeff Holt has spent his life learning the sport of football.

During each stop in his career, he has picked up something that helped shape him into the coach he is today, and he is quick to point out the influence they have had on not only his career, but his life.

His journey began as a child, when his father, Tommy Holt, was the head coach at Hot Springs High School. To this day, his father remains one of his biggest influences even though Tommy Holt died of a heart attack more than 20 years ago. But it was his father who planted the seed of coaching in the impressionable mind of Holt that has blossomed into what Cyclone fans see today.

In high school, Holt was an all-star quarterback and baseball player. He received a scholarship to play football at East Texas State, but he said he didn’t like it and transferred back home. He tried to enroll at Arkansas Tech, but a rule about how many hours a student athlete must take each semester (not throughout the year, which he had covered), kept him from being able to take the field in Russellville.

So, another transfer later, Holt found himself playing baseball for WestArk Community College (now the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith). While he was fulfilling a dream of playing collegiate sports, he pursued and completed a degree in business. Holt believed business was his destiny, and for seven years he toiled away in the business sector.

The coaching bug was always there, and he finally succumbed to it at his alma mater. Holt said volunteering at Hot Springs High School was where he first got a taste of coaching.

“In 1993, I got an itch,” Holt said. “My cousin was at Prairie Grove [as an assistant coach] and after work I would drive [from Fayetteville] over there and help. I knew that was the direction I wanted to go.”

After that experience, Holt began working on his coaching and teaching certificates to be able to coach full time. His big break came just a few years later as a volunteer at Fayetteville High School underhead coach Dick Johnson.

During the day, he was the school’s business teacher, but he found himself getting more responsibility on the field as time passed. By the time Mike Adams had taken the head coaching position at Fayetteville, Holt was ready for even more of a challenge. From 1996-1998, in an era of high-powered offenses in northwest Arkansas, Holt was the Bulldogs’ offensive coordinator.

“It was a great three-year run there,” Holt said. “It was a great experience for me, and we made the playoffs all three years.”

At the end of those three years, the job at Russellville came open. At the time, the job was known as a “coach’s graveyard,” Holt said, but he couldn’t turn it down.

“They must have been out of their mind,” Holt said jokingly. “I told them ‘I don’t know why you hired me.’”

Someone in the administration at Russellville must have known what he was doing, because in the 10 years that Holt has been in charge of the program, the Cyclones have missed the playoffs just two times.

Holt draws from experiences in his career to create his game plan each week for the Cyclones. Whether it is something small he learned from his dad playing football in the backyard, or giving someone a chance like Mark Mallett did for him at Prairie Grove. The energy that his former junior high coach Jerry Clay exhibited every day is still an inspiration to him, as is the discipline set forth by his high school coach Joe Reese.

As time passes, Holt said he realizes why the coaches he worked for or played for enjoyed the game so much.

“There are a lot of great stories,” Holt said. “That’s what it’s all about, seeing the kids grow up in front of you.”

That fact is doubly true for Holt. His own children, 9-year-old Zak and 6-year-old T.J., have been “growing up on a football field.”

For he and his wife, Cherish, it’s not a matter of his children following in his footsteps, but he would like them to grow up active like he did, regardless of the sport.

With the experiences he has had in football and his family, Holt believes he is living a charmed life.

“I’m the luckiest person on Earth,” Holt said. “To fall into the jobs I’ve fallen into, I’ve been extremely blessed.”

River Valley Ozark, Pages 134 on 07/13/2008