MORGANTOWN — New West Virginia cornerbacks coach Jahmile Addae is happy to be back where he spent his college days and where his coaching career began, but he hopes one thing is different — people pronounce his name correctly.
“With the players, I believe I have some credibility since I played here, and the same with the fans — I’ve had my name called, though wrongly most of the time,” Addae said, laughing. “But making this transition back to a place I’m this familiar with definitely makes things easier.”
Jahmile Addae, pronounced ‘juh-mile uh-dye,’ was a hard-hitting safety for the Mountaineers from 2002-’05, playing the back-end free safety in Jeff Casteel’s 3-3-5 stack scheme. His position coach during that time, though, was Tony Gibson, who was WVU’s defensive coordinator from 2014-’18. He was not retained at West Virginia and is now the co-defensive coordinator at N.C. State.
Still, Addae kept in contact with Gibson throughout his career. Both worked together at West Virginia in 2007 when Addae was a video graduate assistant and then again at Michigan from 2008-’09 before Addae broke off to become the running backs coach
at Cincinnati.
Now, Addae isn’t going to seek personnel advice from his former coach, even though Gibson coached most of them last season.
“I’ve talked to coach Gibson my entire career — I played for him, was a GA for him, was a quality control for him … I babysat his kids, I cut his yard, I washed his car,” Addae joked. “He’s a big part of my development as a young coach coming up within the profession, so we do talk often. A lot of the time, it’s about football, but not this time.
“It’s just been, ‘How you doings,’ stuff like that. I’ve tried to stay away from the football aspect of it.”
The biggest reason is Addae wants to make his own evaluations from scratch with what he has rather than relying on the previous regime.
“Not that I don’t trust coach Gibson, but what we’re asking them to do may be a little different than what they’ve done here in the past.”
