MORGANTOWN — When patrolling the sideline at Milan Puskar Stadium, Neal Brown is fully in head coach mode. When in the stands at Lynch Field at Mylan Park, however, the WVU football head coach is just another dad watching his daughter.
This spring, Brown would go through his own football practices in the morning and then spend his evenings at Mylan Park, watching his oldest daughter, Adalyn, play for the University High School softball team.
“I’ll miss a little bit on the weekends. If they’re playing on Saturday, and we practice, I’ll miss,” Brown said during an interview with The Dominion Post. “But other than that I’m at most of those events.”
The Hawks had a historic season, advancing to the state tournament for just the second time in school history and claiming the program’s first state championship with a 10-0 win over Washington last month.
“That was fun,” Brown said. “A very cool parenting experience. In high school, I was very fortunate to have a good run on some really good teams, but we never won a state championship, and so to watch my daughter do that was very cool.”
University softball was a strong team this season, but the state title came as a bit of a surprise as the Hawks were made up almost exclusively of underclassmen. That included Adalyn, a sophomore outfielder for the Hawks who hit .265 with 10 stolen bases and 26 runs scored.
Brown missed a couple of games in the sectional tournament but otherwise was along for the Hawks’ entire playoff run, including the two-day state tournament in South Charleston.
“I was able to see, really the end of the section all the way through every game of the region and state,” Brown said. “So the timing of it worked out well. It wouldn’t matter what I had going on.”
With Brown being around the team so much, he said the novelty of him being the WVU football coach wore off and he was pretty quickly treated just as any other father.
“You play (high school) and you play travel (softball), and so by the time you get to the state tournament, the people that are here in Morgantown, they don’t think anything of it,” Brown said. “The girls on Adalyn’s team, they think ‘That’s Adalyn’s dad’ or whatever. Maybe the first time they’re thinking, ‘Oh, that’s West Virginia’s football coach’ but really after that, it’s, ‘That’s Adalyn’s dad.’”
Brown said the only time he does get a reaction out of people is if the team is on the road outside of Morgantown, like in South Charleston for the state tournament, and even then people don’t make that big of a fuss about him.
“I try to be as incognito as possible,” Brown admitted. “I don’t wear West Virginia (clothes). All good interactions and the people down in Charleston, they did a great job running that event.”
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