Growing up playing athletics, Mike Tomlin didn’t dream of being a head coach in the NFL someday. No, that was not his aspiration. He wanted to be a star wide receiver. Along the way in his quest to be a great wide receiver, however, he also learned the skills necessary to be a great coach, and now here we are decades later.
Tomlin recently recounted his journey in conversation with Carl Francis and Vernon Lee, the co-founders of the Hampton Road Youth Foundation. “I had bigtime football playing aspirations, so for a lot of my playing years, I was miserable”, he said, “because it wasn’t unfolding in the ways in which I envisioned it”.