This morning, Andrea Adelson of ESPN published an article that did a great job of profiling the move of first-year Virginia head coach Bronco Mendenhall from BYU to the east coast campus of UVA.
Adelson rolls out a funny five step process for coaches to move their family from one job to the next opportunity, inspired by the Mendhall's family journey starting with Step 1: Convince everyone that it is a good idea. There, Bronco talks about his wife and him consulting with their three boys.
"We allowed them to weigh in, asked them if they wanted to go -- we wanted to know what questions they had," Bronco said. "We made a pact: If we do this, we would all take it on together."
Step two, titled "Find a house" is where Adelson describes how Mendenhall's move with his family to is anything but the standard coaching move. Bronco tried to do the age-old coaching move of staying in a local hotel until they found the right house. But then Bronco, who is anything but conventional, had an idea: Why not move his family of five into an RV?
Mendenhall and wide receivers coach Marques Hagans drove an hour to pick up a 44-foot fifth wheel camper, which he then parked in front the property of the future Mendenhall property that they're currently having renovated over the course of the next five months. A few complications have been presented early on in the RV; for one, no one has figured out how the hot water works, the "kitchen" is only big enough to essentially make sandwiches, and how the sewage drains is also still a puzzle. As a solution to the water and sewage issue, the one room not being renovated in the house currently is the bathroom.
The other three steps include having a bathroom backup plan, ride horses and have egg hunts, and turn "RV cozy time into a positive".
Hagans, who went with Mendenhall to pick up the RV, notes in the article that "You'd never think a head coach of a Division I program would be living in an RV and truly enjoying it, but that's what separates him."
Head here to read the full article by Adelson, which includes great nuggets on how Bronco and his family are adjusting to the RV life and truly enjoying the experience.