f leadership with longtime captain David Backes leaving via free agency, as did clutch playoff performer Troy Brouwer. And those departures came a year

Drew Mehringer went on a paintball outing with the Rutgers quarterbacks this summer. Wearing his Scarlet Knights apparel, Mehringer got asked by other paintballers whether he also played for the team.That wasnt quite as embarrassing as what happened at a football camp earlier this year. After Mehringer ran some players through drills, an opposing head coach asked what he did for Rutgers.Uh, Im the offensive coordinator, Mehringer replied.Its hard to blame anyone for being confused. At just 28 years old, Mehringer is the youngest coordinator in the Power 5 this season, and he doesnt look all that much older than some of his players.Hes also part of a growing youth movement on coaching staffs around the country. When the 2016 season started, there were 15 coordinators under 35 in the Power 5. Theyre not old enough to be president of the United States, but they could be calling plays for your favorite team.Its definitely not a taboo anymore to be a young guy, said Walt Bell, Marylands 32-year-old offensive coordinator. Even when I got my first assistant coaching job at 26, that was a big deal because I was one of the youngest coaches in the country. Now its more common.How does someone rise so fast in the coaching ranks? Why are more head coaches comfortable giving headsets to guys with nary a gray hair? The backstories of these precocious playcallers answer those questions. It takes the right early connections, sometimes years of grunt work while waiting for a big break and then taking full advantage of an opportunity.Connections: Coaching, like many other professions, is often more about who you know than what you know.Mehringer suffered a career-ending knee injury during bowl practice his freshman year at Rice. Needing to do some work for the athletic department to keep his scholarship, that January he walked into the office of the freshly-hired offensive coordinator and volunteered his services.The coordinator? Tom Herman.That began a long and fruitful relationship. Herman would later hire Mehringer as a graduate assistant at both Iowa State and Ohio State, bring him on board as receivers coach at Houston and recommend him to new Rutgers head coach Chris Ash.Coach Herman has treated me like his son, Mehringer said. He coached me hard and forced me to develop.NC State offensive coordinator Eliah Drinkwitz, 33, planned to go to law school after a shoulder injury kept him from playing college football at Arkansas Tech. Instead, his old high school coach hooked him up with an innovative young offensive whiz in Springdale, Arkansas: Gus Malzahn. That eventually led to a graduate assistant gig at Auburn and much more.Oklahoma offensive coordinator Lincoln Riley, who turned 33 on Sept. 5, was a quarterback for Texas Tech who learned the Mike Leach system inside and out. Same goes for Eric Morris, who was a receiver for the Red Raiders under Leach and now, at 30, is his alma maters offensive coordinator. Auburn offensive coordinator Rhett Lashlee, 33, is another Malzahn disciple, having played for him at Springdale High School.Larry Fedora and Blake Anderson helped give Bells career wings. Both were offensive coordinators at Middle Tennessee, where Bell played four years as a wide receiver. Fedora gave Bell his first full-time job at Southern Miss and took him to North Carolina. Anderson made Bell the offensive coordinator at Arkansas State at age 29. It was Fedora who told Maryland head coach DJ Durkin to look at Bell this winter.Im still a nobody, Bell said, but I was really a nobody before those guys took a chance on me.Sometimes the future connections are closer than you think. Iowa States Tom Manning played alongside Matt Campbell at Mount Union for one season before Campbell became his position coach. Manning ended up working for Campbell at Toledo and now is the Cyclones offensive coordinator at 33.I knew early on that coach Campbell was a special guy, Manning said. I tried to model myself around what he was doing. Hes been a great mentor.Grunt work: Their ages may make them look like overnight sensations, but many young coaches paid their dues in some lean early years.Bell spent five-and-a-half years as either a graduate assistant or quality control coach before getting promoted at Southern Miss. During that time, he says, I probably spent three of those years living in the office.Syracuse co-offensive coordinator Sean Lewis, 30, lived in the basement of the offensive line coachs house when he got his first full-time college job, coaching tight ends at Division II Nebraska-Omaha in 2010. The running backs and receivers coaches also shared rooms in the same house.Drinkwitz and his wife quit their jobs as Arkansas high school teachers so he could take that grad assistant job at Auburn. They sold their house and moved with their 3-month-old daughter into a 900-square foot apartment. Drinkwitz made less than $18,000 at Auburn, so his wife had to work and take care of the baby while he spent hours and hours at the football facility.Mehringer put in three years at Rice as a student assistant/equipment manager before four more as a graduate assistant at Iowa State and Ohio State. He just got out of debt earlier this year, he said.I worked for free for seven years, Mehringer said. It wasnt just, you show up and it happens, even if it feels that way on paper sometimes.Taking advantage: Winning begets more opportunities. Mehringer was a graduate assistant on Ohio State teams that went 24-2. When former Buckeyes assistant Everett Withers took the James Madison job, he asked Mehringer to join him. Mehringer didnt even know what position he would have when he accepted. Then he found out he was offensive coordinator, at the tender age of 26.James Madison broke several school offensive records in 2014 and made the FCS playoffs. Mehringer was then part of last years Houston team that went 13-1 and won the Peach Bowl.Bell, Drinkwitz and Lashlee all oversaw explosive attacks as coordinators at Arkansas State before breaking into the big leagues. Head coaches looking for coordinators are much more interested in yards and points per game than any numbers on a birth certificate.Younger guys will continue to get opportunities as long as the ones who get them are successful, Ash said. I never saw a description of a good coach in a book that said he has to be a certain age.The young coordinators might not have the wealth of experiences upon which a 25-year veteran in the industry can draw. On the flip side, they can often bring youthful energy to the table.I think one reason teams are angling toward younger guys is because theyre single and theyve got no excuse to not be working, Bell said. Im here every day at 4:30 or 5 in the morning. Ive got nothing else in my life thats going to take precedent over me doing a good job.I think, at the end of the day, a lot of that plays into it. Coaches want to know theyve got a guy on staff whos not going to be distracted by anything else and that this is his life.Ash said that being able to relate to young players, especially recruits, is incredibly important.Like the Pokemon Go thing, Ash said. I dont know anything about it, but [Mehringer] knows everything about it. He can talk to the players and talk to recruits about that.Syracuses Lewis said he recently bought the new Drake album the day it came out, just as most of his players did. He has had players come over to his house and challenge him on Xbox.We can talk about a lot of things outside of football, Lewis said. It helps bring down that barrier a little bit, so guys have trust and then are willing to believe what youre selling. And then I think they play that much harder for you.Their early arrival as Power 5 coordinators obviously have many of these young coaches on the career fast track. Marylands Bell has aspirations to be a head coach when hes still as young as his current boss, the 38-year-old Durkin.Ive got really big goals, he said. Im in a rush. I always have been.Rutgers Mehringer is more of a live-in-the moment guy. Some of that is because he accidentally fell into coaching. Much of it stems from a serious head injury he suffered in 2008. A fall in a parking lot outside a Van Halen concert left him with a subdural hematoma. He had emergency brain surgery and was unconscious for three days afterward. He could have died or faced long-term mental health issues.Im blessed to be here and just alive in general, he said. So I dont look past today.Luckily for him and a lot of his peers, today is as good a time as ever to be a young coach on the rise.I think its a positive that no matter age, race or backgrounds, coaches are getting a spot at the table, Lewis said. And if they doing a good job, theyre getting rewarded for that. 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To suggest this is an intriguing season for the St. Louis Blues would be understating things.This is a team, I would humbly opine, that is at an interesting crossroads.After reaching the Western Conference finals last season and unburdening themselves of some playoff demons in doing so, the Blues finally turned a powerhouse regular season into a spring of substance.But of interest to me now is where this team goes from here. Are the Blues taking that next step? Or is their window beginning to close? For one, this is Ken Hitchcocks last season behind the St. Louis bench -- with the team making the unusual arrangement that newly hired associate coach Mike Yeo will take over next season.Theres also the transition of leadership with longtime captain David Backes leaving via free agency, as did clutch playoff performer Troy Brouwer. And those departures came a year after star winger?T.J. Oshie was traded.This, more than ever, is now the team of new captain Alex Pietrangelo as well as Alexander Steen, one of the teams alternate captains and respected leaders.A bit of a change -- obviously Backes was the big piece that was here for a while, Pietrangelo said over the phone Wednesday from Edmonton. But if you look at the fact that Hitch is still here, you got myself, Steener, [Kevin Shattenkirk], [Patrik Berglund], [Jaden Schwartz] -- theres a bunch of guys, pretty much the same core thats been here a long stretch. While there has been change, at the same time for the most part its the same group of guys, with the same coaching philosophies. Pretty much the same identity weve had, just a bit younger.Yes, the core is a bit younger. Which is a good thing. Superstar winger Vladimir Tarasenko can take more ownership now of this team, ditto for two-way winger Schwartz. Center Paul Stastny has been terrific early on this season, feeding off his solid playoff performance of last spring.Nobody is going to pretend to be Backes, the fiery leader who would drop the gloves at a moments notice, the ultimate alpha male who left it all on the ice for the Blues over 10 seasons.But there are other ways to lead, too.Im not going to change who I am, said Pietrangelo, who last month helped Team Canada win the World Cup. I said the same thing to the guys: If Im not who I usually am, I expect these guys to let me know. Obviously, they gave me the C because they dont mind who I am. Im going to continue to be the same person. Im not going to change my personality.Nor are the Blues changing how they play all that much. Sure, they want to be a bit faster -- the San Jose Sharks made them look sllow while beating them in the conference finals -- but this is still Blues hockey that can suffocate you by coming in waves.dddddddddddd Theyre off to a fast start with seven out of eight points in four games.Theyre big, skilled and play a heavy game, said one Western Conference general manager who recently saw them play. This is still Hitchs team, so they play his style of hockey.The players insist having Hitchcocks replacement standing next to him during every game is no big deal.When you think about it, obviously its an odd situation, but Mike has been great, Pietrangelo said. Hes the first one to tell you that Hitch is the coach. The best part about Mike, he even told me and some of the other guys, he wants to learn from Hitch and wants to take this year to understand why a guy like Hitch has been so successful. You know, Im treating Hitch as the head coach and Mike is the assistant. It starts with me. If I dont do that, its not fair to Hitch. Different dynamic, obviously, but well deal with the transition in the summer when the time comes. So far it really hasnt come up. Mike has been nothing but professional, and that makes it a lot easier.Former executive Craig Button doesnt see anything unusual about the arrangement.This is a good succession plan, said Button, a former GM of the?Calgary Flames. Organizations, outside professional sports teams, do it all the time and it is not only important, it allows for an orderly transition. We only hear of firings in sport, and then that leads to other changes and the inevitable feeling-out process for players and coaching staff.There will be familiarity with Mike for the players, it will allow Mike to know the players better and, most importantly, it doesnt force player changes based on lack of knowledge. A new coach that knows the team can keep the group moving forward and continue the process that Doug believes in.A long season is ahead. But the intrigue with this team is undeniable. Can they take the next step?We made some big strides last year getting to the Western Conference finals, but after that excitement, and knowing we made it that far, that wears off and you wonder what went wrong [after losing] and how you get to that next level,? Pietrangelo said. That was a big topic of conversation throughout the summer and going into the season.The big thing for us is building and getting to our best hockey as quickly as we can and carrying that into the playoffs like we did last year. ' ' '