Quincy Wilson, a one-time Kennedy Award winner as West Virginia’s best high school player at Weir High, a star running back at WVU who authored one of the greatest plays in the school’s history and a former NFL running back, takes another step in fulfilling his football odyssey as he has accepted the head coaching job at Rio Grande (Ohio).

Rio Grande, an NAIA school, is renewing its football program after it had been dormant since 1949 and Wilson eagerly accepted the challenge after having spent his post-playing career as assistant director of football operations at WVU under Dana Holgorsen in 2012-15, then spent a year as an assistant at Glenville State before moving to West Virginia State

The son of the former NFL linebacker Otis Wilson with the Chicago Bears, Wilson takes his second shot at a head coaching position after a disastrous situation for four years and spent last year as running back coach at Fairmont State.

This is Wilson’s second venture into a head coaching position, the first resulting in a total disaster. He took over a second-year team at the University of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., with all the enthusiasm he could muster but soon found he had no support at the tiny school in a strip mall in the Florida resort city.

“I wanted to be a head coach so bad when I went down there that I ignored all of the red flags of ‘we don’t have this and we don’t have that’. Once I got there, it was a nightmare,” Wilson said in the press release of his hiring at Rio Grande. “But I’m looking at that whole situation there as becoming a blessing.

“It’s kind of funny. I was telling everybody, even before the announcement was made, that I’d been on the Rio Grande campus before and said that this would be a great place to have football. Maybe I spoke it into existence.”

His team at Rio Grande played exactly one game. Actually, part of one game, losing 46-2, before being stopped early due to a lack of players. The rest of the games on the schedule were either cancelled or forfeited and Wilson left with another former Mountaineer, Damon Cogdell, taking over.

Rather than being soured by the experience in Florida, the former Weir star was driven harder to get a team of his own and prove that he could run his own program.

He believes he has with Rio Grande the tools necessary to get the program going. They are going to take a patient approach, recruiting some players this fall, then adding some in January and putting together a full signing class in February so they will be ready to go in the fall of 2025.

“I think it’s been proven that it can happen,” Wilson said. “If we were trying to play this year, that would be too much of a battle. But we’re at an advantage, I think, in that we’ve got a chance to be selective about who we want to bring in. We can dive into it and develop.

“We have the opportunity to attract good players and good coaches and, if that happens, we’ll let the chips fall where they may.”

Wilson, now 43, believes he has a well-rounded coaching background now.

“You try to take something from everywhere you’ve been. The great thing is, and it cracks me up because people always say ‘the athletes are different’ but, no, it’s not the athletes. What’s different is there’s more accessibility to your kids, which means more educational stuff that we, as coaches, have to do for the players,” he said.

“It’s not like you have one meeting, explain all the rules and blah, blah, blah and go on about your business. Now, you have to have a weekly approach where you’re always selling your program and your culture. I’m big on retention – I want to keep our guys once we get them here. You don’t want to waste all the time you spend recruiting and then have them leave.

“Are you going to keep everybody? No. But we can keep the majority of them because they believe in what you’re doing, they believe in the culture and the brotherhood and they believe that they’re going to be champions one day.”

“We’re excited to welcome coach Wilson to our Rio family and look forward to the success of the football program under his guidance,” Rio Grande athletic director Jeff Lanham said. “We believe his leadership will foster a culture of hard work and team work. His vision for the program’s future aligns perfectly with our goals and aspirations. The energy and enthusiasm he brings to the role are truly inspiring and we can’t wait to see the impact he’ll make on the Rio Football program.”

Wilson was a legendary player both in high school and college.

At Weir he shared the Kennedy Award with Nitro’s legendary quarterback JR House, who today is the third base coach for the Cincinnati Reds. He was the first prep player in West Virginia history to rush for more than 3,000 yards in a single season, leading Weir to the 1998 Class AA State Championship with a 14-0 record.

In his high school career he gained 6,161 yards and scored 90 touchdowns.

At WVU he redshirted in 2000 after reconstructive knee surgery and by his senior year he was a third team AP All-American and All-Big East running back, rushing for 1,380 yards and 12 touchdowns that season.

He played 44 games in his career, gaining 2,608 yards on 474 carries and scored 12 touchdowns.

His finest moment came on a catch and run through nearly the entire defense of the No. 1 Miami Hurricanes in the Orange Bowl with two minutes to play to put the Mountaineers in position for a monumental upset.

But Miami’s All-American tight end Kellen Winslow, Jr. made an equally impossible catch on fourth down to help set up a game-winning field goal for the Hurricanes.