Teamwork is central to Bobby Brockley's life.
Growing up, Austin Peay's assistant offensive line coach always had to be part of a team. When high school ended, he knew three things: he wanted to go to college, he wanted to keep playing football and eventually, he wanted to get into coaching. The problem was size – not many college teams have need for a 165-pound linebacker or fullback.
Enter the United States Army.
"I was always intrigued by the military," Brockley said. "I didn't have a lot of opportunities to go play in college right out of high school. But I still liked being part of a team, so if I couldn't be part of a football team, I figured the military was a good occupation also. I knew getting bigger and faster would give me a chance to go play football later."
Originally planning to enlist for four years with the Marines, Brockley elected to go to the Army in the Summer of 1990, which then offered a shorter commitment (two years), more money, the opportunity to jump out of airplanes plus—more importantly—the GI Bill and a college fund. For Brockley, it was a slam dunk.
So off to Fort Benning, Ga., he went for basic training. He joined the Army on July 31, 1990. Two days later, Iraq invaded Kuwait. Talk about timing.
"At the time, I had never heard of Iraq or Kuwait – they weren't countries in the news like they are now," Brockley said. "I thought it was a psychological thing – I didn't know much about the military when I joined it. I didn't necessarily know what I was getting into. I thought they were just trying to stress us out. We didn't find out until the next day that it was the real thing."
Brockley didn't go to the Middle East at that time – after graduating basic training and airborne school, he was off to South Korea for a year, and then to Fort Campbell before getting out in 1992.
A counselor in the Army Career and Alumni Program (ACAP) turned him on to Worcester State College in Massachusetts, located a couple of hours away from his Albany, N.Y., hometown. For a veteran who served during a time of war and earned a National Defense Ribbon, he could go to school for free – and they had a football team.
So Brockley was set to return to football. The time away had done him good – he'd added 50 pounds during two years in the Army, where he spent a ton of time lifting weights and eating three high-caliber, high-protein meals each day.
Still a young man at 20 years old, Brockley confessed he was just as immature as his younger teammates and lost his starting spot as a sophomore due to a self-professed lack of discipline. Still, Brockley and his teammates led a turnaround at Worcester, taking a program that had won one game the season before his arrival and going 23-6 over the next three seasons.
"The success wasn't my doing," Brockley said. "I had great teammates. But it did reaffirm my decision that I wanted to get into coaching."
After graduating in three-and-a-half years (he put in a semester at a local community college near Albany before going to Worcester), Brockley began hunting for coaching jobs. He figured he would start out at the high school level, but also sent in an application at Siena College in upstate New York.
Siena was in an odd spot at the time. The school had dropped the program after the fall season, having only two wins in the previous three seasons, but the alumni rallied around the program and resurrected it during the spring. The head coach, Ed Zaloom, was putting together a staff on the fly and tabbed Brockley to be his defensive line coach.
After spending a year not making much money at Siena, Brockley decided to give his first career another try.
"Coming out of college, I had run up credit card bills and stuff, like college kids do," Brockley said. "I had always regretted passing on some opportunities during my first tour with the Army, so I really felt the calling to return. I wanted to give it another shot and do some things I had missed out on the first time after being in for such a short time."
So he decided to try out for the Special Forces.
A note about that: one doesn't just join the Green Beret's. Brockley estimates that about a third of the 240 or so candidates who tried out with him made the cut. It's challenging; most guys don't make it. Brockley did.
"It still wasn't necessarily a career," he says now. "I wanted to do it, but I wasn't sure if it was a career yet. Once I got in, I realized it was a good life doing something I really liked.
"It's so hard to train for, by the time you graduate the soldier to your right or left is really good. It's another example of me wanting to be part of a team. Special Forces is really a brotherhood; you might stay on the same team with a guy for three or four years. That was the best team I've ever been on."
SFAS (Special Forces Assessment and Selection) is tough, but the work was just beginning. Training includes field work, classroom training, language skills and survival school. Brockley was actually in survival school on September 11, 2001.
Brockley was first deployed to Jordan late in 2002. American arrival in Iraq was forthcoming, and he went straight from Jordan to Iraq as soon as the conflict broke out in March 2003, staying until September.
"It was different," he said. "That was my first combat experience. You always have to be cautious. You have to be on high alert. When that's not there, you're putting yourself and other people in bad circumstances. You have to keep your guard up."
All told, Brockley would do five tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. He would earn five Bronze Stars alongside numerous service and combat awards. Ever-deferential, Brockley deflected this praise to his team.
"I was very appreciative of the Bronze Stars," he said. "I did my job well, but I was always on a good team and they would put me in a position for me to do well and them to do well. If you have a good team, the soldiers will get recognized; it's kind of like football in that regard. If you're in first place in the OVC, you'll get a lot more first-team All-OVC honors than the last-place team. I was fortunate to be on good teams during that part of my deployment."
At the dawn of this decade, Brockley started thinking about the future. He would be reaching his 20th year of duty soon, and the urge to return to coaching re-entered Brockley's thoughts. Between deployments, he reached out to area coaches – Brockley has been stationed at Fort Campbell since 2001 – and Tennessee State's Rod Reed invited Brockley down to observe practice.
To Brockley, it came down to timing.
"I was hitting my 20th year," he said. "My daughter is starting kindergarten next year. I still feel relatively young and healthy. Also, I would've needed to sign up for five more years, and I would be more marketable now than I would be five years from now for a second career."
Brockley went on leave during the spring of 2014 to join the coaching staff of the Nashville Venom of the Professional Indoor Football League, helping guide the team to a PIFL title. He secured the job mostly by asking.
"They weren't advertising coaching jobs or anything," Brockley said. "But they had a team email account where you could send questions. I wrote in, explaining who I am and that I coached a long time ago, the coach got back to me and asked me to come down to their next try out, to work with the defensive linemen. I must've done good because he offered me the job. It was weird to shake off the rust, but working down there was such a valuable experience in doing that."
Getting back in on the professional level gave Brockley a steep learning curve. Coaching guys who hailed from major Division I schools, there was no time to establish a rapport – he had to show he could do the job, do it well and do it quickly.
"I had to learn a lot during that time frame because those guys were from good programs that had been around great coaches their whole careers," he said. "You can't BS them – if you say something stupid, they're going to know.
"My background and what I've done earns me a little respect at the beginning, but it only goes so far. It fades away quickly if I'm not doing the right thing."
At the same time, Brockley got in touch with Govs head coach Kirby Cannon and began working with Austin Peay's offensive line during the spring. Having tried to return to the offensive side of the ball, he was intrigued by the opportunity to switch sides with Austin Peay.
"I'll always be indebted to Coach (Billy) Back with the Venom just like I am to Coach Cannon for giving me a chance," Brockley said.
Brockley is now charged with helping facilitate the Govs turn-around. Having been involved with program revivals at Siena as a coach and Worcester as a player, it's a challenge Brockley embraces.
"I love where the program is," he said. "I'm not afraid to be a part of something that's being built. I find it appealing. It happened at Siena, it happened when I was a player at Worcester and I saw in both those circumstances that things can change and when they do it's a beautiful thing. I believe Coach Cannon is the right guy to lead the turnaround and I couldn't be more proud to be a part of his staff that's doing it."
