The Old Dominion Athletic Conference soon will have a new football team, and it will have a coach who’s familiar to fans around Virginia.
Roanoke College, which hasn’t had a football team since 1942, announced that it will reinstate the sport under head coach Bryan Stinespring, who has been the associate head coach and an offensive assistant at Virginia Military Institute under Danny Rocco.
Stinespring spent 26 years on Frank Beamer’s Virginia Tech staff.
“We are very fortunate to get a person with Coach Stinespring’s background and experience,” Maroons athletic director Curtis Campbell said in a release. “He is a Virginia native and has established relationships with high school and college coaches throughout the state. Coach Stinespring has name recognition in southwest Virginia, and that will be very important with getting our first recruiting class and establishing our program. We have a great group of coaches on staff, and he will be a welcomed addition.”
Roanoke hasn’t had a football team since 1942, when it was forced to disband the program because of the constraints of World War II. This summer, the school announced it had raised $1.3 million to support the return of football, cheerleading and a marching band.
“It is an honor and a privilege to stand before you as the head football coach of Roanoke College,” Stinespring said Monday at a press conference. “Roanoke has been a second home for me for a long time.”
Stinespring, who grew up in Clifton Forge, graduated from James Madison, where he was a walk-on football player in the early 1980s, and gained a master’s in education administration from Virginia Tech. Beginning as a graduate assistant at Tech, he was hired into his first full-time coaching role under Beamer in 1992, and he stayed with the Hokies for more than a quarter-century. The Hokies gained eight BCS bowl appearances in that span and advanced to 23 consecutive bowls.
Stinespring also coached at JMU, Delaware, Old Dominion and Maryland, as well as VMI.