D3football.com Podcast 407 Extra: David Blake, Bethany (W.Va.) [0:00-5:02]

But you know what's funny being a, being a Navy guy and playing sports my whole life. I've, people start calling me Blake, even like my uncles and my family members will still call me Blake or, or DB, which is funny for my initials and, you know, I hear both a lot, you know, so, you know, and then grown up on a farm and never do what my dad's gonna say. You, you didn't play defensive back also to add to that DB. I did. I did. I played a corner at West Liberty. All right. I think also, uh, be honest with you, um, like my, uh, partner's dad is named Knight Stanley, but I would say a bunch of times people call him Stanley Knight because those are, you know, those are the names can go in the opposite order. I think kind of like yours, dude, could possibly too. I wonder if people, if anybody calls it Blake, David, because they forget which one's the first name. Yeah. I get that high school wrestling a little bit back in the day, but not too much. And that is how we introduced David Blake, the head coach of Bethany College here on this show. He joins us on the D three football calm around the nation podcast. Yeah. Maybe that's a non standard way to start the interview, but coach appreciate you taking the time to join us here today. Absolutely. I appreciate it. All right. So you're coming to Bethany. You're coming back to West Virginia, a state in which you played college football and I have to ask, you know, does, um, do you have to have? West Virginia experience to be successful coaching at a school like Bethany? I feel like, you know, Bethany's unique to me where you could throw it back all the way back to post revolutionary war and my great, great grandfather, 15 generations backs buried four miles from campus. No kidding. You know, Bethany's called, you know, the bison, well, my, my great grandfather, you know, 15 generations backs that'll settle along Buffalo Creek. And so it's kind of quite serendipitous, you know what I mean? And so yeah, definitely the West Virginia roots run deep for me. And, you know, I, I think it adds to the conversation piece, be able to recruit wealth in the state. 15 generations back. I'm just going to sidetrack on that for a hot second. Uh, I can't imagine how do you know where that, where that gravesite is? And I speak as a guy whose dad is like the family genealogist, like we have only been in this country for seven generations, and I can't imagine, you know, if that's got to be super well marked and super well known, I guess, in order for you to know where it is. Yeah. It's actually quite easy to find. I don't know if it's exactly 15, but just a general number. So he's buried in West Liberty, actually right, right off West Lib's campus. Okay. And so, you know, as a student the whole time, I never realized there was a revolutionary or soldier cemetery that right off campus. And then, you know, my aunt and I, we started digging through the genealogy stuff and, you know, it was pretty cool, so, you know, you have military service in your background as well. Yes. Indeed. Yeah. I was in the Navy almost 10 years. I flew and then I was on the Jag, in the Jag War for the last four years of it. Is the Jag War anything like it was on television? That is my only experience with, uh, you know, what I kind of feel like I was the boot leg version of Jag a little bit. You know, I was a flight engineer had an injury, couldn't fly anymore. And so, you know, so what next play? What's the play? What do you want to do? Jag core is, uh, is a legal man. So, yeah, it is funny when we're cleaning out our space the one time, I had a Harman rap autographed, you know, one of those black and white photos, the celebrities do. I had one of those actually hanging in my office as a joke. So it was, you know, yeah, you know, and the young people listening to slash watching this conversation are going to have no idea how to tie all this back until I tell people that NCIS, that show that has been on the air for 20 plus years spun off of a show named Jag that appeared on first NBC and then CBS back in the 90s. That's actually a fun watch. If you want to go back into the, uh, to the archives and find that wherever that's streaming, I assume that seems like a show that would be on prime, uh, that's a, but that's an incredible background. Tell me about, you know, then how all of that led you to come back to college football. You know what? So I was flying on deployment 2014 and, uh, had a head injury and, um, you know, I didn't think much of it and, you know, started, you know, flying more and more across that deployment and then one night I had the worst headache in my life and, you know, it didn't realize that my roommate came back in the room and see what, if I was getting ready for the flight and he fell me on the floor having a seizure and then that was the last time I ever flew in the Navy, which was, you know, October 6, 2014 and, um, you know, it was okay. All right. You know, hey, finish out deployment, get back, you know, a few months after that, you know, getting the simulator started thinking I'm going to get back on the flight schedule flying. Yeah. Well, I got my call up to the, um, the, the flights are just in the one day, he said,