You have to work: Through family tragedies, USFs Steve Ellis triumphs by remembering his up

In the spring of 2006, Steve Ellis called anybody he could in the coaching community.

A young defensive coach at Nicholls State, he wanted to spend spring break visiting other coaching staffs to learn anything he could. So he got on the phone and called everyone he could think of. He would pay for the trip on his own dime, from the little money a Football Championship Subdivision assistant made. He wanted to work and he wanted to learn.

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The next day, Ellis had a message on his phone from Charlie Strong, the defensive coordinator at Florida. Strong told Ellis what days the Gators would be practicing and that he was welcome to come over.

“I didn’t know he was at Nicholls State when I called back,” Strong says now. “He wanted to meet me.”

A few years prior, Ellis’ head coach at Nicholls, Jay Thomas, had told him to pick three outside coaches to look up to and emulate. One was then-Minnesota Vikings defensive coordinator Mike Tomlin. One was then-Michigan defensive coordinator Ron English. The other was Strong. Of all people to respond to this message, here was an idol.

“Damn! Charlie Strong called me back!” Ellis remembers thinking. “I was like a kid in a candy store.”

Spring break came, and Ellis went on a tour that hit Georgia Tech, Auburn, Tuskegee and Tulane. Florida canceled practice at the end of the week due to weather, but Ellis had a new mentor.

“He asked a lot of questions, which is good,” Strong says. “He wanted that conversation. When you’re around someone who asks a lot of questions, they’re really locked in and they want to hear what you have to say. It’s amazing how he went about it.”

Do it yourself. Put in the work. It’s all Ellis has ever known.

Ellis grew up poor in rural Mississippi. Family, work and football were all he had. Raised by a father who left school after sixth grade to start working and often struggled to read and write, Ellis and his two brothers were taught to work, work, work. All three sons earned football scholarships, but only Ellis graduated.

Through those lessons from his father, he learned to rely on himself as he advanced in life and experienced a series of tragedies, from his father’s death, to a career-ending football injury, to the destruction of his family home because of Hurricane Katrina. From offering to help raise his nephews after his brother’s wife died, to his mother’s death and through more recent tragedy, Ellis has forged forward, never letting circumstance keep him down.

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Last winter, he decided to actively look for a move up in coaching for the first time. He spent a decade as Middle Tennessee’s cornerbacks coach, but once all three of his nephews went to college, he pursued a move upward.

And there was Strong, who hired Ellis to be the defensive backs coach at South Florida. Through four weeks this season, USF leads the nation with 11 takeaways, thanks to eight in the most recent game against South Carolina State.

Along the way, Ellis has developed several NFL Draft picks from small schools. The deep relationships he’s formed with players are not just a product of the bond between coach and player. They’re a product of the connection of struggle, the empathy of tragedy and the ties of family.

“He’s been through a lot, and the players see where he comes from,” Strong says. “They sit down and talk about their struggles and what they’ve gone through.”

If Ellis made it this far from where he started, he’ll convince you there are no limits.

As a kid, Ellis remembers waking up at 2 a.m. to find his mother, Dorothy, washing his youth baseball jersey in the sink. The family didn’t have a washer or dryer, so if he slid and got dirt stains on his jersey on Friday night, she washed it overnight. He might end up wearing a wet jersey on Saturday, but it sure looked clean.

Stringer, Miss., is a tiny town in the southern part of the state with a population of less than 3,000. Jasper County’s poverty rate is nearly 24 percent, according to the Census Bureau.

“We’re in the country,” Ellis says in his baritone Mississippi drawl. He emphasizes the remoteness, 30 minutes from a gas station or a grocery store. The family didn’t have cable TV until he was a high school senior. He didn’t leave the state until college.

They lived in a house built by his father, Sammy Lee, on farmland passed down within the family. The walls didn’t look great, so Ellis covered his bedroom walls with preseason football magazine cutouts. Before school, the brothers had to feed the hogs, feed the cows and break up firewood. That meant getting up at 4:30 in the morning, two hours before they headed to school.

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“All the food we ate, we grew it or killed it,” Steve says.

They didn’t have much, but they had football. As Sammy Jr. and Mark played high school sports, the much younger Steve was the water boy, around the game from an early age. He saw the locker room, he experienced multiple state championships and he rode back from games with his brothers, all before he played himself. If the brothers wanted to work on stiff-arms or tackling, Steve was the dummy. But he wouldn’t be a pushover. They had to compete. Father’s orders.

“He learned so much,” Sammy Jr. says. “When Southern Miss recruited me, he saw so much.”

Sammy Lee gave the boys three options when high school ended: They could join the military, get a college scholarship or get a job. They had to leave the house. Just as Sammy Lee had started to care take of himself from an early age, the kids would, too.

Sammy Jr., one of the top quarterbacks in the state at the time in the mid-1980s, went to Southern Miss. Mark played at a community college.

Near the end of Steve’s high school senior season in 1997, their father suffered a stroke. He hadn’t been feeling well and scheduled a doctor’s appointment, but he decided not to go. He said he was fine. There was work to be done. The next day, the stroke hit.

“We ain’t never seen our dad sick,” Mark Ellis says. “We went to the hospital, and when his three boys walked into the room, we’d never seen our dad cry, and he broke down. Us boys had never seen him down. He didn’t want his boys to see him down like that.”

Sammy Lee was as tough as they come. He spent more than two decades working in a manufacturing plant. After the stroke, he was bedridden until he died in August 1998, right as Steve was set to leave for Nicholls in Thibodaux, Louisiana, where he earned a football scholarship.

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Steve was so heartbroken that he didn’t want to go. He couldn’t stop crying. After the older brothers had left for college, it was just Steve and his parents throughout his school years.

Sammy Jr. convinced him to follow through. It’s what their father would have wanted.

“He set a standard for us,” Steve says. He had to live up to it.

Steve Ellis was a three-year starter at cornerback for the Colonels from 1998-2001. He couldn’t afford to pay for summer school for himself, so he spent summers working at the same plant where his dad had worked back in Mississippi. “Real manual labor,” as Ellis describes it.

He performed well on the field. Ellis earned all-conference honors three times. But a devastating knee injury, suffered while trying to cut on a muddy field, ended his playing days. He tore his ACL, PCL and MCL and dislocated the knee, he says. Nerve damage resulted in drop foot for a period of time. Adversity had again hit just when things were going well.

He majored in education and always planned to get into coaching if he didn’t make the NFL. He taught at a local high school while helping out the Nicholls team in the spring of 2003, when two jobs opened. Linebackers coach Jon Robinson took a scouting job with the Patriots, and Daronte Jones took a high school assistant job. Robinson is now the Tennessee Titans’ general manager, and Jones is the Cincinnati Bengals’ cornerbacks coach.

Ellis took to coaching quickly. After spending years around high school coaches as a little kid before he played for them, he could read both sides of the player-coach relationship.

He found under-recruited players, connected with them and developed them. In six seasons as the safeties coach, linebackers coach or defensive coordinator, seven of his players earned first-team all-conference honors, three earned All-America honors and three were drafted in the NFL. Nicholls has produced four NFL Draft picks since 1996. Three were defensive backs coached by Ellis: Chris Thompson (2004), Kareem Moore (2007) and Lardarius Webb (2009). When Webb retired from the NFL last month, he flew Ellis up to Baltimore for the event.

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At a place like Nicholls, coaches had to be resourceful. You didn’t have what the big schools had. Making something out of nothing was all Ellis had ever known.

“You had to improvise, think outside the box,” he says. “What it allowed you to do was be a man with many hats. You had to be the strength coach, You had to be the equipment guy, you had to be the lawn guy. You had to do everything that other schools may have different people to do. You did everything. But it taught you to appreciate work. It made you work. If you want to be successful, you have to work.”

While at Nicholls, he participated in the NFL Coaches Fellowship Program with the Pittsburgh Steelers and worked directly with Tomlin, another one of his idols.

His coaching career had gotten off to a successful start, but hard times hit the family again. In 2005, Nicholls sent players and coaches away with Hurricane Katrina incoming. Ellis went back to Mississippi to stay with his mother. He didn’t think the storm would come that far north.

But the hurricane’s path went straight up the middle of the state.

“The roof came off the house,” Sammy Jr. says. “It’s pouring down rain. I go to pick them up, and our roof is laying off the house. Lord have mercy.”

Dorothy lost everything, including family photos. She was given a trailer by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which she lived in until she died in 2010. Mark and his family moved north to Tennessee after the hurricane, and Dorothy also spent some time there. Cousins now tend the family land.

“They were old, good-hearted people not afraid of nothing,” Sammy Jr. says of his parents.

Hard times hit again. A few years after Katrina, in December 2008, Mark’s wife, Rochelle, died from congestive heart failure. He was left to raise his three sons by himself. Steve stayed in constant communication with his brother and his nephews, trying to help any way he could from Louisiana and encouraging his nephews to stick with school.

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A few months later, Steve got a call from Middle Tennessee coach Rick Stockstill on the recommendation of then-Memphis head coach Tommy West, who had interviewed Steve for a job. The two hit it off. Steve had never heard of MTSU, but he looked up where it was: Murfreesboro, just outside of Nashville, 15 minutes away from Mark. This was it. The chance to help his brother when he needed it the most.

“I knew I had to get this job,” Steve says. “I had to get this job. You do everything in your power and hope it goes well.”

Stockstill hired Steve to coach cornerbacks. Steve’s nephews, Marcus, Jacques and Jalen, became regulars at his place, taking some of the burden off Mark.

“It’s been like that since the time we was small,” Mark says. “If someone calls and needs something, we gonna get there to help your brother out.”

Steve brought his nephews around the MTSU office all the time, any chance to get them out and have new experiences. Steve had created these opportunities for himself, and he wanted to instill that inspiration in the boys.

In 2012, Marcus enrolled at MTSU and became an equipment manager and student assistant, eventually earning a scholarship. He spent five years with the team. Jacques and Jalen are also in college now.

“I don’t know where I’d be without him,” Marcus says of his uncle. “When I graduated high school, he told me you come up here and I’ll get things handled for you. He was a man of his word. He talked to Coach Stock about me trying to better my life. If I needed things in my apartment, he helped. He got me my first car, which he didn’t have to do. I would have never seen some places I’ve seen without him. Like Hawaii or Utah, West Virginia, all these places I’ve seen, he’s the reason for that.”

On the football field at MTSU, Ellis continued to develop players. The Blue Raiders had five draft picks during Ellis’ time. Two of those were defensive backs who worked with Ellis in some form: Rod Issac and Kevin Byard.

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When Charvarius Ward, who went undrafted out of MTSU, grabbed his first interception for the Kansas City Chiefs a few weeks ago, Ellis was one of the first people he texted. Byard is now the highest-paid safety in NFL history, with the Tennessee Titans. He and Ellis keep in touch and ran into each other in an airport last offseason.

“When he stood in front of the room, the way he talked to the men, he’s a great motivator,” Byard says. “He’s just been a great mentor to me. He’d invite us in the summertime to his house and his wife would cook us food and stuff like that. He’ll be coaching for a long time. Just a great guy, great coach, great mentor.”

Ellis stayed at MTSU until his nephews were on their own paths to college, but he was still looking to improve himself.

He continued to take that spring break tour and added a goal: Whatever school produced the Jim Thorpe Award winner for the best defensive back the previous year, Ellis wanted to travel there and learn from those coaches.

A visit from Stephen A. Smith in 2016 gave Ellis another idea. Smith recounted to the MTSU team how he was held back twice in elementary school due to his reading level, so his mom got him a dictionary. It was through that reading and work that he expanded his vocabulary and turned public speaking into part of his career. When he saw a word he didn’t know, he wrote it down, looked up the definition and repeated it out loud over and over.

Ellis knows he talks with that country drawl. A conversation with Smith on that visit inspired him to do the same thing. He downloaded a vocabulary app and began using bigger words in conversations. He participated in 16 public speaking events, just so he could work on it. He tries to watch Tomlin and Nick Saban speak to reporters. He records SEC Media Days and watches all the coaches’ press conferences.

He understands there are different ways to talk to players and administrators to make the right connection.

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“From the standpoint of my talking, I’m just talkin’ here, but if I get the opportunity to speak, I would change my language up, change my voice up,” Ellis says, shifting his tone mid-sentence. “I did a good job preparing for that. I’ve got like 50 or 60 folders full of people speaking in interviews that I took notes on. So if it comes time for an interview, I’m really sharp, really witty.”

With Marcus out of college, Jacques there and Jalen on his way, Steve felt last winter that it was finally time to look for bigger job. He hired an agent for the first time and moved on. Stockstill jokes that he misses Steve’s young son Roscoe around the office more than Steve.

Ellis reunited with Strong as the defensive backs coach at USF. Though transitioning in a new job made that spring break tour a little tougher this year, he still got up to Gainesville to see the Florida staff.

But tragedy has continued to hit. In March, Ellis’ father-in-law, Larry Moffett, was killed in a workplace accident at a Howard Industries plant back in Mississippi. It’s the same place Sammy Lee worked decades ago, the place Sammy Jr. still works now and where Steve spent summers in college.

He carries all of those family hardships with him. They are scars that never fully heal. But the positive mindset never leaves. Family is everything, and his work as a coach has meant helping to provide for them just as much as his players.

His offseason car helps keep it in perspective. When he first joined the MTSU staff in 2009, he bought a 1999 Nissan Frontier. It had more than 200,000 miles and wasn’t in good shape. But he’d heard a story about longtime NFL defensive line coach Jim Washburn doing that to get himself in a gritty mindset, so Ellis took the idea, and he still has that Frontier.

Schools provide nice dealership cars he drives during the season, but the offseason is the time to get back to his roots. The air conditioner doesn’t work, the radio doesn’t work, but it’s always started. It’s always gotten the job done. Driving used to get cold in the early spring with no heat. Now he deals with the hot Florida spring with no air conditioning. But he loves it. It beats waking up at 4 in the morning to bust firewood and feed farm animals.

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The car is about putting in the work, the lessons he learned from family, those still here and those who have passed on. It’s about making sure he never forgets where he came from.

“It gets me back to being very fortunate and blessed where I am now,” Ellis says “It gets me back in the moment growing up in Mississippi when we didn’t have a lot of money. It gets me back hard-nosed. It makes me appreciative of what I have.”

Contributing: Joe Rexrode

(Top photo: Courtesy of USF Athletics)

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