I covered my first college football media day in 1995 at the Meadowlands in New Jersey, which hosted the Big East’s rouser. I was heading into my junior year at Virginia Tech, and two of us from the Collegiate Times made the long drive from Northern Virginia to East Rutherford to catch up with the eight coaches and gather preview information for the season. One of those coaches was Temple’s Ron Dickerson, who didn’t draw a crowd, mostly because Temple was on its way to perennial doormat status in the fledgling conference.

I relayed this story to Dickerson’s son—Ron, Jr.—as we played golf last week at the Ballantyne Resort in Charlotte, part of the Big South’s kickoff festivities. Ron Jr. laughed and said he expected the same thing, to sit alone at the Big South’s rouser without much hype.

That wasn’t the case. Most of the media assembled in Charlotte were interested in chatting with the younger Dickerson, who took over for longtime coach Steve Patton at Gardner-Webb. The Bulldogs underachieved in Patton’s final few years at the helm, and the program had grown stale. Gardner-Webb routinely put nearly as many players on the preseason all-conference teams as perennial favorite Liberty in recent years, but the Bulldogs have been nowhere near contending for a conference title. A change was definitely needed.

The 39-year-old Dickerson spent three years working with Houston Nutt at Ole Miss, so he brings big-time football knowledge to Boiling Springs. And he brings his father with him as well, as Ron Sr. will be the Bulldogs’ defensive line coach.

“Society is kind of messed up, and there are not a lot of young men that have their dads around,” Dickerson Jr. said. “Just from that perspective right there, it shows young men that it can be done. The thing about it, I looked at the coaches gathered around the roundtable and I said, ‘experience, experience, experience,’ and it still wasn’t even close to the amount of experience my dad has in his brain. He’s probably lost more than I ever had.

“He brings just a wealth of experience off the field. How to act. How to be a coach. How to be a role model. And he gives hope that things can be done. Everybody says, ‘Is it a different role to have your dad work under you?’ It’s just a privilege for me to be working with my dad. You hear people say every day, I don’t have a dad or I don’t have a mom. Gardner-Webb gave me an opportunity to work with my dad, and I jumped on it. I said let’s go on and do great things. Everybody on the staff embraced it, and he’s a coach. When we’re out driving around, he’s my dad.

“When I was growing up, that’s when coaches worked from six in the morning until the middle of the night, so I never got to see my dad. Now I get to make up for lost time. We’re blessed.”

—John Rock and Chandler Browning split time at quarterback for the Bulldogs last season, and neither were effective. Rock—who isn’t back this season—threw more than twice as many interceptions (15) as touchdowns (7) and completed 52.8 percent of his passes. Browning completed 53.8 percent of his passes and threw for 863 yards, four touchdowns and five interceptions.

Browning enters fall camp as the starter, though he’ll get pushed by former Utah State quarterback Exavier Johnson, who played at a California junior college last season.

“Right now, I have one starter on my team, and that’s Chandler Browning,” Dickerson said. “He worked his tail off in the spring. He worked his tail off in the classroom and in the weight room. He went home and worked hard and has taken on a leadership role. He’s called the guys and said, ‘hey, let’s go do this and let’s go do that.’ That’s what you need in a quarterback.”

Also in the mix are redshirt sophomore Lucas Beatty and freshman Jordan Paul. Johnson, a 6-3, 205-pound junior, gives the Bulldogs an intriguing athletic presence.

“A quarterback can’t feel comfortable, or he’s never going to reach his full potential,” Dickerson said. “I don’t want any of my quarterbacks feeling comfortable. I want them to know that if you’re not doing your job, there’s another one sitting right there. That’s the philosophy we took as a staff.”

—Dickerson was hired late in the game, meaning he had to scramble to put a staff together and get the team ready for spring practice. His evaluation of the program upon his arrival:

“There was a lot of talent on the team. There were a lot of young men who were trying to figure out who they were, and that’s usually what happens in college football. My first and foremost goal was to bring them all together as one. I hit one young man in the chest with my finger and said, ‘This says Bulldogs. This doesn’t say Ron Dickerson, Jr. This doesn’t say Jordan Woods or Jamie Dunaway. It says Gardner-Webb football. This is all we’ve got, and this is what we are.’”

Dickerson startled his players by starting spring practices well before dawn, sometimes at 5:30 in the morning. The tactic had the desired effect, he said.

“It was a shock,” he said. “You get so comfortable in doing things your own way. The thing I had to see was that when the pressure was on them, were they going to bust? Instead, they beat the coaches out there, the first day in the rain, wide eyed and ready to go. I walked outside and thought, ‘Lord, are you telling me something? It’s freezing cold and it’s raining.’ But when I walked out, the whole team was sitting in the stands, ready to go. We had days like that, and they didn’t complain. And they went on to do what they needed to do off the field in the classroom. At that point in time, I knew we were taking a giant step in the right direction.”

—Oh, and before we started playing golf, Dickerson said he wasn’t a golfer, and that he’d be more comfortable on a boat fishing. Of course, on the long-drive hole, he blasted a ball nearly 350 yards down the left side. If it had been two feet to the right in the fairway, he would have won long drive honors. Not too shabby.

—Three more dispatches to go. We’ll have one on Charleston Southern tomorrow, VMI on Monday and Presbyterian College on Tuesday.