The Hire That Changed College Football Forever: Dutch Baughman, Frank Beamer and a Lasting Legacy

When it does, the Beamer family will sit squarely at the center of it all. Gamecock coach Shane Beamer will patrol the sideline against his alma mater, the team he once played and coached for, and the program that his father, Frank Beamer built. It will be a contest with no shortage of stories and storylines.

But before Shane got a head coaching gig in the SEC, before Frank Beamer took Tech to unprecedented heights, before Spring Road was renamed Beamer Way and a statue in Frank’s honor was placed outside of the stadium, one story proved pivotal in any of these events ever happening. The story goes back to December, 1986 when Frank was a 40-year-old head coach at Division I-AA Murray State; Shane Beamer was just nine.

Enter Dale T. (Dutch) Baughman, a 37-year-old rancher with an already-impressive background that included stints in the United States Marine Corps, as a football coach, and in athletics administration. In a recent discussion with Mr. Baughman, he shared his perspective on hiring the most impactful coach in Virginia Tech history, his views on leadership, and his passion in life, fly fishing.

A native Texan, Baughman played and coached at Ohio State under the great Woody Hayes, and it was there that he began a 50-year career in athletics. Coach Hayes clearly had an impact on Baughman’s approach to leadership. Hayes’s mentorship, and the example he set, aided Dutch throughout his career. 

After a successful stint as athletic director at Furman in Greenville, SC, Baughman was called back home to Texas to serve as associate commissioner of the Southwest Conference in 1983. 

Still serving at the Southwest Conference in 1986, Baughman’s phone rang and Charlie Moir (Tech’s basketball coach at the time) was on the other end. “When I was at Furman, I tried to hire Charlie for basketball coach. I just thought the world of him,” Baughman said. “So out of the blue, he calls me and says, ‘Coach (Bill) Dooley is going to be leaving. And the president (William Lavery) asked me if I had anybody in mind that could take (the athletic director) position. I said that there was one guy and it’s Dutch.’”

Now, 1986 was a big year in Virginia Tech athletics history. The football team was on its way to a 10-win season culminating in a last-second victory over NC State in the Peach Bowl. But it was a big year for other reasons as well; namely, Bill Dooley’s tenure as AD and head football coach coming to an end and NCAA scrutiny heating up. Tech was a school and an athletic department about to go through a big transition.

After a productive phone call, Dutch made a visit to Blacksburg. His first impression: “When I walked on that campus, and I saw the beautiful limestone buildings, and there was good fly fishing in the area, I’m thinking, ‘this is a special place’. It was really remarkable. And I really liked the people in the athletic department and Dr. Lavery was really a nice man.”

But Baughman’s first order of business was to find a new football coach.

“I did my homework and having been a football coach, I had a perspective of what I knew was going to be important here, and I came across Frank Beamer,” he said. Baughman looked into Coach Beamer, a native of Fancy Gap, VA and a 1969 graduate of Virginia Tech. “Highly successful with a stellar reputation, first and foremost for his personal character and the type of human being he is, and then the good coach he is. He went right to the top of my list. And I talked to some other people more as a cursory thing because I wanted to have something to compare Frank to. You know, I was weeding through all of this, and pretty soon I'd get down to Frank's my guy.”

Baughman discussed the position with Bobby Ross, a fantastic coach in his own right who had just resigned his post at Maryland. But the timing wasn’t right for Ross. Curious, though, Baughman asked Coach Ross if he did come to Tech and were building a staff, who would he bring? Ross responded, “I'll tell you the very first guy I would try to get would be Frank Beamer.” Baughman hadn't told anybody else about Beamer as a candidate, so Ross’s comments solidified his decision. Seeing where this was going, Ross also shared, “I can anticipate what it's going to be like at Virginia Tech, now, with Dooley leaving. Maybe what you need as much as anything is not a person that's shown he can win a lot of games, but win at more important things.” 

An extensive interview with Coach Beamer in a Nashville hotel ensued. When asked what he was looking for, Baughman, a lifelong student of leadership and culture, called on his learnings from Coach Hayes. Baughman recalled Coach Hayes always looking for character traits: “Woody would never hire somebody he didn’t take to a meal” to see how they treated people. “When I met Frank in Nashville, (wife) Cheryl was with him. And they came in the room and shook hands and all the normal kind of cordial stuff. Cheryl was just as sweet as she could be. She looked at me and said, ‘Well, I just want to meet you, but I'm going shopping’ and excused herself. 

“There was nothing at all pretentious about either one of them, and it was immediately apparent that this was not just the next job on his resume. This was important to him. For all the right reasons. And I'm thinking, he's got the kind of integrity we're going to need to build a program while we face adversity.”

In Baughman’s experience, in any search, you do your analysis and get down to the final three or four candidates. “Each one of those candidates can do the job. So how do you know which one to hire? What I learned was, always choose based on personal character.”

Baughman was certain that he had his guy after that meeting. “It was so clear to me that Frank was a gentleman, he was polite, he was respectful. This had great meaning to him. You can find people that have the skill sets in all the areas you need, but the determining factor has to be who has the strongest, most genuine, authentic, personal character. You can go to war with that.” 

And so, the most impactful coach in Virginia Tech history was hired, even if no one else knew it at the time. Though Beamer was known and respected by many in the coaching community, he was not a high-profile name. “During the press conference, the media were asking me, ‘you had the opportunity for all these famous people. Why did you choose Frank Beamer?’ And I said, ‘They didn't offer what Frank Beamer offers. This is a value-based decision. It's not based on winning a news conference. That's not what this is about.’ But the integrity of this football program and this university, that's how this decision has to be made.”

Not long after Beamer’s arrival, the full weight of the NCAA’s ire became felt in Blacksburg. Among other things, the Hokies’ maximum scholarships allowed and maximum number of scholarships for incoming freshmen were significantly limited. It resulted in a five-year period with no margin for error in recruiting and a significant problem with depth. 

Throughout that difficult period, Coach Beamer continued to build his program the right way, and in typical Beamer fashion, he never let the highs get too high, or the lows get too low.

“I never once saw or heard Frank complain or say that he was in a disadvantageous position. It was quite the opposite. He saw this as an incredible challenge and was very positive. We talked about what we're going to do to make this thing turn around. And everything we talked about was just right in sync, and he got the commitment for all the help he needed, maybe not financial stuff, to make this thing work.”

Baughman continued: “And then after I left, I talked to people and heard the same thing. Not once did Frank ever complain, that here he was getting started at his alma mater with both hands tied behind his back, essentially.”

Dave Braine, the athletic director who ultimately took over for Baughman and himself a former football coach, knew what Coach Beamer battled through, and famously stuck by him after the 2-8-1 season in 1992. The rest is history. Shane made his way to the Tech roster in the mid-90’s and was the long-snapper on the undefeated 1999 squad. Part of his own extensive coaching journey included five seasons with his dad in Blacksburg.

Baughman always kept up on the Beamers, including surreptitiously returning to southwest Virginia. “I actually came to Blacksburg a couple times after that. And only a couple people knew I was even there, but I wanted to stand on the sidelines and watch Frank and Shane because I just thought they were wonderful people.”

Everyone who has observed Coach Beamer, or gotten to know him at all, knows what a genuinely good person he is. Baughman tells one more story that encapsulates who Beamer is as a man.

“The day Frank had his news conference to say he was going to retire; he called me that morning. Another one of those life moments. He really touched my heart that as busy as he was that particular moment, and all he had going on in his mind, he took the time to call and thank me for taking a chance on a guy that was not on anybody's radar screen and give him the support that he needed. He said that what he built the program on was the foundation we had talked about. I had nothing to do with that other than to talk about the elements of it. He made it happen. But he is a dear friend, and he wasn't when I hired him. I didn't know him. But when I got to know Frank Beamer, the man, and the dad, the husband…this is my guy.”

Baughman went on to a successful stint as Oregon State’s athletic director before serving with distinction as executive director of the Division 1A Athletic Directors Association until his retirement. 

A lifelong leader and successful thought partner was now ready to give back in another way.

“I tied my first fly in 1957. Before that, I was only seven or eight years old, chunking bait and wads of bread in the water like everyone else. Then I saw in a magazine, somebody was holding up a beautiful fish, and it's an article all about fly fishing and it showed the fly. And it's like the world stopped, like everything else around me, it just all stopped. I looked at that, and I said, I've never seen anything more beautiful than that fly, a fully dressed salmon fly. It was magnificent.” 

The fish was a steelhead trout from the Pacific Northwest, and Dutch was hooked on fly fishing and fly tying for life.

“I realized early on that what I got from fly fishing was resolved in my passion. As I'm approaching retirement, I had friends tell me that after you retire, you need to have some place to go every day. And so about two years before I retired, I got involved in Fly Fishers International, and was on the board of directors for 10 years. And I developed a learning center and all that kind of stuff. I started doing that before I retired. So that when I retired, I didn’t miss a beat. It was an even transition.”

He started teaching fly fishing skills at Tarrant County College in north Texas. The class was a hit, to say the least: “We would finish the semester with more people than we started with.”

Baughman was able to take a lifelong hobby and turn it into a passion. He's parlayed this passion into the mother of all pay-it-forward endeavors, sharing his knowledge with a large following. Over the years, and through his teaching, he created a trove of content teaching fly fishing and fly tying skills. That genuine passion and all of that material led to Baughman creating the hugely informative flyfishingskills.com website.

In addition to his board involvement for FFI, he received the 2019 FFI Fly Fisher of the Year Award and a President’s Medal. He received the 2020 Darwin Atkins Fly Tying Achievement Award. He also won the Buz Buszek Memorial Fly Tying Award, considered the “Heisman Trophy of Fly Tying” and the highest honor bestowed upon a fly tyer by the FFI. He continues to teach fly fishing and fly tying in and around Texas and beyond.

Baughman concluded: “Henry David Thoreau once said ‘many men go fishing all their lives without knowing it's not the fish they're after.’ Somehow that clicked for me early on. And so going fly fishing was almost a reverent thing for me. I've never killed a fish intentionally. I release every single one. And it's important to me to have that opportunity as a release, because I can go stand in a river, and I don't know anything else is going on with the world.

Asked if he appreciates the immense impact that he had on our university by bringing Coach Beamer here, Baughman demurred. “I don't know. I wanted Frank to have a legitimate chance to have success. In this business, athletic directors and football coaches and basketball coaches, in a candid moment, they would tell you all they want is a chance for success. To too many of them, that means to have more budget to do what they want to do. To Frank, that meant the chance to heal a team, the chance to heal a university and the chance to build something that everyone would be proud of.”

Frank Beamer went on to win 280 games in his career (238 at Tech), and was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2018. He is arguably the most revered and respected person in Virginia Tech history, and truly earned every recognition he’s received.

Shane Beamer carried his dad’s headphone cord on the Tech sidelines as a child in the early years before his Virginia Tech playing days. He took the reins at South Carolina in 2021 after two decades of learning as an assistant under a slew of fantastic head coaches like Steve Spurrier, Phillip Fulmer, Kirby Smart, Lincoln Riley and, of course, his dad.

It’s hard to imagine any of that happening if Baughman hadn’t been intent on hiring for character and chosen Beamer nearly 40 years ago.