DAVIS, Calif. --  "He has taken his family on vacation to Machu Picchu..." 

So opens the official UC Davis bio for Dan Hawkins since the day he was announced as head football coach back in November of 2016. Winning two Western Athletic Conference Coach of the Year awards, leading Willamette to the national title game, reaching the finalists for the Paul "Bear" Bryant Coach of the Year award, serving as an analyst on ESPN, and guiding the U.S. national team to a gold medal at the IFAF World Championship? That stuff, the first line in any other typical profile, is lower down. 

No, the famous remains of the Inca Empire get first mention ahead of these feats. So does his jumping from an airplane, although the latter at least holds a more direct, albeit unintentional connection to his coaching career. 

"My daughters and I parachuted out of an airplane down in San Diego," Hawkins recalls. "I don't have a massive fear of heights but I don't particularly like them. I said, 'I don't think I can do that,' and she said, 'then everything you tell your team is a lie.'" Of course, the veteran coach took the plunge, and in doing so, he reinforced a lesson he gives to his student-athletes. 

"It was one of those things that everyone will say, 'I couldn't do that, I could never do that.' We can do anything that we want to if we tell ourselves that we can," said Hawkins.

Spend any amount of time around the 1984 UC Davis alum, and he will inevitably teach – and embody – such concepts as the hero's journey, the quality balance of life, and uncommon engineering. Of course, cultivating success on the field is important to him, which helped the Aggies capture a share of the 2018 Big Sky Conference championship and snare their first-ever NCAA FCS playoff berth. Hawkins, for his part, earned the Eddie Robinson Award as the national coach of the year. Scholastic excellence also remains a hallmark of the program, which is why UC Davis set program records for Big Sky All-Academic honors and National Football Foundation Hampshire Honor Society members last season.

Still, these accomplishments are part of a larger goal: to grow well-rounded individuals. Hawkins holds his offseason practice season in the winter quarter, in part to allow his student-athletes to travel or participate in internships during the spring. "I just think trying to get out of your comfort zone, not being afraid to fail and having new experiences expands your depth of thinking and expands your depth of experience," said Hawkins.

Early in his career, Hawkins served on the Aggie staff under head coach Jim Sochor and Bob Foster, an era he refers to as his "baptism of excellence." Sochor assumed a soft-spoken, intellectual approach, and was just as likely to quote from the Tao Te Ching or the works of psychiatrist David Hawkins (no relation) as he was to cite such coaching peers as John Madden and Bill Walsh. 

Foster, who replaced Sochor as the head coach later in the 1980s, served as defensive coordinator at the time. Hawkins still recalls a moment when the team was deep into its preparation for that Saturday's game. He watched as Foster stuffed reels of 16-millimeter film into a knapsack, bungee-corded a film projector to the back of his bicycle, then literally rode off into the sunset. The young coach was impressed: Foster guided a defense that led the nation, and had never experienced a losing season at any level of coaching, yet he still prioritized his role as a husband and father. As Hawkins learned, it's not all about football. 

As such, Coach Hawkins has not only journeyed to Machu Picchu, but he has visited such locations as the base camp of Mount Everest and the Buddhist temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. He has run with the bulls of Pamplona, and swum with sharks in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of South Africa. Hawkins hopes to summit Kilimanjaro, sail the Atlantic as a crew member, and visit the gorillas of East Africa in the spirit of another former Aggie, Dian Fossey. He has walked the Camino de Santiago, a 500-mile trek from the south of France to the coast of Spain. ("You know how you do it? You wake up every morning and you just put one foot in front of the other.")

Hawkins even prefers to get his news from BBC rather than the U.S.-based outlets. ("We sometimes think, hey, we're the United States, we're the most important. It's a big world out there, with a lot of people.") Furthermore, he was set to travel to India last spring. His wife, Misti, volunteers with the Red Cross and learned of an opportunity to volunteer at one of Mother Teresa's orphanages for two weeks. Unfortunately, the COVID-related travel closures began on the eve of their departure. A return to South Asia will have to wait for another offseason.

Of course, disappointment also plays a part in the Hawkins philosophy. 

"That's why I really talk about the hero's journey with our players," Hawkins said. "In my time and era, people didn't really talk about challenges and failures, and learning from them. It was winners and losers. Now, in today's society – and rightly so – they put it in a better frame: what did you learn?"

Hawkins cites some of the downs in his career as being as formidable as the successes. Budgetary issues forced him out of Sonoma State, where he served as a defensive coordinator, but that sent him to take over the helm at Willamette, where he took the Bearcats to the NAIA title game in 1997. Even Boise State, as successful as that stay was, caused some growing pains to the Division I level during the early going. 

Even Hawkins' younger days are littered with such setbacks. In high school, he injured his hand during a fight, which prevented him from playing for the varsity baseball team as a freshman. An age restriction later halted a call-up to the varsity football squad. Even at UC Davis, Hawkins endured limited playing time for most of his junior year, then after he earned a starting job as a senior, injuries to his knee and ankle kept him out of commission for the latter half of the 1982 regular season. Dispiriting is each might have been at the time, he now can point to each one and extract valuable life lessons.

Oddly, for all of his globetrotting, Hawkins never flew on a commercial flight until the final week of his senior season at UC Davis, when the Aggies traveled to McAllen, Texas, to take on Southwest Texas State (since shortened to Texas State) in the 1982 NCAA Division II championship game. He grew up in the rural California town of Bieber, the son of a logger and the first of his family to go to college. His family did not have the means nor the need to take vacations. Still, a respect for the larger world was ingrained in those days: his parents met in Europe, got married in Paris, and maintained a subscription to National Geographic. Those lessons clearly took hold, and decades later, the photo stream on Coach Hawk's smartphone now likely resembles the pages of NatGeo.

Just how important are his worldly interests to Hawkins? Put it this way: his undertitle on his LinkedIn profile reads "The Mystery of the Hero's Journey." Last March, when the COVID quarantine sent people into their homes, Hawkins launched a video podcast via Zoom called Uncommon Engineering. The nine conversations still live on via the department's Aggie Overtime podcast feed and YouTube channel. 

The lineup of guests for Uncommon Engineering is impressive: outdoor expeditionists Brad and Tonya Clement, professor emeritus and Holocaust survivor Alexander Groth, professor and Space Shuttle astronaut Steve Robinson, former MLB player and manager Clint Hurdle, rock guitarist Jock Bartley, Aggie alumnus and CFL coach Khari Jones, musician and filmmaker Michael Franti, head UC Davis women's basketball coach Jennifer Gross, and Aggie alum/NFL kicker/author/philanthropist Rolf Benirschke. The podcast, as Hawkins wrote in the show description, is designed to "inspire, motivate, and educate others to reach beyond the boundaries of our being and achieve the best version of ourselves."

"When I came to UC Davis, Jim Sochor was a totally different type of coach," said Hawkins. "I had really good coaches, don't get me wrong, but he was definitely different. Bob Foster was obviously different. Each place along the way really shapes and molds you."

ABOUT UC DAVIS:
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