Dave Fipp is naturally curious.

When he was in junior high, Fipp was flipping through a Field & Stream magazine and couldn’t take his eyes off of the ads in the back.

“One of them was for raising your own chickens in an incubator,” he told The Athletic. “Buy it for 50 bucks, and you can raise chickens.”

Another was for home-brewing beer. Fipp didn’t drink but was intrigued by the process. He convinced his parents to let him try it and told them he’d give the beer to his dad. Fipp’s mom took him to a restaurant where they gathered used beer bottles. They cleaned them out and went through the entire process once. That was enough for him. He just wanted to try it out.

Fifteen years later, Fipp was living in the Bay Area, and his neighbor was brewing beer at home. He remembered the ad in the magazine and the fun he’d had as a kid and became intrigued once again.

“I’ve always been really curious about the process of things — how things are made, how they work, can you figure it out?” Fipp said.

“Now obviously, the whole craft brew industry is exploding. This was before that or the early stages of all that. Now it’s probably a whole lot more interesting than it used to be.”

Fipp has been the Eagles’ special teams coach since 2013. In October, the team website ran a 4-minute, 35-second video of him showing viewers how to brew beer.



“I make wine. I keep bees. I write children’s books,” Fipp said at the beginning of the video. “But today, I’m going to show you how I make beer.”

The coaching industry glorifies the football-obsessed — those who say they have no time for anything outside the game. There’s no questioning Fipp’s commitment. Those who have worked alongside him rave about his work ethic. And the results speak for themselves. The Eagles have finished first, 10th and second in special-teams performance the past three seasons, according to Football Outsiders.

Fipp is one of the best special teams coaches in the NFL. But he’s not afraid to admit he has other interests.

“I hear guys say, ‘It’s all football. My whole life is football.’ And I’m like, ‘I could never be like that,'” he said. “I’m all football when it’s time for football. But when there’s not enough keeping me busy with football, when we’re in the offseason, then I need to find something else because I can’t sit in the house and relax.

“I don’t know whether that’s unique or not. I also think there’s a lot of people who say, ‘My life’s all football’ because they think that sounds good on the outside. I’m not afraid to say that I’ve got a lot of interests and a lot of things that keep me interested. I’ve got no problem with that.”

The home brewing led him down a rabbit hole of sorts. Fipp began to read about mead, an alcoholic drink made from fermented honey and water. He decided he wanted to try making it as well, but the process requires a lot of honey — about 10 pounds, Fipp said.

His initial plan was to purchase the honey. Fipp found an apiary in South Jersey. His wife grew up on a farm where they had almonds that were pollinated by bees. He had heard stories from his father-in-law about how it all worked. So he decided he’d keep bees at the house and go straight to the source for the honey he needed.

“At the end of the day, now my wife takes all the honey and gives it all out,” Fipp said. “She bottles it all up. So there’s nothing left. So I’ve made mead, but I’ve had to buy the honey for the mead. We have a handful of hives, and beekeeping works well with football because you harvest the honey right before the season starts with training camp. Then during the winter months, there’s just not a lot you do with them. And then come spring, you do a little bit of maintenance. That’s when the hives are building up. And that’s the offseason. So it works hand in hand and allows me to do it. There’s not a ton of work to it. But it’s definitely interesting.”

Fipp and his wife, Jenny, have three kids — daughters Ashlee and Lilly and son Tyler.

“My son will get out there with the little beekeeping suit on,” he said. “They’ll go out there. They’re probably not afraid enough of them, which is not good. But they enjoy it. It’s educational. They see how it all works. When we harvest the honey, we’ll take the frames off the hive, and then we’ll spin them in a machine. So they’re part of all the process, and they enjoy it.”

The research on mead led him to wine. Grapes instead of honey, he explained.

But Fipp wasn’t a huge fan of wine-making. He was glad he tried it but desires more immediate results.

“All of it’s the challenge of, ‘Can you actually do this? Can you make it? Can you figure out how it works?’” he said. “And the whole learning from that and having another experience being able to check something else off the box, for me, is really the gist of all of it.

“I’ve only learned the things that I want to learn. That’s the big difference between this and school. I get to choose the subject.”

Dave Fipp is creative.

As a kid growing up in San Diego, he did not like school. The environment annoyed him — having to sit quietly in a classroom while one person talked and everyone else listened. It didn’t help that Fipp had a twin brother who was always performing better than him academically.

“I love him to death. The guy’s awesome. I look up to him in a million ways,” Fipp said. “But one challenge I had with him was that school came so easy for him. School was difficult for me. And so it was probably even more frustrating because here’s a guy — same age, same parents, same house, same family, I see how much he studies. He gets an A, and I get a D. It was like, ‘Oh wait a minute here.’ So yeah, I’d say it was certainly frustrating. I struggled early on.”

Fipp needed a teacher who was willing to go the extra mile to get him excited and connect with him. He found one in Rey Hernandez — a middle school Spanish teacher who also happened to coach football at La Jolla High School.

The conversations began with sports and football. Soon enough, Fipp was learning Spanish.

“He was teaching my least favorite subject, and he made it fun and enjoyable,” Fipp said. “So it really changed my perspective that maybe there’s a different way to teach and get things across. This guy was special that way.”

That philosophy has carried over to Fipp’s coaching. Along with Hernandez, the other biggest coaching influence he’s had is Al Everest. Fipp was the assistant special teams coach for the San Francisco 49ers, and one thing he took away from Everest was that the last meeting of the week should not be about Xs and Os. It should be about getting players to feel good about themselves.

So when Fipp got to Philadelphia and was in charge of running the special teams meetings, he decided to put together a “Fight Night” slideshow. He picks a specific matchup for each special teams phase and shows it to the players. Merrill Reese provides the narration based off of a script from Fipp. The most epic meeting that punter Donnie Jones can remember came during the Chip Kelly era.

“At the end, it shows whatever team we’re playing and says, ‘You got a problem!’” Jones explained. “So for a couple of years, that problem was [former tight end] James Casey. James would get so fired up over it. We had a malfunction with the projector in the big room so we had to go in the offensive meeting room. When we put him up there, he jumped up, tore his shirt off, ran out of the room and then came back around. Everybody was throwing water bottles at the screen.”

Jaylen Watkins said that more recently, the players went crazy for a Fipp stunt involving Sproles.

“He went through the whole slideshow, acted like it was over, and everybody stood up to leave,” Watkins recalled. “Then Merrill said, ‘Wait a minute!’ He named the opposing team and said, ‘You have a problem!’ And Sproles’ face pops up and everybody goes crazy, throwing bottles, taking their shoes off and throwing them.”

Fipp’s commitment to finding alternative methods to get his message across extends to his life at home as a dad.

He found himself constantly lecturing his kids about brushing their teeth and using good manners. They didn’t listen — which didn’t surprise him. Fipp was the same way as a kid. So he decided to try and disguise his messages in children’s books that he authored. Fipp loves Dr. Seuss so he decided to make the books rhyme. One is titled, “A letter to my child: Dream great.”

Learn from the mistakes you made and things will be okay. I love you and I trust you more than words can say.

“At the end of the day, it was really to get a message across to my kids without lecturing them all the time in a way that hopefully people like me would understand more,” he said. “None of that stuff’s been published. I’ve written a bunch of these things, and they’re just sitting there. Hopefully one day, maybe I’ll have a chance to spend more time with it and do something with it.

“Ultimately, I’ve read them to my kids. But they went in one ear and out the other. Maybe one day, some other kid will listen.”

(Photo by Drew Hallowell/Philadelphia Eagles/Getty Images)

Dave Fipp is loyal.

Hernandez was working with 10 or 12 at-risk middle school kids in San Diego when Fipp was coaching with the Miami Dolphins. The kids needed to get their grades up to be eligible for football as freshmen, but they were struggling.

Hernandez thought Fipp could help. He asked Fipp to send an email to the students offering some words of encouragement. But Fipp had another idea.

“He said, ‘You know what, coach? I’m going to send you these goal-setting worksheets that I’ve put together. I want you to tell them to fill them out for me, make copies of them, send them back to me, and then I’ll get back to them,” Hernandez recalled.

The worksheets were two or three pages. Fipp asked the kids to draw themselves achieving their goals. He wanted them to visualize their own successes.

Then he followed up. Fipp contacted them on a quarterly basis to offer encouragement or tell them they needed to step it up. According to Hernandez, at the end of the year, every single kid whom Dave had reached out to earned eligibility. In the summer, Fipp met the kids face-to-face, congratulated them and ran them through special-teams drills.

“I think what they saw is there was someone that’s in the profession that has a special interest in them,” Hernandez said. “Part of it is they liked getting an email back from David congratulating them on something. That was a form of positive reinforcement.

“David was so instrumental in helping me with those boys. But that’s David. That’s a side that people don’t see sometimes.”

Everest said the loyalty was evident when the two coached together in San Francisco.

“You couldn’t ask, draw up, write up, a better person to have as your assistant. He’s a great person. He does more than he’s asked to do,” Everett said.

“If anybody said something bad about Al, Dave would say, ‘Hey, that’s bullsh*t.’ He’s always been that way. I was lucky to be with Dave for two years.”

Dave Fipp is honest.

Running back Kenjon Barner remembers struggling with kickoff returns during his first or second season in Philadelphia. He went up to Fipp’s office to find out what the coach thought.

“I went upstairs to talk to him and asked him what he thought,” Barner recalled. “He said, ‘You’re sh*tty.’ Just like that. I’m looking at him, and he’s like, ‘Yeah, you’ve got to get better. You can be as good as you want to be.’ He’s that type of coach. You can respect that — a guy that shoots it straight, tells you exactly how it is, doesn’t beat around the bush, doesn’t lie to you. I went upstairs, and he told me how terrible I was.”

Kamu Grugier-Hill likes to joke around. Fipp can be that way too, but he has a line he doesn’t want crossed when the team is trying to get its work in.

Grugier-Hill remembers a Thursday practice where he had trouble identifying that line. Fipp helped him out.

“One of the walkthroughs, I was a little too loose, and he got after me pretty good,” Grugier-Hill said. “Yelled at me, screamed at me in front of the whole team. He definitely can be very serious if we’re not handling our business.

“He knows how to use each player individually and how to touch them individually and get them motivated. So we play a lot for him. It’s exciting to make a play and he’s right there in your face jumping on you. He’s just such a motivational guy. He’ll joke around with you, but if you’re not doing your job, he’ll rip into you as well. He’s one of the best coaches I’ve ever had.”

Coaching special teams can be challenging — especially during training camp. It’s a bunch of players who are fighting for their football lives, unsure of whether they’re going to make the roster or have to look for another line of work.

Fipp recognizes that. Players say he’s brilliant at toeing the line between telling them the truth but letting them know he’s in their corner.

“He’s by far the realest coach I’ve ever been around,” said Watkins. “As cliched as that sounds, he’s somebody that if you don’t have thick skin, he’s not the guy you want to ask how you’re doing or where you’re at on the depth chart. If you don’t want to hear the truth, you don’t want to go to Fipp.

“But that’s a good thing because you’re allowed to go and assess where you’re at. He’s going to tell you the truth, and you have to get better. He has a lot of respect for that in the locker room. A lot of the bottom-of-the-depth-chart guys, you ask him, he’s going to tell you what you need to get better at.”

Added Barner, “He gets guys to buy in. Guys love playing for him. Guys love going out and putting everything on the line for him because they know at the end of the day when Fipp goes upstairs, he’s doing the same for them. He’s going to fight for every player in that room, every player that he believes in. When you have a coach like that, you’ll do anything for him.”

Dave Fipp is private.

Most of the players had no clue about his interests outside of football until they saw the beer-making video. Someone set it up to play when Fipp walked in for a recent special-teams meeting.

Fipp initially declined to be interviewed for this story. He said he’s happy to discuss his players. They are the reason he coaches. But he doesn’t want to talk about himself. Once he was told that readers might be interested in his non-football life, he finally agreed.

Fipp has been asked often if he thinks more special teams coordinators should get opportunities to become head coaches.

“I would never say that about myself, but I do think that there’s a number of qualified coaches around this league who coach special teams that I think do a great job,” he said. “They do have a unique background, skill set. They’ve worked with the whole team, they’ve communicated with a lot of different people, they make a lot of the gameday decisions the same way. I think there’s a lot of talented coaches who are coaching that position in this league that should get that opportunity.”

His core special teams philosophy comes from Everest. The first step is making sure players know their alignments and assignments. Step two is teaching and drilling them on how to win their one-on-one battles. And step three is allowing them to cut it loose on gamedays.

“You don’t see him yelling or ranting at players on Sunday,” Everest said. “It’s their day. You get six days a week to coach. And they get one day a week to go let it all out. If you need to make adjustments, you make them. You treat them like men and try to get the best out of them.”

Fipp is used to working for what he wants. He didn’t play much as a junior in high school, and Hernandez had to convince him to come back as a senior. He earned a starting safety job and later walked on at Arizona.

Kelly knew Fipp from his New Hampshire days when Fipp was coaching at Holy Cross. Kelly brought him to Philadelphia, and Doug Pederson (at the urging of Jeffrey Lurie) retained him. That move has paid off. Special teams has been a big under-the-radar factor in the team’s 8-1 start. The Eagles have lost Sproles (their best returner), Chris Maragos (their captain) and Caleb Sturgis (their kicker) to injuries. But through 10 weeks, the team ranks sixth in special teams DVOA.

Whether Fipp eventually gets a shot to be a head coach or not is uncertain. For now, he’ll continue to challenge himself with interests that pique his curiosity. And the Eagles’ special teams will continue to be one of the best units in the NFL.

“I definitely think if ever given the opportunity, Fipp can definitely be a great head coach,” Barner said. “Guys would love to play for him. He can push guys past their limits, make you realize things about yourself that you didn’t know were capable of or that you didn’t know about yourself.

“I love that dude. He’s a special dude. He’s always looked out for me.”

Top photo: Drew Hallowell/Getty Images