WEST CHESTER – Aside from being son of a legend, there is no easy route into a well-paid coaching gig. Unless you're someone like Lane Kiffin, you pay your dues.

Young Nick Saban was a grad assistant at Kent State for three years (1972-74). Almost a decade into his career, he actually was fired from Ohio State by Earle Bruce after an embarrassing 1981 Liberty Bowl loss to Air Force and ended up as DB coach at the Naval Academy. Saban wasn't even considering coaching to begin with except that his first boss at Kent (Don James) talked him into it. By the time he came to that Navy crossroads, he was hooked.

Young Urban Meyer took a job as DB coach at St. Xavier High School in Cincinnati in 1985. Five years later he felt fortunate to be hired on by that same Earle Bruce as the WR assistant at Colorado State. But in 1992, Bruce was fired and Meyer was broke, out of work, out of prospects with a 2-year-old daughter and a pregnant wife. He considered quitting before Bruce's successor Sonny Lubick unexpectedly found a place for him on his new CSU staff.

You have to want it. And you have to prove you want it. Before you can be somebody, you have to be nobody.

The only way to do that is the way Dan Connor is doing it now – starting at the bottom and learning from the ground up.

Fresh from retirement after six seasons in the NFL, Connor is about to begin his first coaching job. The all-time tackles leader at Linebacker U. will not begin in the cushy offices with scenic views at the Lasch facility. Nothing like that.

He will start without an office or even a desk. He will simply have an opportunity to teach – as linebackers coach on the staff of longtime Division II coach Bill Zwaan at West Chester University.

Will this college All-America at Penn State and starting NFL linebacker with the Panthers, Cowboys and Giants be able to teach everything he knows? What sort of coach will he be?

Even Connor, son of two special-education teachers, doesn't quite know. But the Golden Rams report to camp on Wednesday. We're about to find out.

"I have 25 pages of notes and I haven't even been a coach yet," said Connor on Monday. "I knew, if I prepare, everything will go pretty smooth."

It went smoothly enough during spring drills, essentially a live tryout, that Zwaan immediately hired him to replace his former WCU and Philadelphia Eagles assistant Bill Shuey who left to be defensive coordinator at Widener.

"We kept an eye on him but basically let him go," said Zwaan whose Rams went 13-2 last year and ran all the way to the NCAA Division II semifinals.

"He did a great job. He had tremendous ability as a linebacker. But you can tell right away he's also paid attention to what he was taught. He had an idea of what and how he wanted to teach. He was just really impressive."

Does Zwaan know Connor has prepared this way?

"I don't know," said Connor. "I know he knows this is important to me. And I feel fortunate to have been hired. It usually takes a while to be in this position."

Connor is one of the more interesting Penn State players I ever covered. His twenties seem to have matured him from an occasionally out-of-control hell-raiser at PSU to a thoughtful and introspective young man with a command of language to describe his emotions.

On Monday, he gave me a tour of the facilities of one of the most successful programs in NCAA Division II. Zwaan's Rams have made the D-II playoffs six times in his dozen years at WCU. The top man is paid accordingly.

But it's still Division II. Pretty much everyone other than Zwaan is trying to be someplace else. Zwaan knows this is "a good stepping-stone" for Connor.

He's on the bottom stone.

The coaches' meeting room is as spartan as it gets. It might as well be a break room in an old muni office building. Chairs are weathered, mismatched, a couple are half-broken. But they're for sitting in not for showing to recruits.

The team video room is seven rows of seven seats jammed into a 30-by-20 space. But they perform the necessary function. If you want to learn college-level football, you can learn it here as well as some FBS arms-race show palace.

And Connor clearly could not care less. It's football and he's a freak for the game. He just wants to get started:

"I think about it all the time. That's the thing, I love football so much that it's an obsession, you know? I can't even talk with my brothers or my dad except about football. Family and football.

"We just went down the shore for two weeks straight, that's all it was – football talk. The wives were pissed at us by the end."

That Connor now has a new family had a lot to do with his decision to get out of the NFL while still in one piece. And he's not even sure he did so in time.

He and wife Angela welcomed their first child, a son, last fall. The birth came days after Connor, starting at middle linebacker for the Giants, was laid flat out on the field at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas on Sept. 8.

"I was playing the best football I felt like I ever played, felt the most comfortable. Playing football at a high level. Feeling good."

Dan Connor in his WCU gear stands near photography tower on West Chester practice field with Golden Rams' Farrell Stadium in background.

But Connor began getting stingers – painful nerve injuries that run from the neck down the arm – during camp. That wasn't unusual; he's endured them much of his football life. But these were worse. They wiped out his muscle function and made him numb for longer periods than before.

In the second quarter against the Cowboys, Connor hit a running back and felt unlike he ever had:

"Both arms went numb, went straight down. I lay on the ground and I couldn't raise my arm."

Four days later, Angela gave birth to a son they named Murphy. Dan couldn't hold him:

"I couldn't raise my arm for months. I couldn't hold my son in that arm. It was done. It was shot.

"I told my brother, 'This is tough.' It was just clear that this was the beginning of the end.

"You want to keep playing as long as you can. But when you have a family, I guess that changes your mindset, you reevaluate what's important.

"I thought, if I keep getting these, who knows the function of my arm when I'm 40? Even now, I'm not sure. It's lost a ton of strength."

Connor missed seven weeks on injured reserve, then called his agent Drew Rosenhaus and arranged for the Giants to release him so he could play somewhere else. That was in Charlotte where Connor gutted out the second half of the season for the Panthers, the team that drafted him in the third round back in 2008.

By February, Connor knew with certainty his career was over at age 28. His father Jim and his two brothers consoled him and told him he'd gotten everything he could out of his football career.

His mind was elsewhere. Angela was pregnant again. Family concerns had altered him permanently:

"It changes everything. You've gotta grow up. Grow up quick."

Still, Connor could not face existence without football:

"It eats at you. I knew, if I'm gonna make this move, I have to be in football the next year. No matter where or what position. If I'm not playing, I still need to be around the sport, around a team.

"Because if I had a job, a regular job, I couldn't watch football without sweating. You get antsy. It's hard to describe. It's hard to watch it without being involved."

What kind of coach will he be?

"I had a lot of good coaches early on. At Strath Haven [High], Kevin Clancy and my linebackers coach Paul Tagliaterra and my dad. Getting coached that well young gave me a great base to work from.

"Then, once I got to college – I think Ron Vanderlinden's the best coach in the country. He's done it all. And he had a perfect group at Penn State."

Connor is an admitted training camp lover, among what he said was a 25-percent minority during his time at Strath Haven High and Penn State.

Since leaving Penn State in December, Vanderlinden, 57, now is in his sixth major-college stop – linebackers coach at the Air Force Academy. Connor has been picking his brain all spring and summer and the mentor gladly obliging one of his favorite pupils.

"When you see guys he coached, it jumps out on film. You watch some other guys, you might say: That guy's a great player. But I wouldn't say he's a well-coached player. Coach Vanderlinden has multiple guys in the NFL doing it the right way.

"So, I went back and I got all his drills, all his notes and said, 'If I'm gonna coach, I'm gonna coach like him.'"

Vanderlinden was known as an exacting taskmaster, rarely overbearing but insistent.

"He demanded a lot from you," said Connor. "He wanted you to be perfect all the time. That's good and that works for some guys. It might not work for other guys."

How did Vanderlinden get the best out of Connor?

"Constantly staying on me about every little detail. Certain coaches will let little things fly as the season wears on. He didn't let any little thing fly."

For instance?

"He insisted that you shuffle you feet, never turn and run – which gets you lunging, crossed up by a running back and missed tackles and. He insisted you always keep square to the line of scrimmage and shuffle – fast, almost as fast as you can run.

"Everything in your body and mind is saying, 'Turn and run.' He's saying, 'Trust the technique.' And he's 100 percent right. If you stay in technique, you can be fast and work leverages with other guys on the field – it's not just you out there. If you can trust his techniques, you can get the job done.

"And he was able to get so comfortable with a lot of us that we trusted whatever he said. It worked. You go out and do it, even though when you're learning it feels uncomfortable. But it keeps working. And you keep doing it."

How will Connor's approach to teaching be? He's thought that over, too. Different styles can work for different guys. Different players are motivated by different stimulus.

"Having done it in the NFL is a great benefit. But it doesn't necessarily make you a great coach. Are you a great teacher?

"My whole family's teachers so I feel like I have a good knack on how to relate to people, how to get concepts across. With these guys, when I wrote my notes I put down, 'Don't assume anything. Don't presume that they know any technique, any concept. Teach it from the ground up.'

"That's how I can get them to improve – step by step. I can't try to get them to take on NFL coverage concepts from the highest possible level. They don't apply here. Let's start from the basics, let's build up and then see how high we can get."

What about his demeanor? Some of the best have had nothing in common. Tom Landry was icy and exacting, Vince Lombardi combustible and demanding, Marv Levy warm and encouraging.

Connor wants his WCU players to know he cares about them as people:

"I think maybe as a head coach you can have distance between you and your players. But, as a position coach, those relationships was one of the reasons I wanted to get into coaching. Being part of a group and in a meeting room for however many months of the year. That was important to me."

"I care about these guys. We worked out during the summer. I texted them to get updates. But I care about them because we're all a group. We're all in this together.

"The relationship thing is the most important thing in coaching to me. And that's why I really don't have aspirations to go up to that NFL level and coach. You don't have that. It's hard to have that. There's turnover every year. Guys have families, they have separate lives. There's not that much camaraderie. It's hard to build it that quick.

"At this level, you can have it, you can build it. Players live together, some have come in together the same year, they've been working together for multiple years.

"I like that. That's big for football. But it's also huge the rest of their lives. They have this group they went through this for four years of their lives."

Connor said he still has that connection with NFL standouts Paul Posluszny and Sean Lee, his crew on arguably the greatest corps of linebackers at the program nicknamed for them:

"Sean, Paul. All those guys I played with. It's just a different bond. Everything you went through. No one can see it through your eyes like they can. It's a very small circle.

"You relate to them different than anyone else. Some guy you meet, a neighbor. It's not the same as a guy you did 5 a.m. workouts with and got yelled at by Joe Paterno for four straight years."

Connor laughed then but got serious almost as quickly.

"I respect those relationships as much as any football success I've had. I hold them sacred. Because I really appreciated them."

Like you would a family.

So, you can still get mad at family members, though, right? Camp starts Wednesday. What happens if Connor has to make a point? What if one of his backers doesn't hit a sled very hard late in the day? What about the same mental mistake from the same guy for the third time? Might that hellion in Dan Connor come loose?

"I don't think so. I hope it doesn't get into screaming. Unless it's called for.

"But yeah, who knows? Week two of camp and it's 95 degrees? I might let somebody have it."

He laughed again. He didn't sound like he was kidding.

DAVID JONES: djones@pennlive.com.