Inside Jordan-Hare Stadium last Saturday, Presley Hawkins peered over to the Tennessee sideline and spotted one of her former grade school teachers.

The same man who used to allow her to tumble on the playground at Wills Valley Elementary in Fort Payne was now front and center, leading the Volunteers to an upset victory over her Auburn Tigers. How strange was it to see Jeremy Pruitt in this moment after all these years, Hawkins thought.

"Kind of bittersweet," Hawkins said. "But it was also cool -- just because of where he came from and how he worked his way all the way up."

Barely 13 years before he was named the head coach at Tennessee -- one of the SEC's most storied programs -- Pruitt taught physical education to children in the seat of DeKalb County as he laid the groundwork for a football career that eventually brought him fame and fortune.

In the early aughts, Pruitt spent his days camped out in a lawn chair supervising tiny tykes as they clambered up the jungle gym and played an assortment of games -- kickball and dodgeball, among them.

When he was introduced at Tennessee back in December, Pruitt quipped, "I taught everybody from 2001 to 2004 how to tie their shoes in the city of Fort Payne."

Roughly ten miles from his hometown of Rainsville, Pruitt led a humble existence in the small northeast Alabama community once known as the "Sock Capital of the World."

Back then, he had no other choice but to accept his fate. After a successful run at nearby Plainview, his father, Dale, had just been hired as Fort Payne's high school coach and planned to appoint Jeremy as his defensive coordinator. The only position available in the school district was at Wills Valley Elementary, where Jeremy would oversee gym classes from kindergarten to third grade.

"There was nothing else open," said Jesse Gamez, Pruitt's friend and a Spanish teacher at Fort Payne High. "And he took it like a real man."

Privately, Jeremy grumbled about his lot in life. He was only five years removed from a stint as a defensive back at mighty Alabama, where he also served as a graduate assistant once his eligibility expired. He simply wanted to coach and coveted a job at the high school alongside his dad.

"I would just tell him, 'We're working on it,'" said Dale. "We'll work on it."

In the meantime, Jeremy made do. As a teacher, he straddled the line between hard-nosed disciplinarian and glorified chaperone. He demanded his students finish running their laps but also let them choose their activities -- making the 45-minute period into a hodgepodge of recess and phys ed. Once, when the kids kept clamoring to play soccer day after day, Jeremy left the goals locked in the shed to force them to pick another sport.

"He would act like they were broken or they would not work," recalled Layton Powell, a former Pruitt pupil.

This was part of the playful side Jeremy would show away from the sidelines. At his day job, he'd join in on dodgeball games and occasionally tease the kids.

One day, after Powell kicked a ball into the rafters and celebrated his achievement, Jeremy jokingly threatened to paddle him and call his mother. Powell, not old enough to understand sarcasm, shuffled off to a corner and began to cry before Jeremy went over to console him. Years later, the two would cross paths again at Alabama, where Powell was a student equipment manager and Jeremy was the newly-appointed defensive coordinator.

Reunited in Tuscaloosa, Jeremy requested Powell be his right-hand man.

"I would rather be able to chew you out and feel better about it than chew some other kid out," Pruitt told him.

Powell -- much older and more resistant to shedding tears -- felt honored.

"I thought it was really cool that it, by chance, happened that we both ended up at the same place -- as a student worker and a coach -- under Nick Saban and then for possibly the greatest run of college football history," said Powell, who is now 22. "We were two guys from small-town Alabama that used to be known for their socks."

***

Fort Payne is a hideaway located in a valley surrounded by mountains almost equidistant to Tuscaloosa as it is to Knoxville.

Over the years, the city of roughly 14,000 people transformed into a manufacturing hub for hosiery with mills dotting the landscape. But around the time the Pruitts slid over from Plainview to coach the high school team, the upsurge in globalization and outsourcing began to cut into DeKalb County's chief export, leading to the rapid disappearance of jobs.

On the football field, things weren't going much better.

The town's beloved Wildcats were in shambles. In each of the two seasons before the Pruitts arrived, they went 2-8 in Class 5A.

"It was a mess," Gamez recalled.

And Jeremy was determined to clean it up.

When he was away from his day job, he obsessed about football.

"All Jeremy wanted to do was be a ball coach," his father said.

Gamez remembered one time when Jeremy recruited him to watch film on a slow Saturday night. Gamez, then an assistant on the junior high team, accompanied him until around 1 a.m. before heading home. The next morning, they bumped into each other at church in Rainsville, where Gamez asked Jeremy how long he stayed behind poring over the game tape.

"I got home at 5 o'clock," he responded.

His dedication paid dividends. Fort Payne made incremental improvements, producing a .500 record in 2001, winning seven games the following season and earning its first playoff berth since the early 1990s in Dale Pruitt's third and final year at the helm.

Back at Wills Valley Elementary, Jeremy proudly let both faculty and students alike know he was part of the turnaround taking place down the road.

"Every single day he had on a Fort Payne T-shirt and gym shorts," said Hawkins, a 25-year-old kindergarten teacher in Greater Atlanta. "I know his family. I know football is what they eat, sleep and breathe all day, every day -- his dad, his brother. That's all that is to them -- football is life."

But so too was DeKalb County.

Jeremy was shaped by his small-town upbringing that trickled into his adulthood. As he climbed the ladder in the coaching ranks and moved from one high-profile gig to another, he continued to hearken back to his roots. He never tried to put on airs, even as he starred in an MTV reality show filmed at the suburban powerhouse Hoover High, where he was on staff.

"People call him country," Dale said. "He doesn't care. It doesn't matter with him because he is comfortable in his skin."

During Jeremy's first stint with Saban's Tide, for which he initially worked as the director of player development, he routinely made trips back to northeast Alabama to coach his son, Jayse, on a travel baseball team that also included Powell.

At one point, Jeremy dropped Powell in the lineup after he had been mired in a slump. Stung by the demotion, Powell responded by hitting his first home run. After Powell rounded the bases, Jeremy was there to greet his former gym class student with a high five and a smile.

"I knew something would light a fire up under you ass," he told Powell.

While sharing the anecdote, Powell couldn't help but laugh.

"He definitely didn't lose that Fort Payne/Rainsville, Alabama feel," Powell said.

That wasn't lost on his father many years later when Jeremy returned to the Crimson Tide to run the team's defense before the 2016 season. By then, Jeremy had become a household name after serving as a coordinator at both Florida State and Georgia. His equal on the Alabama staff was none other than Lane Kiffin -- a coach's son, who unlike Jeremy, had been gifted amazing opportunities at the outset of his career. Whether or not it was justified, the perception of Kiffin was that he had it easy. By the time he was 35, Kiffin had already been handed the reins to an NFL team and the Tennessee program Jeremy now directs.

"Jeremy should appreciate it more because he had a whole lot more humbler beginning," Dale said.

Alabama defensive coordinator Jeremy Pruitt works with his players during Alabama football practice, Monday, Sept. 12, 2016, at the Thomas-Drew Practice Fields in Tuscaloosa, Ala. Vasha Hunt/vhunt@al.com ORG XMIT: ALBIN401 AP

***

Inside the guts of Neyland Stadium last December, Jeremy Pruitt wore a bright orange tie and a black pinstripe suit, looking as polished as ever. His dream had finally come true. At long last, he was now a head coach. Jeremy had never held that title before -- not even at any of his stops in DeKalb County. As he introduced himself to the Volunteers' fan base, Jeremy reminisced about how the journey to Knoxville began.

"I got in this business for the kids," he said.

His goal back then was to coach teenagers in high school, perhaps never thinking his career would reach a plateau as elevated as the one where Tennessee resides. But along the way he taught small children in Fort Payne at a time when he couldn't have possibly known he was destined for something much bigger.

"It wasn't what he wanted to do the rest of his life," Dale said. "But it was probably a good thing for him at the time."

Both Powell and Hawkins are certainly appreciative. They now have a good story to tell their friends about the SEC coach who used to tie shoelaces, throw dodgeballs and watch the playground from a lawn chair at Wills Valley.

As Hawkins surveyed the scene last Saturday from the stands at Jordan-Hare and witnessed the Volunteers win their first conference game since 2016, she almost couldn't believe her eyes. There was the man she used to see on a daily basis at her elementary school. There was Jeremy Pruitt.

"It's really weird to think that was my P.E. teacher," she said.

Rainer Sabin is an Alabama beat writer for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @RainerSabin