Jeff Monken fondly remembers getting coaching start in Hawaii under Bob Wagner

This is the week that the pictures and memories of a long-ago introduction to college coaching come vividly flooding back to life for Army football coach Jeff Monken.

A week when he shakes his head as he recalls, as he puts it, “a so green” 22-year old trying to break into the coaching business in what seemed then far-off Hawaii for a native of Illinois.

Even nights spent sleeping on the floor of football coaches offices, nicknamed the “Rainbow Hilton”, surviving on fast-food coupons and a $4,400-a-year graduate assistant’s stipend while getting a master’s degree in education, bring back fond memories 30 years later.

“I had a great experience in Hawaii. I loved living in Hawaii. I loved the people of Hawaii,” Monken says as he prepares to try to knock his 3-0 alma mater out of the unbeaten ranks Saturday in a nationally televised CBS Sports Network game at West Point.

Bring up his UH days and Monken will tell you chicken skin tales of a rocking “Aloha Stadium being packed to the gills” and the thrill of being part of breaking the decade-long Brigham Young jinx.

Never mind that few, if any, of those sitting in on his weekly press conference at West Point this week even knew there had been a “jinx”, Monken spent a good portion of the half hour passionately reliving his two formative years (1989 and ’90) at UH.

“What a great experience it was for a guy who played Division III football (at Millikan University) to go into an atmosphere like that,” Monken said.

“When he’d come home (to Illinois) for Christmas we’d ask him about Hawaii and he’d tell us how much he loved it,” his father, Mike recalled. “But he’d say, ‘that floor (in the coaches’ offices) is kinda hard.’”

Though he came from a coaching family — his father, four uncles and a brother all coached high school football in the Midwest and a cousin coached in the NFL — “man, I was so green, I didn’t know anything about coaching,” Monken said. “You don’t realize everything that is packed under that umbrella of being a coach. I learned so much.”

UH’s then-head coach, Bob Wagner, had also come from a small midwestern school (Wittenberg) and knowing the difficulties of breaking into Division I football had a soft spot for candidates trying to follow the same path. “(Assistant coach) Buzzy Preston knew the father and recommended the kid,” Wagner said. “And, he was very bright, a hard worker.”

“I learned things from Bob Wagner that, still today, I think have benefited me,” Monken said. “The two coordinators, Paul Johnson, who I worked with for 13 years, and Rich Ellerson, an unbelievable defensive coach who was the coach here before I came to Army, there are things I learned from those two guys. The patience they had to teach a young kid.”

Manoa, where he worked with slotbacks (1989) and the secondary (1990), was where he was introduced to the triple option that would become his calling card. He rejoined Johnson at Georgia Southern, Navy and Georgia Tech before getting his first head coaching job with Georgia Southern in 2010.

“You could see him rising up the ranks,” Wagner said.

When Monken got the Army job in December of 2013 one of his first calls was to thank Wagner.

“That he remembered, that meant a lot,” Wagner said.