Father knows best.

That is the view from Sam Bennett, the son of widely respected football coach Phil Bennett.

“I’ve seen him as a father, obviously, and I’ve played for him, and I worked with him for one year at Arizona State,” said Sam Bennett, who was hired as the University of Hawaii football team’s offensive line coach and run-game coordinator in January. “I’ve seen all the angles.”

Bennett said he has learned his father’s teaching and motivational techniques. “My wife jokes that I try to be me, but I sound like him a lot of the times,” Bennett said. “It’s in the blood. It’s in our nature. He was a coach. My uncles were coaches. Even one of the aunts on my mom’s side was a coach.”

Bennett said he was taught to earn his place. When the elder Bennett was SMU’s head coach, the Mustangs were scheduled to play UH at Aloha Stadium in 2002. “I was a freshman in high school, and he said, ‘you’d better have a job if you’re coming,’” Bennett recalled. “I said, ‘I’ll be a ballboy. It worked out. I was ballboy on the sideline.”

At his father’s recommendation, Bennett worked summers for SMU’s facilities crew.

“I had to check every bleacher in the entire stadium,” the younger Bennett said of 32,000-seat Gerald J. Ford Stadium. “If anything was loose, I had to fix it. If anything was busted, I had to report it. If I could fix it, I had to fix it. I was mowing the grass and painting the practice fields. It worked out. When I was coaching high school and middle school football out of college, I was painting the fields and cutting the grass.”

Bennett said his father embraced the “victim-or-victor mentality.”

“He kind of always told me, ‘when something is not going your way, are you going to lie down and quit or are you going to man up and find a solution?’ That was something in our lifetime we had to do that.”

It was in April 1999 when Bennett’s mother was struck by lightning while jogging in Manhattan, Kan.

“I was asleep, my sister was asleep, my dad was at the house,” Bennett recalled. “It was — I don’t want to use ‘fluke’ — but it was the only lightning strike in the area. She lived for 17 days afterwards, and passed away in the hospital. It changed everything. It changed drastically for my father specifically.”

Phil Bennett, who was Kansas State’s defensive coordinator at the time, could have taken an extended leave of absence. “But he didn’t,” Sam Bennett said. “He found ways to be a father, mother and a football coach.”

Two uncles stayed with the family. Neighbors helped look after 11-year-old Sam Bennett and his 9-year-old sister. KSU coach Bill Snyder worked out a flexible schedule. “Coach Snyder just grouped them around, ‘this is what we need to do. Phil, does this work for you?’ ” Sam Bennett recalled. “We found ways to live a functional life. He taught me by example, and I watched how he persevered. It hurt him. It hurt all of us. You would have never known what he was going through when he got out there with his players or when he was with us. All he was doing was trying to make everybody the best they can be as a person, a player, and the same thing with us, his kids.”

Bennett said he still relies on his father for advice.

“To this day, I’m 30-something years old, if there’s an issue and I call him about it, he’ll say, ‘hey, find a way,’ ” Bennett said. “It’s something I’ve lived by.”

At Highland Park High in Dallas, Bennett was an offensive guard protecting Matthew Stafford, the Detroit Lions’ starting quarterback. Bennett recently found a photo that included a former Highland Park teammate, Cy Young winner Clayton Kershaw. “My wife said, ‘Is that who I think it is?’” Bennett recalled. “I said, ‘yes, that’s him.’ ”

Kershaw was Highland High’s center as a freshman before pursuing baseball full-time. “I remember in eighth grade going up to bat against him,” Bennett said. “I never saw someone 13 years old throw a baseball that hard. I said the same thing about Matthew in football.”

Bennett was a long-snapper at SMU before eventually joining Rice as a graduate assistant. He lived with offensive coordinator Larry Edmondson’s family for six months. It was there where Bennett met the young neighbor who is now his wife.

“It worked out,” said Bennett, who then accepted a job as graduate assistant at Arizona State under Todd Graham, now UH’s head coach. “I left (Rice) with knowledge and with my wife. It was a win.”

After three years at ASU, he joined the Arizona Cardinals as a coaching assistant last year. While Bennett enjoyed working in the NFL, he could not refuse Graham’s offer to join the UH staff.

“My No. 1 thing was my belief in Coach Graham,” Bennett said. “I’ve known him a long time, and him and my dad have a very strong friendship. As great as it was in the NFL, I missed the smaller aspects of college football that you don’t get at the professional level, which is the true development, not just as an athlete, but as a student. I want to take what I learned from a year (in the NFL) and prep them for their chance to get to that and also prep them for that business interview in four years.”