Coaching football is not rocket science.
But if it were, Tony Hull would be more than qualified.
Hull, who was hired as the Hawaii football team’s co-offensive coordinator in January, earned an engineering degree in industrial technology and then worked with a group who developed a more efficient external fuel tank for NASA.
And Hull could have kept reaching for the stars if not for a straight-from-the heart decision.
“My passion and my calling is developing young men through the game of football on and off the field,” Hull said.
Hull left Lockheed Martin, an aerospace company sub-contracted by NASA, to become a high school coach in Louisiana.
“It wasn’t about money,” Hull said. “I took a high school job making $30,000. I felt the tug in my heart that it was time for me to do it. That’s what I loved doing, and I’ll love it until my last days.”
In addition to coaching at the high school, Hull taught algebra and calculus.
“It gave me different tools to understand how kids and young adults have different learning styles, how each of us is unique and learn differently,” Hull said. “It helped me tremendously. It helped me understand how to teach. So, now as a football coach at the collegiate level, I can teach the game of football and reach the different individuals who come along with it.”
The teacher also was the student. As Warren Easton High’s head coach for nine seasons, Hull attended several college coaching clinics.
“As a high school coach, I studied all these offensive systems with all these college coaches,” Hull said. “It allowed me to be in the same room as them.”
Hull ran a modified version of the Air Raid, a quick-rhythm passing attack out of a spread formation. At Kansas, where Hull coached running backs the past three seasons, a more advanced Air Raid was the base offense.
Soon after being hired at UH, Hull and offensive coordinator G.J. Kinne studied videos of the Warriors’ practices and games the past two seasons.
They concluded that the run-and-shoot, UH’s offense and Air Raid share the same concepts. Hull said the Warriors will maintain the run-and-shoot schemes, but add wrinkles, particularly in the running game, if needed.
“You don’t want kids adjusting too much and making a major change, especially in these times,” Hull said. “The beautiful thing is there’s a significant carryover from what we’ve done in the past and what they’ve done here. It allows us to make it easier to help the kids out.”
Hull, who will work directly with the inside receivers, said he is impressed with the Warriors’ drive. It was a similar trait Hull demonstrated growing up in New Orleans.
“I grew up from a pretty tough area in New Orleans, and I went to a tough high school,” Hull said. “People always said kids who graduate from this high school can’t do this and can’t do that. I remember telling one of my teachers I wanted a degree in engineering, and she told me, ‘you can’t get a degree in engineering graduating from this high school. I was like, ‘yeah, I’ll show you.’ ”
Hull said engineering matched his love of numbers with “figuring out how things work, putting stuff together to accomplish a goal.”
At the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Hull chose industrial technology as his engineering field.
“It’s the more practical form of engineering,” Hull said. “It’s taking the engineering principles of design and applying it to produce a product as opposed to just theories. I’m not a big theory guy who studies theories on top of theories on top of theories. I love to take theories and apply them to a real-world application to see if they work.”
Hull added: “I went out and got the degree.”
