Lou Holtz Never Wanted Son Skip to Enter Coaching

Posted Jan 20, 2010 by Scott Carter

Updated Jan 20, 2010 at 02:02 PM

The future of USF’s football program is now in the hands of Skip Holtz, hired on Thursday to become the second coach in the program’s 14-year history.

USF fans have been buzzing with excitement in the week since Holtz’s hiring. However, if Skip Holtz had listened to his parents when he was a student at Notre Dame while his father was coach there, he would not be the head coach at USF.

“I wanted him to be president of a corporation. My wife wanted him to be an engineer,’’ Lou Holtz told the Tribune’s Joey Johnston. “She felt he had great ability, always taking things apart and putting them back together. We didn’t send him to Notre Dame to be a coach. He had never talked about it. I even tried to talk him into being a basketball coach. No, he wanted to be a football coach.’‘

After leaving Notre Dame, Skip Holtz joined Bobby Bowden’s staff at Florida State as a graduate assistant. He eventually moved up the coaching ranks and is now the new face of USF’s program, replacing Jim Leavitt.

Lou Holtz isn’t second-guessing his son’s decision like he once did.

“The thing that concerned me was he was going into coaching because he saw the luster of it, being at Notre Dame, the attention and everything else,’’ Lou Holtz said. “I didn’t want him to go into coaching, thinking that was the only part of it. But once I talked to him, he just liked dealing with people, he liked teaching, he liked the challenge, he liked the competitiveness.

“Once I was convinced he was going into it for the right reasons, I was fine. That’s when I gave up trying to talk him out of it.”