Hunter Burris

 

By Mike London
mike.london@salisburypost.com

BOONE — Life after Hurricane Helene is almost back to normal for 2021 Jesse Carson High graduate Hunter Burris, and his life is football.

Burris was a pretty good basketball and baseball player for the Carson Cougars, but those sports were just something to keep him busy and competitive between football seasons. Football is where his heart has always been. Burris needs football the way most people need air.

Burris enjoyed some glorious peformances for the football Cougars, was the best running quarterback the program ever has seen, but he doesn’t play football anymore. Now he studies it, he analyzes it, and he even helps coach it, even though he’s only a college junior at Appalachian State University.

“I went through an interview process and was given a chance to help by the coaching staff,” Burris said. “I’ve loved doing it.”

Officially, Burris is a student assistant for the Mountaineers. That doesn’t sound impressive, but he showed he could excel at a thousand small tasks that the coaches didn’t have time for. He has earned bigger jobs and has been trusted with more responsibility each year.

He looks and dresses like a coach. He runs drills. He breaks down film. He counts reps. He’s a lot more than just a fan hanging out with the team.

“I put in a lot of hours as a student assistant,” Burris said. “But for me, football isn’t work. Football will never be just a job. It’s something that I can see myself doing long-term. It’s something I’d love to do the rest of my life.”

Burris gets his love for football honestly. It’s in his blood. His father, Keith Burris, was one of the driving forces in the Rowan County Youth Football League for years. Burris coached with Kent Ryan, a legend as a youth and North Rowan Middle School coach.

Thousands of people want to work in football. Most of them aren’t prepared for the grind that is required, but Burris embraces it. He won’t be outworked.

His goal is to be a college football coach. Not being a college player will be an obstacle to that, but it’s not an insurmountable barrier. Burris is confident that doing exemplary work as a student assistant will lead to an opportunity to be a graduate assistant for a program after he gets his undergraduate degree. Being a graduate assistant can lead to becoming an assistant coach, maybe even a head coach some day. Burris, who majors in exercise science and athletic training, believes that what he’s doing now will be more beneficial in the long run than being a backup player at a Division II or III school.

Mike Macdonald, the Seattle Seahawks head coach, is an inspiration for a lot of potential coaches. Macdonald’s playing career ended in high school due to injuries, but he got his foot in the coaching door by helping with a high school team while he was a student at the University of Georgia, and then he got a chance to be a graduate assistant at Georgia. Then he was promoted to a defensive assistant. Then he joined the Baltimore Ravens as an intern. He moved up to defensive assistant, then position coach, then defensive coordinator. Now he’s a head coach at the highest level and the youngest head coach in the league.

“It’s all about getting a foot in the door and making connections in the coaching network,” Burris said. “I try hard to make a good impression on all of our coaches. Hopefully they’ll be able to recommend me for grad assistant jobs.”

Closer to home than Macdonald, the direct inspiration for Burris is his friend and mentor Jonathan Lowe, who was an assistant during Burris’ playing days and is now Carson’s head coach. Lowe was an East Rowan quarterback who didn’t play in college but got started down the coaching path by becoming a student assistant at Liberty University.

“I would sit in his office in high school and I talked to Coach Lowe a lot about his journey, about football, about life,” Burris said. “Coach (Daniel) Crosby who was the head coach before Lowe was important in my career choice, as well. He gave me a lot of freedom with the play calls as a quarterback and I learned a lot from him about offensive football.”

There was a night in September 2021 when Burris ran for 188 yards on just 10 carries when Carson blasted South Stanly. That set a school record for rushing yards by a quarterback.

Burris’s dream is to coach in college, but he won’t mind if his football path leads to being a high school coach like Lowe or Crosby, someone who gets the thrill of leading young men into those Friday night battles while also getting a chance to make an impact on the rest of their lives.

He has come home in the summer months to help Lowe, by working with Carson receivers and defensive backs. When he was a freshman at App State he still was coming home to help the Cougars on Friday nights, but he’s got too much to do at App State now — and that’s a good thing.

Burris works mostly with App State’s receivers coach and that position group.

“I can help run the practice drills and the game warmups,” Burris said. “I count reps for the guys at practice, so we can make sure they’re all getting the work in. When we played at Coastal Carolina (on a recent Thursday night), I called out the plays for our walk-through.”

Most of Burris’ time away from the field is spent breaking down film. Right now, he is studying James Madison University’s defense, as that is App State’s next opponent.

What he wants to see is how James Madison’s defense aligns when faced with various offensive packages. That will indicate how they probably will line up against App State’s receivers in various formations. It’s more complex than it sounds. Different downs and distances will trigger different defensive fronts, blitzes and coverages. Burris records all the tendencies.

On game days (or nights), Burris is positioned in the press box with offensive coaches, including the coordinator. That’s heaven for him, watching and learning as the plays are called that will decide the outcome of the game. Burris is knowledgable enough that he knows exactly why a certain play was called in a certain situation.

Like many mountain residents, Burris had his world temporarily disrupted by the disaster wrought by Hurricane Helene.

The last thing Burris was worried about living in Boone — App State’s Kidd Brewer Stadium sits 3,333 feet above sea level — was a hurricane. Those storms are normally catastrophic only for low-lying coastal areas.

Hurricanes and tropical storms normally fade when they make landfall, but Helene actually intensified, gained energy and grew stronger as it tore through western North Carolina. The storm fed on the saturated soil that was similar to the moisture-rich environment of the ocean. The “Brown Ocean Effect” scientists call it. It proved deadly and destructive.

“I lost power, but I was one of the lucky ones,” Burris said. “I live way up on a hill and did’t get flooded. But we had terrible flooding and storm damage at the school. Whole buildings were flooded. A lot of our players had apartments that were ruined and had to find other housing. The school was closed for more than two weeks. For a while there, we had no idea if we’d be able to play another home football game.”

App State’s home game with Liberty was canceled.

“They sent us home for a while,” Burris said. “When I got back to school, my power came on.”

App State played road games, both losses, at Louisiana and Marshall, in early October, as it tried to restart its season.

On Oct. 26,  App State was back in business at home at the place they call “The Rock” and 33,783 people, close to capacity, were there to see the Mountaineers rally to beat Georgia State. It was fitting that a rainbow appeared over the stadium to celebrate the victory.

“It was amazing, emotional,” Burris said. “Then we beat Old Dominion after that, and those two games kind of turned around our season. It was great. People were trying so hard to get back to normal again after the hurricane.”

App State lost a tough one at Coastal Carolina and now prepares for a visit from James Madison on Nov. 23, the traditional Black Saturday game,  the last home game for the seniors.  “The Rock” will come alive again.

Until then, Burris will run drills, count reps and break down film, and he’ll love every minute of it.

“I’ve got this passion for football,” Burris said. “I believe I always will.”