“Won’t he be a sight with his football helmet on? Well, that’ll be his first love ‘til his first love comes along. He’ll get his heart broke by the time he’s in his teens. And heaven help him if he’s anything like me,” From “Anything Like Me,” by Dave Turnbull, Brad Paisley and Charles Du Bois.

Somewhere in the collection of household goods that Dan and Misti Hawkins have compiled in advance of their upcoming move is a videotape from the 1990s. In it, Dan Hawkins, rising football mind and head coach at Willamette University, is conducting a post-game interview with five-year-old son Cody perched on his shoulders.

Cody is doing his best Groucho Marx impersonation, using a pencil as his “cigarette,” while the camera man keeps trying to lower his focus to remove the young man from his picture. Cody keeps lowering his head to stay on the screen while dad continues his interview, oblivious to being “photo-bombed” by his son.

“It was very hilarious,” recalled Misti Hawkins. “Cody’s son Bowen does the exact same things as his dad.”

“You never realize how much your parents love you until you have kids of your own,” said Cody Hawkins, now the head football coach at Idaho State. “When I started to have kids, I was like, ‘Holy cow, I’ve got to apologize for so many things to my parents.’”

Really, no apology necessary. Not for the time Cody and his brother Drew ran right through the middle of the football field, chasing each other while a Willamette game was ongoing.

Not for the time when Dan was an assistant coach at Boise State. Washington State was driving for a late touchdown, the tension was rising and Dan looked up to see a football flipping up in the air by the goal post the Cougars were approaching. There was young Cody, nonchalantly leaning on the goal post, tossing the ball and seemingly heedless to the drama building on the field before him.

And not for the time Cody accompanied Dan on his first game as head coach at Boise State for a trip to take on South Carolina and the immortal Lou Holtz. Overwhelmed by the police escort, the 90,000 fans making their way to the stadium and cars parked all along the highway, the 13-year-old Cody couldn’t contain his excitement as his dad tried to focus on the game ahead.

“I’m usually pretty locked in on game day — pretty locked in,” Dan recalled. “I’m like ‘Cody, ‘you need to be quiet dude.’”

No, no need to apologize for any of those moments, because they were, in truth, moments if not orchestrated, certainly cherished by Dan and Misti Hawkins. They were examples of how the Hawkins family turned football into a shared experience that has lasted pretty much a lifetime.

And on this Father’s Day weekend, what better time to explore what makes a family of coaches and fathers, their spouses and their kids all draw together around the game of football.

The Most Empty Feeling of His Life

When Cody Hawkins made the decision to sever the cord and leave Dan’s staff at University of California, Davis to become the head coach at Idaho State in late 2022, he changed a family dynamic that had been ingrained for decades. Dan always said you can’t allow football to become your mistress — rather, the Hawkins family made football an ongoing family reunion.

Every Saturday as Cody, his brother Drew and his sisters Ashley and Brittany were growing up, football Saturdays were time for the family to gather for tailgating, walking the sidelines and rooting on whoever Dan was coaching at the time — Willamette, Boise State, Colorado, UC Davis. That was followed by gathering for a post-game barbecue or pizza, and football highlights on ESPN.

“It was like every weekend was a holiday,” Cody said. “It was college football Saturday. It didn’t just mean you were watching kids hit and tackle and score touchdowns. It was food, it was family, it was being together and that’s what makes it so special. That’s the life I want to provide for my family.”

As Cody grew up, he stayed tightly bound to Dan, playing quarterback for him at Colorado, a trying and painful, but emotionally rich experience. Hawkins was fired with three games left in his fourth season. Cody was so emotional heading into the next game after his dad was dismissed that he couldn’t talk.

“It was the only time in my career where I was Big 12 player of the week,” he recalled of the win over Iowa State. “I came out and played my (tail) off. I remember when I was about to run out of the tunnel, I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t call the cadence. We just went on clap at home, because I couldn’t talk in the huddle, I was so choked up.”

Struggling to restrain his emotions as he remembered that day 14 years later, Cody continued, “I remember I played really well, and just hugging him after the game, because he’d been through so much stuff,” he said. “I felt so bad about it, because I feel like if I’d played better, he wouldn’t have been through all that stuff.”

After Colorado, father and son stayed connected through a couple of different coaching and playing experiences, and eventually Cody joined Dan’s staff at UC Davis, working his way up to offensive coordinator. And marrying Tianna and starting his own “football family.”

“I always told Cody I would move anywhere but California, and then the first place I moved for him was California,” Tianna said with a laugh. “So the joke’s on me.”

By the time Idaho State called to offer Cody the job as Bengal head coach in 2022, he and his dad were more than coaching cohorts, more than father and son, even. They were best friends and the closest of confidants.

“He not only lost one of his best coaches, but one of his best friends,” Misti Hawkins said. “And his grandkids. So it was very difficult. I would say it was instrumental in his decision to move on.”

“(Cody’s) two kids, Finley and Bowen, spent a lot of time around here with my wife,” Dan Hawkins said. “I’m not going to lie, when they left, my wife and I just walked into the living room and we just hugged and bawled for 10 minutes.”

Dan Hawkins stuck around to coach the Aggies one more season, but it just wasn’t the same. UC Davis’ first game of the season was at Oregon State. Cody’s Bengals, meanwhile, were opening at San Diego State. His mom and siblings all gathered in California to watch his head coaching debut.

“My dad was by himself,” Cody said. “He flew there by himself, he flew home by himself and walked in the house and nobody was there. He said that was probably the most empty feeling (he’s) ever had, because to him, football was family.”

Then near the end of that season, father and son matched up in a game in Pocatello. Tianna wore Bengal colors, Misti those of the Aggies, her daughters both. Cody’s brother Drew selected a shirt that just said, “Go Team.” While outsiders thought it must have been a great day for the Hawkins family, it was a tough one for the coaches.

“Coaching against him was brutal,” Dan said. “I tell people it was the worst 60 minutes of my life. For a lot of reasons… It was like having a Russian spy in your own family. He’s over there telling their defense what we’re doing and what’s going on. I’m coaching against a good coach and a guy who knows us. That was hard.”

The Aggies managed to pull out a close win, but that was the last time Dan wanted to coach against Cody.

When the season was over, Dan Hawkins resigned his post as head coach at UC Davis. A lot of folks have characterized it as Hawkins, now 63, “retiring,” but nobody in the Hawkins family believes he’s retired — or that he’s done with football.

In fact, he’s been spending a lot of time mentoring coaches in the Bay Area for a wide range of sports — sort of a “coach’s coach,” if you will.

In the meantime, he and Misti are selling their home in California and looking for some place in the Northwest to relocate. They have children and grandchildren in Beaverton, Oregon, Boise and Pocatello, as well as son Drew in North Carolina. They don’t know where exactly they’ll wind up, but it will be somewhere close to family, that’s for sure.

Maintaining the Family Atmosphere

Coaching Division I football may not be the most challenging occupation for raising a family, but it’s got to be in the top ten.

“When I was the head coach at Willamette, the first two years I was the head coach, my boys played flag football and basketball, and my girls played volleyball and basketball — and I have two of each,” Dan Hawkins said. “I did not see one game in two years of football — volleyball or basketball. Didn’t see one game.

“It’s hard,” he continued. “Your family makes a lot of sacrifices and you make a lot of sacrifices.”

Football offices are also not always known as the most “family friendly” environments. But Misti and Dan made a decision early in Dan’s coaching career that they were going to do their best to make it so.

“It started then — when Dan was an assistant. It evolved from then,” Misti said of the efforts to make the football programs they were involved in welcoming and nurturing places for the coaches’ kids. “The rest kind of came intuitively to me and to Dan as a father. He wanted to spend time with his kids, as Cody does. When you have to spend so much time at work with the players in the stadium, with the other coaches and you aren’t able to come home, it’s wonderful that their mom can bring them. And they can still be a father and the kids can still participate in their life more fully.”

If you drop by football practice at ISU’s ICCU Arena (formerly Holt Arena) these days, there’s a good possibility that you will see Cody’s three children — daughter Finley, 5, son Bowen nearly 3, and baby daughter Dani, who was born in December — hanging around the field with mom Tianna. Along with the children of several of the other coaches.

Tianna Hawkins, who grew up in Boise, said being a coach’s wife is a challenge, but she takes cues from Misti and her relationship with Dan.

“I think that’s why I was never scared of it,” said Tianna, a former teacher and now stay-at-home mom. “Because he and Misti, my mother-in-law, do such a good job at not taking football as a separate thing. That’s why the kids and I are always around. They are the ones who taught me... It’s just part of what we do. I know here, nobody has ever complained, but it’s just different because the kids and I are always around and that’s just his parents’ piece of advice.”

When Cody hires assistant coaches, he makes clear the expectations that his coaches also be good family men.

“Everyone that I hire that’s on our staff, I say, ‘Hey, I’m not going to guarantee we’re going to win championships, but I can guarantee we’re going to do things right and we’re going to treat people right,’” Cody said. “My goal is that when you leave Idaho State, you leave as a better teacher, a better man, a better husband and a better father.”

Cody consistently reinforces to his staff the importance of family involvement, of spending time with their families and the freedom to bring their families to practices, games and other football-related activities.

“They need to be fathers,” he says of his assistants. “And if they’re not being fathers, they’re going to be worse people and better people make better coaches. And they’ve got to realize their impact on the world is a lot bigger than what they do in our staff room. They’ve gotta be home for their wives, they’ve gotta be home for their kids and I think that will have more impact on them as people than anything I do in here.”

Cody recognizes that some observers may see his emphasis on family and the presence of young kids running around practice as “odd,” or a less than serious approach to football. But he frankly doesn’t care.

“That’s the only way I know how to do it,” he said. “I mean my dad has been a national coach of the year three times, and he did it at every place he’s coached. So I figure, ‘Hey, you can do both.’”

Some Pretty Awesome Women

When asked for her perspective on being married to a football coach and a father, Misti Hawkins recalibrates the discussion.

“So my perspective is a little bit different than you might expect,” she said, “because my perspective is I’m married to my husband who is the man that I chose because I knew he was going to be a wonderful husband and a wonderful father — and he happens to be a football coach.”

As the daughter, wife and mother of coaches, Misti has a unique perspective on what it takes to make a coaching family successful.

“The most important thing I learned was to embrace your husband’s profession and not let it become a competition with your family,” Misti said.

It is an approach that has trickled down through her daughters and Cody’s wife, Tianna.

“I have a bunch of really kick-ass women in my family,” Cody noted. “We have a lot of amazing women in our family. My sisters, my mom, my grandma — my grandma is the wife of a coach, my mom is the wife of a coach, my two sisters were really involved in athletics. I have a sister (Ashley) who works for Nike and a sister Brittany ended up marrying a former Boise State football player and she was a fantastic athlete herself — an all-state softball player. So just having them around, there are a lot of women who understand sports who have been able to support Tianna. And man’s she’s picked it up and ran with it.”

Tianna, meanwhile, made her own impression on the Hawkins family — an impression that she would fit right into a coaching family.

“When I was dating Tianna, you could tell she loves her family, which is something I wanted,” said Cody. “She was great around kids, she was an elementary school teacher and I had an opportunity to see her mentor a lot of people and see her around my nieces and nephews. You knew that she was going to be good with whatever. She’s really low-maintenance, she’s super tough, hardworking, values her family and I knew that would translate well.”

Tianna works hard at balancing her role as mom and football coach’s wife. She looks for opportunities to see Cody with the kids during the day, knowing that sometimes he won’t be home until late in the evening. And she tries to maximize whatever time she and the kids do get with Cody.

“I would say in any marriage, I wouldn’t necessarily say just in coaching, but both of us need to put our phones down,” Tianna said. “Like we played cards the other night and it was kind of nice, just to make ourselves, because it’s easy to get caught up in all that.”

“My wife is fantastic about it, she understands, but she is also gently encouraging me to put it down,” Cody said of his phone and his connection to all things football. “I think that’s one thing that I’ve really tried to do is to protect bed time. That’s probably the best thing for me… Trying to get home for bedtime, read to the kids and snuggle them in bed so they know dad loves them and I get to talk to them about their day.

“I compare being a head coach to being a parent of a newborn,” Cody continued. “I don’t know if ‘fun’ is the way you describe it, but you’re proud, you’re definitely in love but you’re exhausted and you’re doing your best to figure it out.”

The Hawkins family certainly isn’t perfect, but as far as making it as a coaching family, they’ve probably got it “figured out” as well as any.

“I think my dad did a great job setting the tone,” Cody said. “Hey, we’re going to be a family first… The more you continue to build on that foundation of rock, which is your family, you’re going to reap the benefits long-term. It’s not easy, but man it’s 100 percent totally worth it. And I’m only able to do it because of the awesome example set by my dad.”