Who is Missouris Eliah Drinkwitz? The ambition, prayers and play calling that lifted him from a s -

ALMA, Ark. — As coach Marty Belcher prepared for first pitch, a chubby-cheeked kid entered the dugout, wanting a word. Seven-year-old Eliah Drinkwitz was concerned about his youth-league team’s lineup construction: The first two batters were struggling to get on base, taking away chances for the 3-4-5 hitters to drive in runs. Why not move the sixth- and seventh-hole players to the top of the order?

“Good call, Eli,” Belcher remembered telling his second baseman, who batted eighth, meaning the changes had no impact on him.

Drinkwitz marched out of the dugout, back to his teammates. Another coach, who watched the impromptu strategy session, turned to Belcher.

“What’s that about?” he asked.

“That’s Eli,” Belcher replied. “He’s going to be a good coach, a good preacher or a politician.”

Officially, Drinkwitz picked coaching, ascending to the Missouri head job in December, but he’s a blend of all three. Major college football requires its share of politicking, and Drinkwitz can draw from his time as student government president in college. The 36-year-old, who is open about the role of faith in his life, is like a preacher: He needs people to buy into a vision, something greater than they can see.

Drinkwitz showed his enthusiasm earlier this month, whooping through the hallways when a recruit committed to the Tigers. A video of his reaction garnered half a million views on Twitter, giving Drinkwitz beneficial exposure. He might be fast-rising in the football world — he’s the youngest head coach in the SEC — but he’s little known nationally with only one year of college head coaching experience.

A married father of four, Drinkwitz took an unorthodox path to Missouri, where he’ll make $4 million a year and is charged with elevating the Tigers from middle-of-the-pack status. Along with Mississippi State’s Mike Leach, he’s one of only two coaches in the conference who didn’t play college football.

Growing up in Alma, Ark., Drinkwitz and his wife, Lindsey, shared a small-town love story: She was a year older, a cheerleader chosen as Miss Alma High, and he was an ultra-involved, glasses-wearing football player. The senior superlative section of his yearbook lists him as the top male student, and he was treasurer of Spanish Club.

“He didn’t look like an athlete,” said Tom McMurray, one of Drinkwitz’s high school football coaches and mentors. “He was more of the bookworm-type guy.”

Eliah Drinkwitz earned superlatives as a student at Alma High. (Courtesy of Alma High Library)

Drinkwitz, a self-described fan of arguing and justice, grew up an aspiring lawyer. But the coaching seeds were always there, cultivated in the river-valley town. Whenever Drinkwitz’s mom, Susie, cleaned the family house, she’d find pieces of paper littered with X’s and O’s and arrows, even in the bathroom. Football ran in the family: His dad, Jerry, was an all-conference running back at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, and coached high school ball before the family moved to Arkansas. Eli grew up watching his dad’s film through a 16 millimeter projector.

Alma, once branded the Spinach Capital of the World because of a now-closed canning company, is largely a bedroom community for Fort Smith, 20 minutes down the road. But football is a point of pride. Most boys around Drinkwitz’s age grew up playing, and the Alma High stadium seats more than 6,000 people: more than the town’s population in the latest census.

“It’s the culture of the town,” Drinkwitz said from his office overlooking Faurot Field. “That was our identity.”

At the heart of Alma is T&L Barber Shop, which has stood on West Cherry Street since 1970. The price sign features a yellow Alma High logo, and a picture of the Airedale mascot hangs over a half-century-old soda machine.

Frankie Vines, a T&L customer, coached at Alma from 1976-2006, winning 270 games and leading the Airedales to their only three state championships. Everyone from area coaches to former players to Auburn coach Gus Malzahn describes Vines as an Arkansas football legend.

He’s also one of the main reasons Drinkwitz, who played linebacker, decided to roam sidelines, not courtrooms. During Drinkwitz’s senior year, Vines told him he had the makings of a good football coach.

“That was really the first time it entered my mind,” Drinkwitz said.

Drinkwitz left Alma to attend Arkansas Tech in Russellville. But on Friday nights, he’d make the 60-mile trip back home so he could volunteer coach. He pointed out observations to the defensive coordinator in the booth, taking in the game with a new lens.

At the heart of Alma is long-time fixture T&L Barber Shop. (Peter Baugh / The Athletic)

In the Bible, a priest called Eli breaks his neck falling from a chair, so Jerry Drinkwitz nixed that name idea. The prophet Elijah, on the other hand, was a good namesake — the Bible said he worked miracles through God — but Jerry preferred spelling it without the “J.” So they called their fourth of six children Eliah.

“But I never have heard anybody call him that,” said Malinda McSpadden, Drinkwitz’s elementary school counselor.

Back home, he’s Eli.

Susie homeschooled her kids in their early years, but after the family moved to Alma from nearby Mountainburg, Ark., Eli enrolled in third grade at the public school, where McSpadden said he emerged as a leader. It’s a role he kept throughout his youth: He was president of the high school student council, as well as the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. At the See You at the Pole prayer event, he strummed his guitar and led students in song.

The worst punishment Drinkwitz’s mom gave him growing up was a grounding for neglecting to take out the trash, but he had his mischievous moments. Scott Treece, the Alma High librarian, said Drinkwitz and a friend or two once sneaked a turtle sculpture from the local pool and placed it atop the Alma Dam.

“So Eli is an office aide, and our resource officer comes in,” remembered Treece. “He says, ‘Somebody stole that daggum turtle out there at the park, and we’ve got to find it.’ And Eli hears it and he goes and gets the turtle and takes it back.”

After the sculpture was returned to the pool, where Drinkwitz also worked, the boys turned themselves in to the resource officer, Treece said. They didn’t get in trouble; everyone had a good laugh.

Drinkwitz injured a shoulder his freshman football season, so he started attending varsity practices to help out as a manager. He was chatty: McMurray had to take him and the other managers to games in his car so they wouldn’t drive Vines crazy on the team bus.

“I don’t know if Eli has ever had a shy moment, even when he was a kid,” his mom said.

The Airedales won state in 1997, Drinkwitz’s freshman year, then again the next. Drinkwitz keeps a back-to-back state championship hat next to his desk at Mizzou.

The Alma High halls display the Airedales’ school spirit. (Peter Baugh / The Athletic)

Now retired, Jerry Drinkwitz was a hard-working man who taught special education eight miles away in Van Buren, and the family started a T-shirt printing business out of its garage. Jerry and Susie earned what they needed to provide for their children, but there was little room for extravagance.

During summers, Eli worked as head lifeguard at the pool, which his mom managed, and refereed sporting events. Good grades were also important for the kids: Financial aid was key to a college education.

“We learned to do what it takes,” Drinkwitz said.

He took the same approach in football. Drinkwitz didn’t have an abundance of natural talent — “What he lacked in size, he made up in slowness,” Vines said — but spent hours in the weight room and ran extra to improve his speed.

“You’d always depend on him,” said Blake Belcher, a fiery safety whom Drinkwitz often had to calm down during games. “He was always doing his job, but I would be maybe yelling at the defensive line.”

The Drinkwitz house served as a team hub. Before Friday night games, players flocked to Rudy Road, entered the one-story ranch house and grabbed spaghetti prepared by Susie. Then they reviewed game tape before heading to the stadium.

The former Drinkwitz home in Alma served as a team hub before games. (Peter Baugh / The Athletic)

Drinkwitz, who earned all-state honors as a senior, could’ve walked on at Arkansas Tech but decided against it. He was coming off a torn labrum and would’ve had to give up his academic scholarship to keep up with football. His focus turned to coaching.

“He was not a great athlete,” Vines said. “But he was a real good player.”

Back when Drinkwitz was in high school, Jeanne Vines remembers talking to her husband when he got home from practice. Frankie had gotten angry at the team that day and said “goddamn it.”

That didn’t sit well with Drinkwitz. He urged the coach not to curse in God’s name, Jeanne said. Frankie doesn’t recall the encounter two decades later, but it sticks out to his wife.

“He made him stand back and look,” Jeanne said. “Eli was a person like that who would have that kind of influence on you.”

Drinkwitz thanked Jesus within the first minute of his opening news conference and, while a student at Arkansas Tech, helped buy a Bible for Lance Fetters, a student who was deployed to Iraq. The small book fit in Fetters’ pocket, and he carried it with him from training in California to Kuwait to Iraq before returning home safely.

“He’s a Christian coach; it’s his ministry,” said Malzahn, who first met Drinkwitz at the Arkansas high school all-star game in 1999. “He puts God first, before his profession.”

That started early. Drinkwitz’s family moved from Oklahoma to Mountainburg when he was 1 to live in a trailer and work at God’s Ranch, a campground for religious retreats. McSpadden, one of Susie’s close friends, calls her “a prayer warrior,” and the Drinkwitz family became members of a nondenominational church in Alma.

As Marty Belcher said when Drinkwitz was playing youth baseball, he’d have made a good preacher. People around him trust his voice. When Dustin Chitwood, an Alma student, died in a motorcycle accident in 2003, Drinkwitz, then 20, spoke at the funeral.

“That’s just how much everybody loved Eli,” Jeanne Vines said. “And I told him, ‘The day (Frankie) leaves this earth, you’ll be speaking for him, too.’”

Coaching has carried Drinkwitz from Arkansas high schools to Group of 5 programs to the SEC. And he’s prayed every step of the way, McSpadden said.

“When you look at the journey and the path that I’ve taken, there’s a lot of either divine appointments or coincidences — I chose to believe in divine appointments — that led to where I’m at now,” Drinkwitz said.

But Drinkwitz is also both driven and intentional. He put himself in positions to rise.

Zak Clark, a former quarterback for Fayetteville High, first met Drinkwitz in 1999 at the week-long all-star event. Vines coached the team, and he asked Drinkwitz, a rising junior, to help as a manager. Drinkwitz grabbed water for the team and talked to coaches, Frankie Vines remembered. When they posed for a group picture, Drinkwitz stood in the back row, next to the coaches.

“If the players voted on the captain, he would’ve been the captain,” said Frankie Vines, who had Malzahn on his all-star game coaching staff.

Five years later, when Drinkwitz was finishing up at Arkansas Tech, Malzahn remembered him and brought him to Springdale as a volunteer assistant and student teacher. It would be a key relationship for Drinkwitz, as the two later reunited at Auburn.

Even though Drinkwitz had played defense, he was drawn to offensive coaching. He knew that expertise made it easier to get a head coaching gig, and Malzahn encouraged him to work with the offensive line. It’s the hardest position to find good coaches, Drinkwitz remembered Malzahn saying.

And when opportunities came calling, even ones that felt risky, he took leaps.

“Eli’s goals and dreams,” said former Alma athletic director Mike McSpadden, “were a lot bigger than just a small town.”

Before leading Appalachian State to a 12-1 season in 2019, Drinkwitz hadn’t been a head coach since 2005, when he spent one season leading the Alma Middle School seventh-grade team. McSpadden, who hired Drinkwitz out of college, said coaching that level is revealing: The players are still learning fundamentals and the coach handles all aspects of the game.

None of that scared Drinkwitz, whose enthusiastic outlook made him popular. Jason Reeves, then the eighth-grade coach, remembered his young coworker doing up-down exercises with his players. And, during games, Drinkwitz mixed in occasional trick plays.

“We would sit in the office, and we would say, ‘You know, there are a lot of not very smart people who are head coaches in high school,’” Reeves said. “‘We can be a head high school football coach. We just need to work.’”

Drinkwitz spent 2006-2009 as an assistant at Springdale High, where he doubled as a world history teacher. Malzahn had left for the college level, but Drinkwitz took his advice and worked with the offensive line. A year later, he took over offensive coordinator duties, too.

“If you weren’t prepared, he’d make you look real silly in a hurry,” said Southside High coach Jeff Williams, who remembered giving up 52 points in 2008 to Springdale, which was playing with a banged-up quarterback.

Drinkwitz developed a tight circle of coaching friends while at Springdale, including Clark, now the school’s head coach, and Williams. They loved meeting up to talk ball, and Drinkwitz is still part of a group text with the two coaches, as well as brothers Keith Fimple, the Conway football coach, and Daryl Fimple, the North Little Rock women’s basketball coach.

Though only 26 when the 2009 season ended, Drinkwitz was in contention for Springdale’s vacant head coaching position. But the administration went with a more experienced candidate.

“It was a disappointing thing, because I thought I was the best candidate,” Drinkwitz said. “But it led to something better, obviously, and an open door at another place.”

After the 2009 season, Malzahn returned to Springdale, this time to recruit Drinkwitz.

“I was his first five-star recruit,” Drinkwitz joked.

Malzahn, then the Auburn offensive coordinator, wanted Drinkwitz as a quality control coach. As a graduate assistant, he’d make around $15,000 a year with no benefits. Drinkwitz might not have gotten the head job at Springdale, but he still had a good teaching position and a gig as coordinator.

On top of that, Lindsey, whom he’d married in 2005, was on maternity leave, having just given birth to the couple’s first daughter, Addison.

“He had to have a little bit of faith, take a pay cut and get in the crazy world of college football,” Malzahn said.

Lindsey weighed in: They’d always regret not taking the leap if they didn’t, she told her husband.

Drinkwitz listened. They took a sizable hit on the house — the bubble had recently popped — and moved into a tight, two-bedroom apartment 10 minutes away from Jordan-Hare Stadium, prepared to spend frugally and rely on their savings.

“I honestly don’t know how we did it,” Drinkwitz said.

Lindsey Drinkwitz, shown fifth from left during her time at Alma High, encouraged Eli to take a low-paying job as a graduate assistant at Auburn. (Courtesy of Jeanne Vines)

Shortly after arriving at his new school, Drinkwitz sent a group text to his coaching friends in Arkansas. He included a picture of Auburn’s new quarterback, telling them he was the real deal. Daryl Fimple remembers feeling skeptical — who even was this Cam Newton guy?

Auburn went 14-0 under coach Gene Chizik that year, edging Oregon to win the national title. Newton won the Heisman Trophy and was drafted first the following spring.

After the 2011 season, Malzahn left Auburn to take a head coaching job at Arkansas State. He brought Drinkwitz with him, giving him a full-time role as running backs coach. Malzahn’s reasoning was simple: Drinkwitz had earned his trust.

Like most coaches, Drinkwitz, who will call the plays at Missouri, has been influenced by those he’s worked with. Vines taught him to trust people to do their jobs. Chizik stressed not taking work concerns home to family. Malzahn helped Drinkwitz create an offensive philosophy, and Bryan Harsin, now the Boise State coach, set an example with his day-to-day organizational skills.

Those coaches molded a distinct, offensive-minded philosophy that carried Drinkwitz to coordinator positions at Boise State and NC State, then the head job at Appalachian State. After leading the Mountaineers to a Sun Belt title and top-25 ranking this past season, he drew interest from Power 5 programs, including Arkansas, sources told The Athletic.

But Missouri was the right fit, and some back in Alma — only 50 miles from Fayetteville — are relieved he didn’t end up with the Razorbacks. The Tigers won six games this past season and play in the weaker SEC East, whereas Arkansas has struggled in the formidable SEC West.

Shortly after the Sun Belt title game Dec. 7, Drinkwitz’s agent told him Missouri wanted to meet. The coach couldn’t right away because of a prior commitment: Addison was performing in “The Nutcracker” at 7 p.m. The coach is intentional with balancing family and work life — he says he’s a husband and father before he’s a coach — but pushing thoughts of a life-altering opportunity proved difficult. He slipped out after his daughter left the stage and drove to a Hampton Inn in Wilkesboro, N.C., where athletic director Jim Sterk and other UM officials waited.

By the next night, he’d accepted the job.

Back in Alma, he was the hot topic, nowhere more than at T&L Barber Shop. Barber Terry Fimple got tired of talking about Drinkwitz with customers.

“It was like he was Brad Pitt,” he said.

In his two months as Missouri coach, Drinkwitz has already made visible changes throughout Missouri’s facility, plastering objectives on the wall: “Our goal is to win the SEC East and a bowl game with class, integrity and academic excellence.”

Questions linger. His year of success at Appalachian State came with a roster built mostly by a different coach, and winning the Sun Belt is one thing. The SEC East? That’s a different beast.

In Alma, there’s faith he’ll succeed. The townspeople have seen his charisma and play designs, his aspirations and his growth. The job at Missouri won’t be easy — perhaps his most difficult task so far — but they know it won’t deter his ambition. Nothing has yet.

(Top photo of Drinkwitz: Courtesy of Zach Bland / Mizzou Athletics)

ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57kG9nbGhpbHxzfJFpZmlqX2aBcLnIrKqoraKeerW1xp6prGWWpLy1rsClo2adnJ6uqXnDq6Cno6eewbt50aiqnmWjmrBw