DeKalb grad Dre Brown hired on as recruiting coordinator at Tennessee

In the span of about a week, DeKalb graduate Dre Brown went from working at a bank in Champaign to being on the staff of the University of Tennessee football program.

Brown, who played running back for and graduated from the University of Illinois, was hired Friday as the recruiting coordinator for the Vols.

“I was just reaching out to literally every coach that coached me in college,” said Brown, a 2015 graduate of DeKalb. “I had always been tight with coach Alex Golesh, who’s the offensive coordinator at Tennessee. He messaged me on a Thursday and was like can you send me a resume, and I was like sure. A week later I’m in Tennessee working for the Volunteers.”

Golesh was the recruiting coordinator and running back coach at Illinois in 2014, and was in the program from 2012-2015. He came over to Tennesse this year from UCF with Josh Heupel. Golesh was also a grad assistant at NIU from 2006-07.

Brown was the Daily Chronicle Male Athlete of the Year in 2014 after standing out in football, track and basketball for the Barbs in his junior year, and was the Football Offensive Player of the Year later in 2014.

Brown, who said he’s about to earn a master’s degree from Illinois, struggled with injuries throughout his career with the Illini. He missed the entirety of the 2015 and 2016 seasons with injuries and played only 13 games the next two years.

In his senior season in 2019, he played 13 games and helped the Illini reach a bowl game.

Now he’s in the operations department of the Tennessee football program.

“I’ll just be helping out a lot with visits – with COVID it’s a little different with virtual visits,” Brown said. “I’ll be helping the stuff with communication and stuff. It’s a really awesome job. I’ll be working hard over here, but it’s super-exiting.”

Brown said he’s not sure where the opportunity will lead. He said for now he’s just looking to get his career around football started, getting his foot in the door with a staff.

“I’m really not too sure of my goal right now,” Brown said. “I’m just going to work as hard as I can, network a lot. That’s super important in this profession. I’ll see how things are in the SEC. If that leads to coaching, if that leads me to the head of recruiting somewhere someday, that’s what I’ll look at the most. But I’m meeting a lot of super-cool people around here.”

Although he went undrafted, he had minicamp opportunities lined up with the Bears and Giants in March 2020. The pandemic ended up canceling those appointments, and it was at that point Brown decided his playing days were over.

“It’s such a weird time because no one’s really been through a global pandemic,” Brown said. “I can’t really say woe is me because it’s affected way more people than me. I would say that it was difficult but I knew that my one shot was that year. So I moved on. I felt like it was what I was dealt with.”

He also said he’s adjusting to living outside of Illinois for the first time in his life.

“Just hearing people talk, they have a longer end to their words,” Brown said. “The last letter, they really enunciate that. Driving is also different. I’m used to driving through corn, now it’s mountains. It’s a little intimidating, but I’m starting to get it slowly but surely.”