The rise of Coastal Carolina football through the eyes of AD Matt Hogue, a Clover grad
Seventeen years and a few months ago, Matt Hogue had a headset on when the Coastal Carolina football team marched 97 yards and scored the go-ahead touchdown with 10 seconds left to earn the program’s first-ever win in its first-ever game.
Hogue, who grew up in Clover and is now Coastal Carolina’s athletic director, was the play-by-play guy for the school’s radio station then. He remembers that the Chanticleer offense didn’t throw a pass on its final drive. He can still picture how the students, who helped fill the sold-out crowd, rushed the field in Conway and ripped down one of the field’s goalposts after the win.
He even recalls what he said on air when covering the historic moment: “I remember saying something to the effect of, ‘Is this a dream?’”
Two decades later, the Clover High School graduate has perhaps caught himself in a story that feels like a new, bigger dream — one that has captivated the nation’s sports gaze, and one that not many outside of the CCU athletics program can truthfully say they saw coming: the story of the 2020 Coastal Carolina football season.
Coastal Carolina is the No. 15 team in the nation right now, according to the latest Associated Press Top 25 poll. The team is 7-0 after defeating conference foe South Alabama, 23-6, on Saturday. Its other notable wins have come against Louisiana, a squad that was nationally ranked when it played CCU, and Kansas — the team’s season-opener that gave the program its second-ever win over a Power 5 school, and the game that set the tone for 2020.
“What we’re doing in football now, this was the goal,” Hogue, 49, told The Herald. “This was not, ‘Hey, let’s hope we have a year when everything kind of comes together.’ It’s very much all been by design.”
Hogue’s unconventional path from Clover to Coastal Carolina
Hogue’s career — which took him from Clover, to Columbia, to Conway — interestingly intersects with the ascent of the Coastal Carolina football program.
Here’s the short of Hogue’s rise: After graduating from Clover High School in 1989 (where he played on the Blue Eagle basketball team), Houge attended the University of South Carolina with the intent of being a sports broadcaster, spending his free time doing what he could to “get behind a microphone.” He covered Gamecock women’s basketball games on the campus radio station for four years, and then, after graduating, he bounced around different radio stations. He covered everything from Great Falls football’s 1A state title run in 1991 to more USC Gamecock sports before arriving at Conway in 1997.
Hogue’s path up the college athletics ladder became unconventional once he got to Coastal Carolina. In 1997, he started out with CCU’s sports information department while also working as the play-by-play announcer for the school’s basketball team. In the next few years, he’d gradually learn about the “athletic administration side” of college athletics, he said — being promoted to the associate athletic director for marketing before beginning his role with the main university office as an associate vice president of marketing in 2009.
From 2009 to 2014, Hogue didn’t deal with athletics day to day, he said. But on nights and weekends, he was in a broadcast booth or at a courtside table, calling Coastal Carolina and Big South sports events. His unique experience with CCU made him a compelling candidate to earn the interim athletic director job in 2014, and then the permanent job in 2015.
Considering all that, how exactly does Hogue’s career path align with the transformation of Coastal Carolina football?
Hogue was in Conway in 1999, when the school’s board of trustees approved the establishment of a Coastal Carolina football program. He was also there to see Brooks Stadium erected and the CCU sports department ramp up staffing before the aforementioned first Chanticleer football game in 2003, where he called play-by-play from the Brooks Stadium press box.
In the next 15 years, Coastal Carolina became a force in FCS football, and the Clover native covered its rise. CCU went 6-5 in its first year and then 10-2 in its second. It won the Big South Championship seven times. And then in 2016 — literally a day after it won the College World Series in baseball (which, yes, Hogue played a special part in) — the Chanticleers joined the Sun Belt Conference and were a Football Bowl Subdivision program, a process Hogue helped spearhead.
“I’ll be honest, I’m a unicorn in terms of having been in one institution as long as I have, particularly in the variety of roles,” Hogue said. “That’s not really how this business works. Folks move around, you climb the ladder trying to reach the destination job you want. But for me, it was kind of the perfect combination of the place that embraced my talents, of a place where I had the chance to grow and learn and be guided by a lot of great folks through the years. …
“It was an opportunity for me to grow and transform my career at a time when the university was transforming and growing.”
‘Pay dividends in ways far beyond athletics’
After the two-year FBS transition, Coastal Carolina played a full Sun Belt schedule in 2018 and went 5-7. In 2019, CCU earned its first-ever win over a Power 5 school when it defeated Kansas en route to putting together another 5-7 season.
But 2020 has been a whole different phenomenon.
It’s been a dominant string of performances by head coach Jamey Chadwell’s team — which features a host of York County players, including redshirt sophomore Jordan Morris (Rock Hill High), junior De’Angelo Huskey (Rock Hill High), redshirt junior Myles Prosser (York Comprehensive High) and redshirt freshman Shon Brown (Clover High).
But it’s also been a viral tweetstorm of unique postgame celebrations displaying the team’s championship bravado. (Seriously: These celebrations are wild. The most popular one is a video of a WWE-style wrestling show, where the team cheered on two guys dressed up as professional wrestlers who elbow-slammed someone else who was dressed up as the Georgia Southern mascot.)
This year has also brought victories off the field. Coastal Carolina announced a record $852,000 in athletics foundation donations in October in a press conference earlier this year, where Hogue also showed that the university received tens of millions of dollars in revenue based on media, video and television impressions between Sept. 10 to Oct. 19.
Those numbers will likely only grow as the season continues: CCU is setting up for a big game against a fellow FBS-transition-success-story in Appalachian State — a team CCU has yet to beat — on Nov. 21. And perhaps a prominent bowl game is in its future this season.
But whatever happens, Hogue said CCU won’t let the momentum the program has built slip away.
“The great thing is that a lot of people are learning about our university now,” Hogue said, “and that pays dividends in ways far beyond athletics.”
Hogue reflecting on where he’s been
Hogue, who turns 50 on Nov. 12, said he’s done a lot of reflecting on where he’s been. He considers Clover home still, he said, and he visits when he can to see his parents who have been married for 50 years and who still live there.
“It was a great place to grow up,” he said. “It had a great school system, that I often cherish now. I didn’t know how good we had it. There were a lot of great people who led me then. And I think back to going to football games when I was a kid, when I was 8, 9, 10-years-old. ...
“To now be sitting in a press box as an athletic director at an FBS institution, that’s pretty amazing to me sometimes when I think back on it, to have taken that kind of journey, and to have done it maybe in an unorthodox way.”
This story was originally published November 11, 2020 at 7:02 AM.
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