The path from Los Angeles to Sackville, New Brunswick is not one that football coaches routinely navigate.
But Kelly Jeffrey, the Saskatchewan Roughriders’ newly appointed offensive co-ordinator, is anything but a routine coach.
He is someone who embraces the types of challenges that might deter or discourage others — as was the case when he journeyed across the continent in 2006 to coach at Mount Allison University in Sackville.
When that opportunity materialized, Jeffrey had just joined the football staff at West Los Angeles College after spending four seasons in North Dakota as the head coach at Mayville State University.
The initial blueprint at West L.A. had called for the athletic director to take over as the football coach and for Jeffrey to be the offensive co-ordinator.
The athletic director eventually decided not to coach. Jeffrey was presented with an opportunity to remain on the coaching staff, but another factor came into play.
His then-girlfriend and now-wife, Cathy, was living in New Brunswick at the time.
A nationally ranked tennis player who attended Virginia Tech on an athletic scholarship, the former Cathy Dixon competed in the Boston Marathon in 2013. Kelly and Cathy Jeffrey are proud parents of a daughter (Alexandra) and a son (Drew).
But all of that was in the distant future in 2006, when Kelly was residing in the Los Angeles area.
“One of us was going to move,” he recalls. “I was looking for a new job and Cathy said, famously now, ‘There’s a team in New Brunswick, but it’s not very good.’ ”
In 2005, the Mount Allison Mounties had posted an 0-8 record, scoring just 23 points and allowing 379.
“I thought, ‘If you go around long enough, teams cycle up, cycle down. That’s just how it is,’ ” Jeffrey says. “And she said, ‘I think they lost 105-0.’”
“I said, ‘Well, that doesn’t really happen,’ so I went online and, yeah, they got beat 105-0.”
That was on Sept. 15, 2001, when the Saint Mary’s Huskies administered a beating during the Mounties’ second of three consecutive 1-7 seasons.
Then came three successive 0-8 campaigns, after which Jeffrey joined the Mounties as the offensive co-ordinator, special-teams co-ordinator and quarterbacks coach.
“I called the coach and said, ‘Do you have any openings?’ ” Jeffrey says. “That was about the length of the interview. They needed some serious help.
“So I headed to Sackville, New Brunswick — and to Fredericton, New Brunswick, to live with my girlfriend at the time.”
In 2006, the Mounties improved to 2-5 — snapping a losing streak that had swelled to 34 games — and elevated their average points per game from 2.9 to 18.9.
That same season, the Mounties made the playoffs for the first time.
Although the team went 1-7 the following year, the offence continued to improve. With Jeffrey calling the plays, the 2007 Mounties averaged 24.9 points per game.
Jeffrey was hired as the Mounties’ interim head coach in 2008 and later that year guided the team back to the playoffs. He was named the full-time head coach in 2009 and remained in that position until 2015.
Jeffrey was named Atlantic University Sport’s football coach of the year in 2010, 2013 and 2014. In the latter year, he was also honoured as the top coach in all of Canadian university football.
That was quite an ascent for Jeffrey and for the program that he helped to rescue from the rubble.
“When I first got to Mount Allison, the program was beaten down so badly that people didn’t care if you did something new or original and failed on the field, because they’d had so much failure,” he says.
“So you had this kind of opportunity to go out and paint on a blank canvas, and the teacher said, ‘Whatever you put on there, I don’t care. It’s an A.’
“It was without an audience critiquing and saying ‘What are they doing?’ and ‘They should be canned.’
“You had the opportunity to learn a ton of things about what translates well from the U.S. game to the Canadian game and what didn’t. From there, you can start building your system in an offensive sense.”
Jeffrey also kept building a coaching career that had previously included stops at Dickinson State University (receivers coach, 1994-95), Northern State University (running backs coach, 1996-97), the University of San Diego (quarterbacks and special-teams co-ordinator, 1998-2000) and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (quarterbacks coach, 2001).
While at Northern State, Jeffrey — a former quarterback at Southern Oregon University — earned a master’s degree in health and physical education/fitness.
All those lessons learned, on the sideline and in the classroom, helped Jeffrey reach a point where he led a football program.
“After I got done at UNLV, there was a job at Mayville State, and they were bad,” he says. “They hadn’t had a winning season in 33 years or something, but I wanted to be a head coach really badly so I didn’t really care that they were a smaller program.
“I just have kind of taken some jobs that I know many, many, many people would never touch, because they’re not established or there’s no chance for a national title or whatever.
“I’m a builder. I look for those opportunities. I like to see programs that are downtrodden, because I believe they can be as good as or better than anybody else.
“It probably originates from my high school (in St. Helen’s, Ore.). It was terrible. We got a new coach and they went from 0-and-8 to a playoff team the next year.
“It was just off one guy coming in with great confidence and belief and energy and a good system. I saw it from the start.
“So anytime I see a program that’s beat-up, I think they can win. I’ve seen it done.”
Case in point: Mount Allison.
After Jeffrey’s successful and extended stay with the Mounties, the CFL came calling. He joined the Toronto Argonauts as their special teams co-ordinator in 2016.
Four years later, he was named the Edmonton Elks’ quarterbacks coach and special-teams assistant.
He joined the Roughriders as the running backs coach for the 2022 season and, in December of that year, was promoted to offensive co-ordinator.
“It’s always what I’ve wanted to be — a professional offensive co-ordinator,” says Jeffrey, 51.
“I think I fit in very well. I think I can rally players and coaches together. I love being on the offensive side as well.
“As a head coach in other programs, I kind of felt sometimes that I wanted to be more involved with the offence, but you always want (the offensive coaches) to have their own stamp on it and to just help them.
“In the position I’m at now, I really feel like I’m made for it. It’s what I was kind of doing my whole life in terms of having an eye on running an offence, no matter what position I was doing.
“You take a piece from what one offensive co-ordinator did and from what another offensive co-ordinator did — and there are a few things where you say, ‘I would never do that.’
“And here we are.”
In addition to serving as the offensive co-ordinator on Craig Dickenson’s staff, Jeffrey will be the quarterbacks coach.
He will work closely with four other offensive coaches — Anthony Vitale (offensive line), Drew Tate (receivers), Andre Bolduc (running backs) and Naaman Roosevelt (offensive assistant).
“Everybody’s very in sync and in-line,” Jeffrey says. “Everybody on our staff has a really good vision themselves of what football should look like.
“Whenever you start fresh, there are always times when you say ‘We can pull from this’ and ‘Nobody’s doing this.’
“There’s some things from down south that we’re going to do that I haven’t really seen up here yet that we’re excited about, too.”
