Assistant Rumph enjoying his return to Hurricanes
Cornerbacks coach draws parallel with his UM days, which ended in 2001 title.
Padres at Marlins 7:10 p.m., FSN CORAL GABLES — Tolbert Bain came by one day to deliver an earful about tackling. Phillip Buchanon was on a mission to plant seeds about press UM run defense looks improved, FSU’s Maguire back at practice,
coverage. Everybody, it seems, has a solution for what ails the University of Miami, and all those alums are happy to share their cures with new cornerbacks coach Mike Rumph.
“That’s where all the pressure comes from,” Rumph said Friday, standing beside of the Hurricanes’ practice fifield, the only sweat pouring offff him coming courtesy of a blazing sun, not the blazing spotlight.
Rumph, understand, has been here before. Not just as a UM cornerback — in his day, he was one of UM’s best — but in a coaching sense. When he tries to convince these Hurricanes how good they can be, it’s not just August coach-speak you can hear in every locker room across America.
Rumph, 36, fifirst arrived at UM out of Atlantic High in 1998. Things weren’t rosy then, either ... but they were by the time he was done.
Building a program became his calling card. Following a fifive- year NFL career, he spent a few years learning that working 9 to 5 wasn’t his thing, so he took a job coaching high school football at Plantation- American Heritage, which had never won a state