It turns out that the Sewanee football program had a chance at Travis Rundle long before he became the Tigers' 31st head coach.
Not really, but he did come to the Mountain for a recruiting visit while in high school in Michigan. He went on to play as planned for his father at Albion College, where Travis was a two-time all-conference quarterback and was part of three league championships.
Sewanee's coach at the time was John Windham, a former Vanderbilt standout who had been an assistant coach for the elder Coach Rundle at Colorado College, and the Rundles made their visit to Sewanee to see Windham as well as check out the campus.
The younger Coach Rundle, now 36, was back at Sewanee on Monday, finalizing his hiring that was announced Friday morning. He met with a group of core boosters in the morning - at the regular "Coffee with the Coach" - and with his new team in the evening.
Athletic director Mark Webb said the four-week search attracted about 70 applicants.
When the job came open, Rundle's dad called him right away about taking a look, and he later talked to Windham and Robert Black, the Tigers' 28th and 29th head coaches. Black was a Sewanee player when John Thomas was a Tigers assistant, and Thomas was the strength and conditioning coach at Penn State and frequently talked about his time at Sewanee when Rundle was a defensive assistant for the NCAA Division I Nittany Lions.
Thomas now is an assistant strength coach for Mark Richt at Miami.
Just in early January of this year, Rundle attended the American Football Coaches Association convention in Nashville, not knowing he and his family soon would be living about an hour away - and that he would be directing a team playing on the oldest football field in the South, and fourth oldest in the country.
Indiana Wesleyan has the fifth oldest. That's where Rundle has spent the past six years as defensive coordinator, arriving with the added role of recruiting coordinator and swapping that later for the position of head strength and conditioning coach.
He had proven success in all three roles with the Titans and will need his expertise in all three areas plus his overall organizational ability to turn around the Tigers, who have lost 19 games in a row with large groups of freshmen on the roster. Part of his attraction to the program, he admitted, is Sewanee's glorious football history, although it has had very little of that in the last three decades.
The program's main claim to fame in the last quarter century was two former Sewanee quarterbacks rising to positions of high responsibility in the NFL, John Shoop as an offensive coordinator and Phil Savage as a general manager. Savage now is executive director of the Senior Bowl.
Windham did have a stretch in which a graduating class did not have a losing season, but 6-4 has been the high-water mark of this century.
"The academic reputation of the school is one thing that really stood out," Rundle said, likening it to IWU. "And there's a lot of great high school football within an hour's drive."
He said his wife, Sarah, "fell in love" with Sewanee in her initial visit as part of the interview process, and they believe from others and their own observations it will be a great place to bring up their children - now 9, 7 and 3.
"I'm excited to be here. It's been first-class all the way," said Rundle, who expressed a particular fondness for the Division III approach to athletics.
He emphasized to the boosters that he believes in tailoring schemes to personnel but promised that the Tigers "will take shots down the field" on offense and be physical in both lines and aggressive on defense - and that "mental toughness" will be a regular part of the conditioning program, just as it has been since he took over that aspect at IWU.
"We haven't lost a close game in two years," he said. "Against Carthage College we led a total of 1 minute, 10 seconds, combined, the last two seasons and won both games."
Contact Ron Bush at rbush@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6291.