Travis Brown was always destined to become a football coach, even if he didn’t know it at the time.
“I got to see everything from a young age,” said Brown, the Eskimos linebacker coach the last two seasons. “I had a private tutor who was a heck of a football coach. That’s kind of what got my football knowledge up a little quicker than most people.”
The private tutor was Brown’s father, Dan, a long-time U.S. college defensive football coach who spent the 1995 season as the defensive line coach with the Birmingham Barracudas, one of five American teams in the final season of CFL expansion into the United States.
“I’ve always had that role where I picked up the defence quick and then just tried to lead through understanding the whole defence instead of just my job,” Brown said. “It mostly came from learning from my dad. He had such a broad and intelligent mind when it came to football.
“Every day in high school after games or practices, I’d sit down and watch film with him. He’d talk about my job, and then he’d be like, ‘What defence are you in here? What’s the DB (defensive back) doing? What’s the DL (defensive line) guy here doing?’ From there, he could piece it all together and say, ‘OK, well, you should probably do this a little bit better’ and coach me that way.”
Brown, 29, lost his father to brain cancer at the age of 50 in 2009, but he was able to repay his dad for all those lessons by committing to the Fresno State Bulldogs before he died. Dan coached 12 years at the California university, the last seven years as the defensive coordinator.
“I was in my senior year of high school,” Brown recalled. “I was pretty heavily recruited. Most of the Pac-12 (schools) had offered me scholarships plus a few scattered teams from across the nation.
“From the start, I knew I wanted to be a Fresno State Bulldog so I could play for my dad. We were getting to the end of the recruiting season, but he was at his sickest (at that point). We knew it wasn’t going to be much longer, so I made the decision.
“I wanted him to be around when I committed to Fresno State to play for him. You could tell his morale was down. I said, ‘Hey, I want to commit to being a Dog. I would love to play for you.’ Just seeing him light up was the coolest thing that I’ve ever done and will ever see. It was pretty awesome for a bad situation. That’s something I’m going to carry forever.
“I didn’t even take visits (to other prospective universities) because I wanted to do it early enough where he’d be around when I did commit. It’s just a cool little story that I’m going to tell my kids someday.”
Dan Brown passed away that spring, so Travis never had the opportunity to play for his father.
Ranked by one scouting service as the 11th-ranked linebacker in the United States coming out of high school, Travis Brown went on to start 38 consecutive games during his final three years at Fresno State despite having had shoulder injuries during college and high school that resulted in three surgeries.
Another shoulder surgery after his second season with the Ottawa RedBlacks in 2015 ended his CFL playing career.
“I had a good rookie year before I had to call retirement on it with the shoulder injury,” he said. “I blew it out again in the first game of my second season.”
He went on Ottawa’s six-game injured list, came back to play, re-dislocated his shoulder again and sat the rest of the season. When the RedBlacks released him the following off-season, Brown knew it was time to move on.
“A lot of guys would be saddened by it,” he said. “For me, it was more of a relief. I knew I wasn’t healthy enough to play, and I knew I wasn’t not going to play. I was going to go in there and give it my all and probably injure it again. So once it happened, I was like, ‘Aw, OK.’
“I took it as a blessing. Now I could start my career, and this is what I love doing. I actually played with (Eskimos defensive back) Forrest Hightower at Ottawa. He came up to me and a couple of linebackers the other day. He’s like, ‘You guys didn’t even know that Travis has been doing this since he was playing in Ottawa’ because they always used to call me a player-coach. I was just one of the players who was always active, talking to the DB group, talking to the D-line and then going out there and playing.”
Brown said his “coach’s son” training actually led to his opportunity to play in Canada. Realizing that he “might not be an NFL guy” because of his history of shoulder injuries and the fact he was under-sized for an NFL linebacker, he started watching CFL game films after seeing his first CFL game on TV.
“From that point, I was like, ‘Alright, I should probably start watching it because it is different. From there on out, it was like a full six months that I was studying and watching tape and just learning the game through watching it.”
He eventually hitched a ride with a buddy for a 4-1/2 hour drive to Long Beach, Calif., to attend a RedBlacks tryout camp in 2014, but almost didn’t participate.
“It was a rainy morning by the time we got to the tryout,” he said. “I was sitting in the car for 10 minutes contemplating ‘Let’s just head back home and relax on the couch.’ We ended up staying another five minutes, I saw some people walking in and went to the tryout. I did really well – not on the testing side, I was never really a big tester – but once it turned into the football part of it, I made some plays on the one-on-ones. I got a call two weeks later, and they offered me a contract.
“If I had turned back around and went to the couch, I probably would have never had this opportunity to coach and, obviously, the opportunity to play (in Ottawa).”
Brown got his first real coaching job in 2017 as the assistant linebacker coach for former CFL quarterback Jeff Tedford at Fresno State while finishing his college degree in kinesiology and exercise science.
Then his CFL connections with the RedBlacks, including Eskimos General Manager and Vice-President, Football Operations, Brock Sunderland and Head Coach Jason Maas, who both worked in Ottawa when he played there, came into play.
“I went fishing with the quarterbacks one day, caught probably a 12-pound pike, and Coach Maas (the RedBlacks offensive coordinator at the time) was on that trip with us,” he said.
He also re-connected with Maas when the Eskimos head coach came to study the Fresno State offence for his professional development during the Bulldogs’ spring camp in 2017.
“I went out of my way to make sure that Coach Maas was comfortable,” Brown said. “I opened the gym up for him so he could get a workout in before practice.”
Maas offered Brown a coaching job the next off-season.
“Most of the guys I’m coaching are older than me,” he said. “But what I try to prove initially is that I’m not just a guy who got here who didn’t know anything about football.
“I played the (linebacker) spot so I can relate to them. And I put my work in to study football. I grew up as a coach’s son.”
It was hard decision to walk away from his former college program that was on the rise – the Bulldogs had just finished a 10-4 season and would go 12-2 last year – and he was learning so much from Tedford, the detailed-minded head coach.
“Just so many awesome experiences learning from that guy at a young coaching age,” he said.
But Brown also has been “loving” his Eskimos experience. He started out as the assistant linebacker coach in 2018 and became the linebacker coach when the Eskimos shuffled the coaching staff in mid-season last year.
“I put on my pre-game paper with all my notes – ‘Don’t be a fan’ – because it’s so easy to enjoy the (CFL) game,” he said. “It is an entertaining game.
“But you’ve got just to lock in – ‘Alright, I’m coaching this game. I’m not watching it.’ ”