FCS coach rescheduled next week's game for daughter's wedding
Wagner College coach Walt Hameline faced the ultimate test last fall of choosing football or family when his daughter told him she'd be getting married on Sept. 20.
The special day happened to coincide with what was originally scheduled to be the Seahawks' next matchup, against Monmouth, a Big South school from West Long Branch, N.J.
As Fox Sports reported, the school's coach of 34 years reacted to his daughter by asking, "How can you do this? What are you thinking about? It's football season."
"Ever since she was a baby she went to every football game," he added.
Hameline is also the school's athletic director, and has compiled a 217-136-2 record in more than three decades, fifth among active FCS coaches in career victories.
Apparently, his daughter Kelly, 28, gave the coach two dates to choose from.
He couldn't believe he was being faced with the dilemma. "There's always been a golden rule in our family," he told the news outlet. "Once football season starts, my wife, my family, they go to the games and we do nothing else."
Luckily, Hameline knew the coach of Monmouth from their days as young assistants in the late 1970s. When Hameline became head coach at Wagner, Kevin Callahan was the first coach he hired.
"Callahan was in the process of filling Sept. 20 on Monmouth's schedule, but was able to move the Wagner game, lock it in and build the team's remaining schedule around it," wrote Fox Sports.
"We had the flexibility to make it work. I was more than happy to do it," said Callahan, Monmouth's coach of 22 years.
And the other possible date that Kelly could get married on? It was absolutely off-limits for her father.
That would have been last week's 34-3 loss at (1-1) Florida International, an FBS school that made (1-1) Wagner College $240,000 richer.