How Benedict College turned into a Top 10 football team overnight

Chennis Berry’s voice is already hoarse at 6:21 am.

Berry, the second-year head coach at Benedict College, has been up since 4 a.m. on Wednesday. He’s two coffees deep, per usual, polishing off one when he woke up and a second, bigger cup on his drive from his house on Lake Carolina to campus in downtown Columbia.

“I’m always this turnt up,” Berry told The State, only half-joking.

Raised a devout Christian at the Temple Baptist Church in Cleveland, there’s a preacher-like quality to the man guiding Benedict — a Division II HBCU located in the heart of Columbia — through its most successful season on record.

Berry’s voice booms in the wee hours of the day, like that of a man delivering a Sunday church service.

He’s boisterous, but meticulous. Supportive, but stern.

There’s no rap or rock music blaring through the Tigers’ football operations building on Two Notch Road as Berry readies for his morning sermon. Players are, instead, greeted by the smooth sounds of gospel music.

The Rev. Timothy Wright and The Chicago Interdenominational Choir provide the melody on Wednesday.

“Our players, they may listen to Lil’ Baby, Jeezy, Young-whatever they listen to,” said Berry, who spent the previous seven years as the offensive coordinator at HBCU power Southern University in Louisiana. “But when they come to this place in the morning, I’m going to put some spiritual food in their soul and they’re going to listen to some gospel music.”

What Berry has accomplished in his two-plus years at Benedict borders on divine intervention. The program owns just five winning seasons since it restarted the football program in 1995. It never won more than eight games in that span, and hadn’t ever been included in the American Football Coaches Association Top 25.

Now? Benedict is 9-0 and ranked No. 9 in the country. A win over crosstown rival Allen University on Saturday would give the school its first undefeated season.

Forget Clemson’s No. 4 ranking Tuesday in the first College Football Playoff rankings. Disregard South Carolina’s return to The Associated Press Top 25 two weeks ago for the first time in four years.

Benedict is the best team in the Palmetto State nobody is talking about — at least until recently.

“Some of the players, when they go out with Benedict gear, people are saying, ‘Go Tigers,’ ” defensive end Loobert Denelus said. “I think that’s pretty cool that we’re bringing a different kind of attention to, not only the football team, but Columbia, South Carolina.”

An investment from Benedict administration

Defensive coordinator Jordan Odaffer smirks as he glances at the floor beneath his feet.

Arriving in Columbia just a few weeks after Berry was hired in February 2020, Odaffer, Berry and the rest of the staff put in their own labor, spending hours pulling up carpet in the football facility to help with a much-needed renovation of the space they occupy for nearly 12 hours per day.

“You knew there was going to be a lot of work,” Odaffer said. “If you had worked at a Power Five school or something, where you just coach ball and you have 100 people in your department and everything, (it would’ve been hard). A lot of us have worked at smaller schools before, so we understood there’s a lot that goes into it.”

Benedict’s recent rise comes in conjunction with a significant investment in the football program from university administration.

The school spent a little over $1 million to install turf and add a new scoreboard in 2019 to renovate the 11,000-seat Charles W. Johnson Stadium, a university official told The State. Benedict opened a sparkling weight room adjacent to the football offices this year.

The football operations building itself is the centerpiece to the entire overhaul. Although worn from the outside, the interior rivals those of Group of Five and high-end FCS programs.

Swanky graphics and wall art break up the yellow-and-purple color scheme. The walls are further emblazoned with the countless acronyms that serve as the slogans for Berry’s program.

All 10 on-field coaches have their own offices. A boardroom-style coaches meeting room is just off the main entrance. The back right corner of the facility also houses a kitchen stocked with snacks and drinks for players to snag when they stroll in the door every morning.

“First and foremost, it’s a blessing to have an administration that we have,” said special teams coordinator Kevin King, who played for Berry at Southern. “They understand what you need to have to have a winning program and they believed that we could do it.”

Berry’s first team meeting as head coach included a roster of no more than 60 players. Most, if not all, of those who attended that meeting have since departed the program.

Some players dipped during the COVID-19 pandemic when the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference canceled its 2020 season. Others didn’t buy into what Berry was selling and opted to leave football or head elsewhere.

Transfers and high school prospects from seven different states flooded into the program, helping the current roster balloon to over 100 players — including imports from Florida State, UCF, Southern, UT-Martin and Northwestern State.

“If you don’t want to work hard, don’t be a coach,” Odaffer said. “If you don’t care about young people, don’t be a coach. It’s not just pressing ‘X’ on the PlayStation, like on Madden. There’s a lot that goes with it.”

Plinko boards, offense and the Kansas City Chiefs

Benedict isn’t just beating teams in 2022, it’s downright dominating.

The Tigers are winning by an average of 24.3 points, employing a multiple offensive scheme centered on a power ground game, while also drawing on concepts from the air raid, triple-option and West-Coast offense, all run at a breakneck pace.

Berry explains that it functions similarly to what Ole Miss and head coach Lane Kiffin have pieced together in constructing one of major college football’s fastest and most dynamic offensive units.

“If you ask anybody that’s in this office, we have really yet to play our best football — which is the scary part about it,” co-offensive coordinator Kevin Saxton said. “We’re in a position where we’ve barely cracked the surface of really playing a true three-phase game.”

Berry calls the plays, but allows plenty of input from Saxton, a one-time Appalachian State quarterback who became a four-year starter at Emory & Henry College, and the rest of the offensive staff.

This, after all, is a collaborative effort, welcoming of new ideas from a group that includes four new offensive coaches.

Take the Plinko board sitting on Saxton’s desk as proof of concept. It’s an exercise, he said, he learned while interning with the Kansas City Chiefs and working with quarterback Patrick Mahomes as part of the Bill Walsh Diversity Coaching Fellowship this past summer.

Benedict’s version is a slimmed-down variation of what Chiefs quarterbacks coach Matt Nagy developed to maintain superstar quarterback Patrick Mahomes’ day-to-day competitiveness.

Every event — whether that be passing for 300 yards in a game or missing a meeting — correlates to a number of times the Tigers’ quarterbacks can individually drop a chip through the Plinko board. The bottom of the board is then divided into baskets, which each have assigned point values. Players then add or subtract the number of points depending if the dropping of the chip stems from a positive or negative event.

At the end of fall camp, Saxton tallied up the points and declared a winner, who received a meal of their choice on their coach’s dime.

“It helps with individual accountability, but also position group accountability and leadership” Saxton explained. “Because that’s something that this position group kind of lacked before I got here. ... It keeps them motivated, keeps them competitive.”

Taking advantage of an opportunity in Columbia

Berry motions toward the back left corner of his office, pointing to a framed program from his father’s funeral.

Chennis Berry Sr. died on April 18, 2020, almost two months after his son, or “Junebug” as his dad lovingly called him, earned the head coaching job at Benedict.

Opportunities had come and gone over the years. Berry was a finalist for head coaching jobs at Fort Valley State and Howard during the same cycle he interviewed at Benedict.

Neither offered him the job. Benedict did.

“He was so, so freakin’ happy that I became the head coach,” Berry said of his father, who’d been in hospice care for two years due to a failing heart. “Because he was telling me this for like, five, six years, ‘Junebug, you need to be a head coach. You’re ready to be a head coach.’ That’s not my decision. I don’t make that decision. I don’t give myself a job.

“Benedict College chose me,” he continued. “That’s why I’m here today. That’s how it all worked out.”

Berry rarely, if ever, allows himself to think about the milestones that accumulate by the week. But the attention is increasingly hard to ignore — even in a town where Shane Beamer’s Gamecocks and a rabid high school gridiron scene suck up much of the football oxygen.

A middle-aged woman stopped Berry while grocery shopping in recent weeks with a brief message: “Let’s go 1-0 this week,” she said, echoing the message Berry, his staff and players recite ad nauseam.

Beating Allen on Saturday cap off an undefeated regular season and grant the program another historic moment in a season filled with them. The SIAC championship game and the Division II playoffs will follow, too.

So when will Berry actually let this season soak in?

“I’ll be sitting on the back deck (this offseason),” he said, “just sipping a cup of coffee and reflecting.”