Humble beginnings to head coach: Mike Elko’s journey to leading Duke football program

It’s not a surprise Mike Elko rose to a prominent position in his chosen profession.

He’s been rising through the ranks his whole life, and sports have been involved the whole way, developing an ability to comfortably interact with people from various backgrounds.

That’s allowed him to reach his dream of becoming a college head coach.

“I grew up in a trailer park and wound up at an Ivy League school,” the 45-year-old Elko, Duke’s first-year head football coach, told The News & Observer. “I started coaching at the Division III level and wound up in the SEC. I think, through it all, I’ve tried to stay consistent with who I am.”

Though none have come close to the level he’s reached, Elko grew up in a family of coaches — from his namesake great-uncle to a cousin. Even his father and uncle coached Pop Warner football.

Al Bagnoli, the same man who plucked him from his middle-class upbringing in South Brunswick, New Jersey and later hired him to his first full-time coaching position, noticed Elko’s aptitude quickly while coaching him at the University of Pennsylvania.

“Early on in his playing career, we had him at safety,” Bagnoli said. “And he just kind of understood where not only he was supposed to be and where he was supposed to fit, but what the corners were supposed to do and where the linebackers were supposed to fit.”

His knowledge of the entire picture continued when Elko played special teams.

“You know,” Bagnoli said, “that just doesn’t happen very often.”

So it only makes sense that, in the span of 20 years, Elko went from coaching the Division III players at the Merchant Marine Academy to being hired as Duke’s head coach in the ACC.

That’s not to say it’s been easy, working his way up through nearly every level of college football to become a head coach for the first time. But it was his plan. His knowledge and work, combined with his unique background, came together to get him here.

“All in and excited from the get-go,” said Michelle Elko, who met Mike Elko when they were Penn students, became his wife and has been with him every step of his coaching journey. “We knew that was Mike’s dream. I was all in and ready to see what God had in store for us. And here we are.”

‘Such enthusiasm’

At Duke, athletics director Nina King and senior associate athletics director Art Chase, who supervises the football program, are counting on Elko having success. They parted ways with the beloved and respected David Cutcliffe last November with the Blue Devils having lost 13 consecutive ACC games over the past two seasons.

For all Cutcliffe did over the previous 14 seasons, taking Duke from the bottom of Division I football to making six bowl games in a seven-year span from 2012-18, the Blue Devils were once again non-competitive.

Though he’d never been a head coach, Elko won over King and Chase to land the Duke job.

A defensive coordinator since 2006, from Hofstra to Bowling Green, Wake Forest, Notre Dame and Texas A&M, his teams consistently showed rapid improvement when he arrived.

His players recognized a rising star.

“We used to always joke about him being a head coach when he was there,” said Buddy Johnson, who played linebacker for Elko at Texas A&M and is in his second season with the NFL’s Pittsburgh Steelers. “It’s just the way he loves to be in control of things. He knows what to do when he’s the man up top. He’ll be a great coach and do a great job.”

Beginning Friday when Duke plays Temple at Wallace Wade Stadium, Elko gets to show if he can do it again with the Blue Devils.

So far, King is impressed.

“He’s really done such a great job of integrating himself and the Duke community and the Durham community,” King said. “Just such enthusiasm. He came to Durham and hit the ground running.”

A sporting life

Growing up in central New Jersey, Elko gravitated toward sports at age 8. Then as now, family played a central role.

“It just was what we did,” Elko said. “T-ball, basketball, then football and Pop Warner. My uncle was my Pop Warner coach. My dad coached Pop Warner. I had a cousin who coached high school. Nothing of a grand stature, but certainly was around sports a lot.”

The family member with the highest coaching profile was out of Elko’s life before he was born.

Mike “Mickey” Elko, his great-uncle, coached varsity football and junior varsity baseball at South Brunswick High. In March 1977, while coaching at baseball practice, the 42-year-old had a heart attack and collapsed on the field. He was pronounced dead 30 minutes later at a hospital.

Four months later, Mike Elko was born. He grew up to star in multiple sports at South Brunswick, playing football at Mike Elko Field, named for his late great-uncle. Each year on Thanksgiving day, Elko and his South Brunswick teammates battled rival North Brunswick to win the Mike Elko Trophy, another memorial tribute.

Though an only child, Elko grew up surrounded by his extended family, as his parents both came from large families.

“They were all around us,” Elko said.

Elko was the eldest cousin in his generation by nine years, so the family gathered to support his exploits.

Meanwhile, his teammates became a second family, providing an important aspect of his background that’s factored into his adult successes — his knack for being comfortable with a wide range of people.

“That’s what sports culture is,” Elko said. “Here’s my team. Let’s hang out. Next year, here’s my team. Let’s hang out. So that’s all my upbringing is, all encompassing, welcoming. I’m at this table. Let’s hang out. That’s part of who I am.”

Off to the Ivy League

His conference’s top quarterback at South Brunswick, Elko also played safety on defense. When he arrived at Penn in 1995, the quarterback position was locked up by Mark DeRosa, the future Major League Baseball player who led the undefeated Quakers to the Ivy League title in 1994.

DeRosa quarterbacked Penn again in 1995 as Elko, a freshman, landed on the defense playing safety and began impressing his coaches with his football acumen.

Penn won another Ivy League championship in 1998, Elko’s senior season. By then, after initially planning to have a business career, he’d turned his plans to coaching.

Along the way, he’d honed his skills in forging relationships with people from different backgrounds.

“Mike got a chance to not only rub elbows with teammates, who pretty much a majority of them had backgrounds like him,” Bagnoli said, “but he was also walking the halls with people that had quite a bit of different backgrounds, that happened to be his classmates. I think it’s a great teaching opportunity and learning opportunity.”

Said Elko: “You just learn how to be confident in who you are and not change your core values. You just realize very quickly that everybody’s path to success is going to be different. So at the end of the day, the best thing you can do is just be true to who you are and then allow that to grow and build.”

The zig-zag journey

Elko spent one year at Stony Brook as a graduate assistant before Bagnoli hired him at Penn to coach defensive backs in 2000.

From there, he went to the Merchant Marine Academy, where he was a defensive coordinator for the first time in 2001. Then there were two seasons each at Fordham and Richmond, followed by three at Hofstra, and five at Bowling Green.

Lyle Hemphill, Duke’s safeties coach who first met and befriended Elko when they coached at Hofstra, noticed something exceptional about him that continues.

“Mike is the greatest multi-tasker that I’ve ever seen, ever heard of, could ever imagine,” Hemphill said. “No one can multitask like that. In my opinion, that is his greatest thing. He can do, in his mind, so many things and do them all so well and do them at a high level. It’s insane. It really is.”

In 2014, Mike Elko, Michelle and their three children came to North Carolina for the first time when he was Wake Forest’s defensive coordinator.

His success there led Notre Dame to hire him in 2017 and, then, Jimbo Fisher lured him away the following year to coach defense at Texas A&M.

The Aggies defense allowed 408 yards per game in 2017, ranking No. 78 nationally. In 2018, Elko’s first season, Texas A&M allowed 348 yards per game, No. 32 nationally.

Last season, the Aggies were No. 14 nationally at 327 yards per game and No. 3 in points allowed per game at 15.9.

“He did a great job explaining to us what he wanted from us and what his expectations were,” said Johnson, the former Aggie linebacker. “He did a great job of teaching the defense. His defense is real detailed. It’s a lot of moving parts.”

Balancing life as a head coach

Having previously been involved with coaching searches at Kansas and Temple, Elko quickly became a front-runner in Duke’s search last fall.

The interest, from the beginning, was mutual.

“So excited,” Michelle Elko said, “because it was just a great location, great academics, great sports, great people and a great place for the family to live. That’s really important to Mike and I, but really Mike.”

Throughout all their moves, Michelle Elko said her husband has become successful in being present for family time despite his coaching demands.

“Mike has learned, and he’s always been very good at it, at leaving it in the car or leaving it at work, because when he comes home, he’s all about the family,” Michelle Elko said.

He compartmentalizes job and family, playing XBox with his kids or grabbing a meal out before heading to one of their many events.

Like their father’s upbringing, the three Elko children are heavily involved in their own sports these days.

The eldest, Michael Elko, is a freshman on Northwestern’s baseball team. Andrew Elko, a sophomore in high school, plays hockey for the Junior Hurricanes and football at Apex Friendship High. Kaitlyn Elko, a middle-schooler, is in competitive cheerleading.

Unlike their parents’ modest upbringings in New Jersey, the children are growing up with the privileges brought by a father who is a college head coach with a multi-million dollar contract.

“Our kids have no idea,” she said. “Both of us come from amazing families and support, but don’t come from that. So our kids have no idea really how blessed they are. We really try to instill that in them and make them understand that in every aspect of life.”

Turning Duke into a winner

Mike Elko’s path to his first head coaching job allowed him to work with a plethora of successful head coaches, starting with Bagnoli at Penn to include Dave Clawson at Bowling Green and Wake Forest to Brian Kelly at Notre Dame and Fisher at Texas A&M.

The challenge now is to take those experiences and, with his own flair, implement lessons to find success at Duke.

“Everybody just kind of told me,” Elko said, “be yourself, be diligent in your hiring process, get good people around and just put your stamp on the program. I think the biggest thing is just make sure that you do it the way you believe in and at the end of the day, have conviction behind what you do. And if you do that, people will feel it, and they’ll follow you.”

At Duke, he’s spearheaded the coaching staff’s overhaul and changes in the program’s nutrition and strength-and-conditioning programs.

The message to the players was straight out of his no-nonsense playbook.

“When Coach Elko first got here,” Duke redshirt junior defensive lineman R.J. Oben said, “he was telling us that this is going to be hard. Maybe some of you guys might not make it through this. But he knew that we’re going to push this to a level that he needs it to be to get us to win.”

One way that played out, for example, was an August day during practice when the team’s work in one period of practice wasn’t to his standard. He stopped practice, told the staff to reset the clock and started the period over again. A few minutes later, he angrily blew his whistle to again stop practice.

“Start it again,” he yelled.

Now that they’ve been through 15 spring practices, a strenuous offseason conditioning program and four weeks of August practices, his players know what’s required.

“We’ve talked about this a lot as a team,” Duke junior left tackle Graham Barton said. “We strive for perfection every day and football is not a perfect game. Is there anything perfect when there’s so much going on? But if you strive for perfection, you find excellence along the way.”

Elko’s route to Duke was far from perfect. But working through imperfections, whether in performance or support or surroundings, landed him in a job he’s sought for decades.

“I’m sure Mike,” Bagnoli said, “spent a lot of time on culture in that locker room the way he wants it. Getting people to buy into the vision that he has for Duke and Duke football and trying to get everybody to be aligned and to kind of pull it in the same direction.”

Michelle Elko assures the pattern her husband followed to find success elsewhere will be followed at Duke.

“We’re not changing who we are,” Michelle Elko said. “... We are who we are and we’re always going to be who we are. We want to share that with everyone and invite everyone into our Duke football family.”