Jim Fleming continues to improve Rhody Football
Fleming led the Rams to 7 wins in 2021, their highest win total in 17 seasons. PHOTO CREDIT: gorhody.com
When looking at coaches across college football, there are few that share the same level of experience and exposure with Jim Fleming.
Entering his 9th season at the University of Rhode Island as head coach of the football team, Fleming has reversed a football program that saw its fair share of tough times.
Fleming’s coaching career started 37 years ago, when he served as a graduate assistant at the University of South Carolina. Since his first stop, Fleming has coached in 9 different college football conferences both in the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) and the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS), stopping at Boise State, Brown, East Carolina, Villanova, Sacred Heart as a Head Coach, UNC Chapel Hill, Akron, Kent State, UCF and now URI.
While being with such a vast amount of schools, Fleming recognizes the vast discrepancy in resources that can be apparent when coaching at FCS schools such as URI as compared to bigger FBS programs.
“I’ve made comments in the past,” Fleming said. “We are kind of peanut butter and jelly guys and [FBS Schools] are eating steak.”
However, when Fleming arrived at Rhode Island in 2014, the team could barely afford the bread for their peanut butter and jelly.
2001 was the last winning season for Rhody, with the most wins in a season since then tallying up at 5, which only occurred once. The team even went winless in 2012, going 0-11, and only averaged more than 10 points in a game twice.
Fleming’s first four years as head coach were far from ideal, tallying a record of 7-38. However, in 2018, a turning point occurred. URI recorded their first winning season in 17 years, going 6-5.
Finally, in 2018, updates were made to Meade Stadium and Fleming credited a lot of the recent recruiting success to the switch from grass to synthetic turf along with the addition of lighting fixtures. These changes allowed Rhody the advantages that those larger schools had all along.
“Since I’ve been here, we’ve been able to watch some growth in our facilities,” Fleming said. “This turf has really helped us and that was done with generous donations that got us the turf and lights which are an expectation at the college level.”
Fleming also went into the importance of investing in the players, mentioning the addition of summer schooling, which allows them to develop their players year round.
These investments have gone a long way for URI as, since the 2021 spring season, URI has compiled an 11-6 record, something that would have looked impossible 5 years ago.
One player who has seen the flip of the program in its entirety is Jake Fire, a redshirt senior linebacker in his sixth year at URI. Fire stressed his gratitude towards Coach Fleming for his development of him as a player, especially since Fire entered the team in his freshman year as a walk-on.
“He’s just really given me a chance to develop, he’s given me all the resources that I need to grow as a player,” Fire said. “He tells the guys that come in, especially walk-ons that if you work hard, you control your own destiny. He gave me that opportunity, and I’m forever thankful for that.”
Fleming’s 180-degree turn of Rhody’s football program can be attributed to a plethora of different reasons, such as the increase in resources, or the recruitment of the right players. However, Fleming stressed that the main reason the team was able to change was that their mentality didn’t.
“I think there’s a very strong characteristic of our team, being very committed to the process, believing that good things would come if we continued to grind and it goes in with our building blocks which is accountability, productivity and persistence,” Fleming said.
Fire acknowledged the mentality Fleming took on with teams in his first four years when the team was struggling.
“It’s the ‘no quit,’ with those teams early on,” Fire said. “Those are some tough years and it could have been easy for us to just give up but we stuck with it and we stuck with each other, and that’s what [Fleming] was big on preaching.”
The Rams will have to continue on that persistent path as they rebound off of a tough 42-21 loss against Delaware last week, now traveling to take on 24th ranked Pittsburgh in their toughest game of the year.
However Coach Fleming is confident in his team that he has built upon accountability, productivity and persistence. He hopes those building blocks bring a championship to Kingston in the near future.
“This is my last stop,” Fleming said. “Obviously I would love to see a championship somewhere down the line, but we are just worried about getting better every day and embodying our culture.”