It wasn’t long after Van Malone, a former star defensive back at the University of Texas, had fallen into coaching at his alma mater (Waltrip High School) that he met this one player he couldn’t shake.
The kid wanted to know everything Malone could tell him about football, asked for extra work and wanted to break down film every chance he could. What made the relationship so strange was Malone coached defensive backs and Tremaine Jackson, who was recently named the Prairie View A&M football coach, was a defensive lineman.
“The fact that I’m a defensive back coach, and even when I was coaching him, the D-line and the front wasn’t my thing, but here he is hanging out with a DB coach,” Malone chuckles at the recollection. “I was like, here is what you are going to do. You are going to be doing DB drills.
“He talks about to this day, `This man had me out there back peddling and this and that.’ I remind him, you hung around me. That made you a better defensive line when I had you out there doing the DB drills.”
HERE’S TO A NEW ERA!! 🏈 We welcome PVAMU Head Football Coach Tremaine Jackson! #swac #collegefootball #hbcusports #pvalumni #pvpanthers #congratulations #winbig pic.twitter.com/jm2aR85yvS
— 1876 Athletic Foundation (@1876AF) January 9, 2025
That was and remains who Jackson is at his football core. He identifies those he can learn and grow from and then he becomes a sponge, absorbing every bit of knowledge.
Jackson has made a career of doing just that. And what a career it’s been with the 43-year-old set to take on his biggest challenge yet as the head coach of the Panthers following a successful three-year run at Division II powerhouse Valdosta State.
Malone couldn’t be more proud of the coach Jackson is today, especially knowing he played a part in his success.
“As a coach, you have certain kids and they are always in your face,” Malone said. “They are always, ‘What you want me to do. I’m coming up there on a Saturday, can you help me do this’ Or ‘Coach, are you going to be watching film at your house? This dude helped me move, I took him to his first (NCAA Football Coaches Convention). He went to the convention with me one day when he was still in college.
“You just couldn’t get rid of the dude and I ain’t been able to get rid of him in all of these years. Fortunately, for a lot of kids, he went down the path of coaching.”
Great First Impression
Former Texas Southern coach Johnnie Cole had a similar experience after hiring Jackson as a restricted earnings coach in 2008. It was a chance for the Houston native to return to his alma mater and Jackson took full advantage as a defensive coach and top-notch recruiter.
Cole, who proudly refers to Jackson as his protégé, was so impressed that after a year, Jackson was promoted to full-time assistant.
“Tremaine had it in him. He loved the game, he studied the game,” said Cole, who won a SWAC title with the Tigers in 2010 that was later vacated. “His attribute was he knew how to go recruit, he knew how to hunt players down. Part of our success was his ability to recruit. And he was hungry.
“I tried to reward him for the things he had brought to our staff.”
Jackson Joins Valdosta State’s Cradle of Coaches
After leaving TSU, where he also played under Steve Wilson, Jackson went about constructing a career that would one day land him a head coaching spot at the collegiate level. There were assistant coaching stops at Texas A&M-Kingsville, Abilene Christian and Texas State before landing his first head coaching job at Colorado Mesa in 2021.
Following one successful season at Colorado Mesa, Valdosta State athletic director Herb Reinhard had seen enough to believe that the confident Jackson was the right man to take over his Division II power program.
Valdosta State, a small school in southern Georgia, has made getting to the Division II national championship game a habit—appearing in seven and winning four of them since 2002—and in the process has become known as the cradle of coaches. Well-known college coaches like Hal Mumme, Kirby Smart, Mike Leach, Will Muschamp, Dana Holgorsen, and Kerwin Bell got their starts there as either head coaches or assistants.
Jackson could be next in line.
It was a rocky first season in 2022, but Jackson worked the transfer portal and quickly got the Blazers back on track. He was named the AFCA Division II National Coach of the Year after guiding the Blazers to an undefeated regular season and the Division II National Championship Game.
Congrats to Coach Jackson on this amazing award!!! Great to learn from him and the other coaches around. Not often you get to coach with the coach of the year straight #DOG https://t.co/dr9pNQpC0h
— LG (@CoachLG) January 14, 2025
Reinhard, who retired from Valdosta State last June after 32 years on the job, was quite impressed with Jackson and the way he was able to connect with his players and get the best out of them on the field and in the classroom.
“I’m certainly very, very proud of the work he did at Valdosta State,” Reinhard said. “I’m very proud of what he was able to do with the team on the field and I think he did just a good a job, if not better job, off the field. He has a real ability to connect with his football student-athletes.”
Finding a place to belong at Prairie View
But it wasn’t just that he won at Valdosta State; it was the circumstances in which he had done so. A Black man serving as a head coach at the Division II level is almost unheard of unless he is at an HBCU. He was the first at Valdosta State.
“My goal is to get the absolute best coach that I think we can hire for our position,” Reinhard said. “That’s what I was looking for first and foremost, but the fact that there was an opportunity for us to bring what I thought was an extremely qualified minority coach to Valdosta State and the Gulf South Conference, I’m not going to say was something … Let’s just say I was aware of that.”
Jackson also received his share of, `Are you sure?` questions from his mentors after he made the decision to go anywhere a head coaching opportunity was available. Malone, who has been a longtime assistant coach at the FBS Power 4 level and is currently Kansas State’s assistant head coach/defensive passing game coordinator, remembers a conversation with Jackson about his planned move to the Division II ranks.
Jackson, who is definitely blessed with the gift of gab, convinced Malone it was the right move for him. They would often talk about the lack of head coaching opportunities on college football’s biggest stage, and they even co-founded the Minority Coaches Advancement Association, an organization that helped open the door for Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman after going through mock interview sessions.
Jackson was bent on being a head coach wherever he could be.
“When he said that, I said, you know what, he’s right,” Malone said. “You’ve got to go be a head coach where they want you to be a head coach. Yeah, we are going to keep fighting to find opportunities with Marcus Freeman having the opportunity to be the first African American to coach in the national championship game.”
Following highly successful seasons the last two years at Valdosta State, when the Blazers went 25-3, it wasn’t surprising that Jackson would be open to moving on.
The only question was where.
The previous Blazers coaches either moved on to big-time college jobs or at least mid-major FBS jobs. But as a product of an HBCU, Jackson was insistent that he wanted to go somewhere that would accept and embrace him and where he could make a difference.
So, it was a no-brainer when the head-hunting firm reached out to him about the Prairie View job, even though the Panthers were once his rivals. Prairie View fit everything he was looking for, and the bonus was that it was home, where he could be close to his family, including his 18-year-old daughter, Harmony, who is a freshman at the University of Houston.
“As I watch him, I know she is his reason,” Malone said of Jackson’s daughter.
Cole says he had some reservations about Jackson taking the PV job, thinking that he should hedge his bets and wait for a bigger job to come. But Cole now understands the vision.
“He said, `It’s not about that for me. It’s about me getting somewhere where I’m comfortable, where I feel like coming to work and I’m looking at people who look like me,’” Cole said. “When you’ve got that and you are coming to an HBCU school, that’s lovemaking.
“Prairie View is the right place.”
