KU aide comes full circle
Henderson returns to Jayhawks after 24 years to coach secondary
He played football for Kansas University and he now coaches football for Kansas University. What goes around has come around for Pat Henderson.
Kansas secondary coach Pat Henderson works with some freshmen during preseason practices. Henderson, who played for the Jayhawks' 1973 Liberty Bowl team, returned to his alma mater after 24 years and coaching stops at eight different schools.
The 50-year-old former reserve linebacker for the Jayhawks is now KU’s secondary coach.
“Funny how our paths have crossed,” Henderson said, “as much as I’ve bounced around.”
Few men bounce around as often as college football coaches and Henderson has probably had as much flubber on his shoes as any of them.
In the quarter of a century that has passed since Henderson left Mount Oread, he has coached football at count them Coffeyville Community College, Nebraska-Omaha, Indiana State, Arizona State, Purdue, Texas Christian, Tulsa, Southern Methodist and now Kansas.
If you lost count, Henderson spent 24 years at eight different schools an average of three years for each stint before joining Mark Mangino’s staff late last year.
Nomadic lifestyles have their drawbacks, but don’t bother to send Henderson a sympathy card.
“I don’t feel sorry for football coaches,” Henderson said. “We’re doing what we want to do. Yes, it’s hard on your children, but I think it has made us stronger as a family. There are times, for instance, when our children would rather be with us than with their friends.”
Henderson and his wife, Mary, have three grown children sons Brian, 28, and Jeff, 22; and daughter, Kelli, 25.
“There’s a tradeoff, like most things in life,” Henderson said. “It’s the nature of the beast. You can’t let your feelings get hurt. It’s part of the job.”
Henderson describes himself as “an inner-city kid.” He grew up in Kansas City, Mo., and played football at Northeast High. A knee injury limited him to five games during his senior season, but both Kansas and Missouri sought his services.
“Like a lot of Kansas City guys, you’re split. You like both schools,” Henderson said. “Missouri fiddled around and KU offered me first. It was the last year of the 45-scholarship limit and I was probably No. 45.”
Among the others in that 1970 freshman class were David Jaynes, Emmett Edwards and Delvin Williams three key players on the Jayhawks’ 1973 Liberty Bowl team. Henderson, however, was never more than a reserve. That ’73 season, in fact, is the only year he lettered. Another knee injury suffered in 1971 didn’t help, and he was small even for those days at 6-foot-2 and 205 pounds.
Yet, like all football players, he wanted to play more than he did, and one day he screwed up enough courage to go talk to head coach Don Fambrough.
“I went to complain about my playing time,” Henderson recalled with a smile, “and coach Fambrough told me that was his decision to make and not mine. After I left, I felt really good but I didn’t get more playing time.”
Through it all the injuries and the sideline time Henderson was programmed to earn a degree so he could enter his chosen profession.
Henderson in '73
“When I was a junior in high school,” he said, “I knew I’d be a coach. By the time I was a sophomore at KU I had visions of becoming coach at my high school.”
Those visions clouded when Dick Foster, who was coaching the KU freshman team, took the head football job at Coffeyville CC and invited Henderson to go with him. At the time, Henderson was planning to become an assistant coach at Washburn Rural High in Topeka, but he went with Foster instead.
“I wasn’t even a graduate assistant there,” Henderson said. “I was more like a student assistant.”
Eventually, Sandy Buda, another former KU player and assistant coach who had become head coach at Nebraska-Omaha, invited Henderson to join his cadre and then it was on to Indiana State and so on.
Through the years Henderson has seen the college game he loves evolve thanks mostly to television money into a bigger and bigger business with more jobs, enhanced facilities and increased pressure to win. When Henderson played for the Jayhawks, for example, the locker room was where the track office is today in the northwest corner of Allen Fieldhouse. And the weight room was nearby in Parrott Complex in a space that has now been turned into offices for the business staff.
“The game is totally different at every level,” Henderson said. “Today it’s an important investment for a university.”