Trust, curiosity & ‘full circle’ moments: The journey that brought Andy Kotelnicki to Penn State

Lindsey Kotelnicki remembered the quick trip back to the apartment she shared with her then fiance, Andy, to get their car. They lived less than two blocks from the football stadium where his playing career just ended and she needed it to take him to the hospital — per the instruction she received from Andy’s mother.

“His mom is a nurse and so she asked some really good, pointed questions (about the injury Andy suffered) and got the answers. And his mom turned to me and goes, ‘Lindsey, go get the car. We’re not paying for an ambulance,’” Lindsey recalled with a laugh. “I, in flip flops, ran home, got the car and come peeling up to the front of the stadium just in time to see him leaving in an ambulance.”

They’d both watched as Andy, an offensive lineman at Wisconsin River-Falls, lie on the ground grabbing the grass on the playing field. His body was facing down, but his foot and toes were facing up. He’d dislocated and fractured his ankle, and fractured his lower leg — the kind of gruesome injury that TV replays avoid showing nowadays.

He would need surgery and rehab to recover, but he would also need a job. And he knew which one he wanted.

“He told me he had to get surgery,” Andy’s former college coach John O’Grady said. “And then the next thing that came out of his mouth after he told me about the surgery was, ‘can I coach the rest of the year?’ ... Here’s a guy who just lost the great opportunity to play the rest of his senior year and the first thing he asks is if he can coach. I remember saying to him, ‘you’re darn right you can.’”

“I remember being in an incredible amount of freaking pain,” Andy said. “But I remember knowing right away, well, I’m gonna start my coaching career. As a matter of fact, the next day, after I had surgery — I got hurt on Saturday, had surgery Sunday morning at 6 a.m. — I went to the Sunday night practice on crutches and I was coaching that week already.”

Lindsey wasn’t surprised. She’d known that he knew what he wanted and what would come next. Sure, the road could be long and arduous, but his belief in himself — and Lindsey’s belief in him — wouldn’t allow him not to take it.

So he did.

All of the twists and turns have formed Andy Kotelnicki into who he has become — the creative, charismatic offensive mastermind who can change the future of Penn State football.

Building a resume

That first coaching role in 2003 indicated Andy knew what he wanted, but that didn’t guarantee that it would happen. He finished out his final season of eligibility, riding around on a golf cart at times around practice as he tried to help out, and needed to find a more formal coaching position.

And coaching, like many careers, can be more about who you know than anything else. As a Division III offensive lineman, there wasn’t a guarantee that he would have the kind of connections to get a job. So Kotelnicki packed up and went to the American Football Coaches Association’s convention — flying on a plane for the first time — and tried to network his way into a gig.

Fortunately for him, he had enough of a connection to land one.

“One of Andy’s older brother’s teammates was a (graduate assistant) at Western Illinois University,” Lindsey said. “So he had called Andy when they had something come up, like ‘hey, can you come down and interview?’ And that’s how we got to WIU.”

He and Lindsey relocated to Macomb, Illinois, where she searched high and low for a job, eventually landing one as a graduate assistant herself with the office of student affairs at the school — two weeks before the semester was about to start.

One year at Western Illinois turned into two before Andy had the chance to go back to a place Lindsey said they thought they might call home forever — Wisconsin-River Falls.

“For us to get an opportunity to go back to our alma mater, that felt like a dream,” Lindsey said. “We thought that was gonna be the end-all-be-all to be quite honest. Our young, innocent and honestly quite ignorant perspectives were like, ‘this is it, this is great, we love this place, we’re close to family.’”

O’Grady brought Andy back to coach, but had to have him coach defensive backs his first year before moving him back to offense, something he promised he’d do at the first opportunity.

But this wasn’t the same coach that left the program for Western Illinois. O’Grady said Andy had grown exponentially in his two years away.

“He’s a very open-minded guy,” O’Grady said. “I know that he tried to learn about other systems, I know that he went to many clinics, I know he would meet with other coaches. ... He had a wide open mind and went to listen to a lot of people. You could just see him growing more and more confident with his total understanding of the system.”

Despite Andy and Lindsey’s desire to stay in River Falls, the coach’s journey took him elsewhere. He was hired as the offensive coordinator at the University of Mary by then-head coach Myron Schulz — on the backing of a reference from his brother Josh, who was also a football coach — and left for the school in Bismarck, North Dakota.

The problem? Lindsey, their son Maximus — who was still a toddler — and their dog couldn’t join him right away.

“We had bought our house in River Falls at the height of the market,” Lindsey said. “And then when we tried to sell it, it was terrible. So we had to live apart for about six months so I could keep working and we could keep paying the mortgage while he started a new job out there. It was brutal.”

Behind Andy’s curiosity

Those difficult times did not deter Andy or Lindsey, as hard as they may have been. Because it was around then that Lindsey noticed a change in her husband, in large part because he was now a father.

“When Max arrived, it was like this light turned on inside of Andy,” Lindsey said. “I saw such a softening in him, but all of the best qualities in him, he just exuded. He has a super big heart. It was just really meaningful to see him turn into a dad and love on this little person. He doesn’t always have the quantity of time with our kids, but he has the quality. And he’s so intentional with everything he does. He takes every opportunity he has with our kids to teach them, to influence them, to encourage them, to love on them.”

Those qualities that Lindsey loved, and that became more accentuated, are also a part of what has made Andy so successful as a coach. He has prioritized his relationships with his players and his other coaches — something O’Grady and Schulz attested to — and it’s built a trust that has allowed him to help them grow.

Andy’s interest in his players, according to those who know him well, is genuine. And it comes from an innate curiosity — something Kotelnicki said has always been a part of who he is.

It’s something he grew in River Falls and Bismarck, and that continued to develop when he joined Wisconsin-Whitewater and head coach Lance Leipold in 2013, one year after initially interviewing for a position on Leipold’s staff.

His success in Whitewater, and eventually in Buffalo and Kansas with Leipold, helped put him in a position to join Penn State last December, but it’s his curiosity that helped push the envelope. Kotelnicki, for all of his own creativity as an offensive coordinator, is not too proud to try something from someone else or to listen when he needs to.

And some of it comes from his own failure.

“I’ve messed it up enough, and been humbled enough as a play-caller, to know there’s a million ways to move the football,” Andy said. “There’s a million ways. So assuming that your way is the only way or the best way would be the biggest mistake that you can make.”

He’s willing to take plays from anywhere — including from a small high school while watching recruiting film at Kansas — and uses his own trust with his players to find what will work.

That trust is vital in how he wants to operate as a coach, something he realized as he grew as a coach and, as Lindsey noted, when he became a father to Max and eventually a daughter, Joy.

“As you go through your career, you grow,” Andy said. “There’s these waves and flows of what you think is important and whatnot. I’m in my mid-40s now. I think there’s a phase when you kind of get up through college and all of the technical and the logistical things of your profession take shape and you get so excited about the scheme. And then something happens in your life. You probably have kids. Then you’re like, ‘s---, having a good relationship and having fun with the kids is pretty fun.’ And that’s kind of why you probably got into it when you first started coaching. That’s kind of my journey a little bit. It’s a hell of a lot more fun to be a college football coach when you’re just having fun with the guys you coach.”

Finding joy in the journey

All of his accomplishments on the field and his affability off it have now pushed him to the moment he’s in. His growth, his perseverance, his determination and his focus on the two things Lindsey says mean most to him — family and football — have him at Penn State.

The decision to leave Leipold’s staff was not easy for the Kotelnicki’s. Andy had been one of his coaches for over a decade and through three stops, and the other staff members had become more like family than co-workers.

Despite that, there was an allure to Penn State that he and his family could not resist. There is, of course, the story that Andy told at his introductory press conference about his mom getting him a Penn State helmet when he was 5 or 6 years old.

That wasn’t just a fun anecdote to get fans bought into the program’s new offensive coordinator.

“When I first met him, Penn State was his team,” Lindsey said. “The first gift I ever gave him when we were early dating, was a Nike navy Penn State hoodie. Then we come here and I remember him putting on his first hoodie, like the team issued one, and I’m just a sobbing mess, because it was such a full circle (moment), feeling like the stars had aligned.”

The allure of his new employer wasn’t just something he felt in the interview process.

It’s something Lindsey can already feel, even without having attended a game yet.

“It is a special place,” she said. “Us getting here, the welcome that we felt was immense. Like, I can’t even tell you how warm and welcome we felt from the get go. ... It’s different and it’s really special and it’s actually pretty incredible. You can feel the greater community within of Penn State football fans. And it’s intense, and we love that.”

If his tenure at Penn State is like his career to this point, Andy will have immense success. He is curious and creative and always growing. But there is something else about him that stands out among the rest of the qualities that made him an appealing hire so many times.

There is something innately human about Andy. He messes with players during ball security drills to get a laugh. He engages with people in a way that acknowledges their humanity to him — as Lindsey puts it, “he makes anyone he’s speaking to feel like they’re the only person in the room because he genuinely is interested in everyone.”

And there is something about Andy that draws people to him.

“There is something very honest about his humanity,” Lindsey said. “And he owns it and he is not afraid to be himself.”

That has shown itself already. In the way he gratefully smiles at the mention of O’Grady and Schulz. Or how both coaches were so excited to speak about their former pupil. Or in the way he called O’Grady to thank him for his first opportunity while he walked around campus at Penn State. Or how he recounted childhood stories about being a Penn State fan to Schulz when he got the job.

But at the end of the day, Andy Kotelnicki will be judged by how well his offense plays, whether Drew Allar takes a leap forward at quarterback and all of the other on-field goals he may or may not reach.

If his history is any indication, he’ll embrace that journey with his family — the one at home and the football one — and learn from it.

Much like he did the one before it. Much like he will the one after.