MORGANTOWN — It was a long and trying day for one member of the West Virginia family, one who had strong reason to want Florida State to play West Virginia in the Gator Bowl so he could help give Bobby Bowden a proper sendoff in his final game.

Why wouldn’t Donnie Young feel that way? After all, it was Bobby Bowden who gave him his start in coaching at West Virginia.

You have to go back further than Young would like to think. The year was 1970 and Bowden had just been promoted from an assistant coaching job at West Virginia under Jim Carlen to his replacement. That same season Young had produced a successful season at Salem.

As Young recalls, a physical education professor had recommended him as a possible coach on the staff Bowden was putting together.

“I sent him a resume,” Young recalls. “He called and offered me the job.”

Things, as you can tell, were a little different nearly 40 years ago when it came to big time college football.

“I didn’t know him at all,” Young said.

Shortly after he had been offered the job on the phone, Young and his wife drove from Salem through a snowstorm, no easy trip in those days, to Morgantown to meet Bowden.

While he had the offer in his pocket, there was still some apprehension. “I knew he had to like me,” Young said. “He seemed like a humble person, easy to talk to. You could tell he meant what he said and you could tell he was a Christian man.”

At that time Bowden had a reputation as an offensive coach and had experience at Samford as a head coach.

Young was to coach the freshman team for Bowden that first year, before switching to linebackers. In that era, freshmen were not eligible to play with the varsity, and Young would learn a valuable lesson from the man who would go on to win 388 college victories, second most all-time to Penn State’s Joe Paterno.

“When I was at Salem I was a little bit of a screaming coach,” Young said, something that is hard to imagine as mellow as he is today in his role as executive assistant to head coach Bill Stewart.

But Ed Pastilong, who was with him at Salem, will vouch for his coaching style.

“I was out of control sometimes. At that time it was the Vince Lombardi style of coaching. Well, Bobby saw me getting on the kids pretty hard, like I had at Salem,” Young recalls.

After practice, he received an invitation to join Bowden in his office.

“Now Donnie, you got to slow down,” Bowden said. “Your job is to keep them here, not to run them off. You can be

a ranter and raver to get it done. You can be tough, but still not yell so much.”

“So I altered my coaching style a little bit right then,” Young said. Must have been good advice. He coached until Don Nehlen retired.

He and Bowden, of course, would go through an eventful run at WVU.

That first year, in mid-season at Pitt, they had the Panthers beaten worse than Pitt had Cincinnati beaten on Saturday, only to spit up a 35-3 halftime lead in the second half and lose, 36-35, a defeat that Bowden still calls “the worst of my career”, even though he had a couple of more famous losses that came to be known as “wide right.”

It was a quiet locker room after the game.

“There were a lot of West Virginia fans at that game,” Young recalled, “and after it they were banging on the door, trying to kick it in. it was almost like, golly, what’s going on here? After a while, it quieted down and Coach Bowden spoke.”

There were no hysterics, no lecture. As Young recalls it, Bowden simply said, “Men, we should have played better here but we didn’t. We just have to get better and get them next week.”

“It wasn’t one of those rant and rave kind of things. I don’t think I ever heard him raise his voice on anything we did,” Young said.

They went through some good times after that, but in 1974 the bottom fell out, the team going 4-7 and Bowden having to live through the indignity of being hung in effigy.

“He never said anything about it to us,” Young said. “It was tough. Across from the stadium, you’d go to work and you’d see signs like ‘Bowden Must Go!’ It was sad. I know it was an awful time for him.”

Things changed the next year.

“When we gathered the next year, he became more involved with the football team. He had been more a manager of the staff. But now he got into it and they sure took note of that,” Young recalled.

Bowden shook it off, went 9-3 in 1975, stunned North Carolina State in the Peach Bowl by going away from his veer offense and putting in a wishbone, then jumped to Florida State.

“He didn’t tell us he was leaving right after the bowl game. The next week, when we came back, he told us. We didn’t know anything was up. We were just coaching that bowl game to win,” Young said.

They all were stunned.

“The thing with West Virginia University is, after you’re here a while, you kind of get ingrained in the town and with the people. It’s kind of hard to leave,” Young said.

But Bowden left. He also offered Young a chance to go with him to Florid State.

He turned it down.

“I went down there, but I just didn’t feel comfortable,” Young said.

And so he stayed with Frank Cignetti, lost his job for a while when Cignetti was fired, but came back under Don Nehlen.

Did Young have any regrets?

“I remember when Frank got fired, I was watching Florida State play in the Orange Bowl for the national championship and thinking, ‘I could have been part of that.’”

But he was meant to stay at West Virginia and now all he wants to do is see Bowden, wish him luck and thank him again for the opportunity he gave him.

E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.