- December 4, 2025
Eating amid chaos, Bethune-Cookman University assistant football coach Pat Brown (center) referees at the 7-on-7 camp on Friday, June 27. Photo by Michele Meyers
Bethune-Cookman University's new assistant coach Pat Brown is the co-special teams coordinator and running backs coach. Photo by Michele Meyers
Bethune-Cookman University's new assistant coach Pat Brown is the co-special teams coordinator and running backs coach. Photo by Michele Meyers
Bethune-Cookman University's new assistant coach Pat Brown is the co-special teams coordinator and running backs coach. Photo by Michele Meyers
Mainland head football coach Jerrime Bell (second from left) disputes a call as new Bethune-Cookman University assistant coach Pat Brown (right) listens at the 7-on-7 camp on Friday, June 27. Photo by Michele Meyers
Bethune-Cookman University assistant football coach Pat Brown (right) referees at the 7-on-7 camp on Friday, June 27. Photo by Michele Meyers
Bethune-Cookman University head football coach Raymond Woodie Jr. (center) talks to the players at the 7-on-7 camp on Friday, June 27. Photo by Michele Meyers
Bethune-Cookman University assistant football coach Pat Brown (center) talks to the players at the 7-on-7 camp on Friday, June 27. Photo by Michele Meyers
Bethune-Cookman University assistant football coach Pat Brown gives some pointers to a receiver at the 7-on-7 camp on Friday, June 27. Photo by Michele Meyers
Pat Brown is back in Wildcat territory as Bethune-Cookman University’s newly hired assistant football coach. The 37-year-old, B-CU alumnus and former Seabreeze High School head football coach started the year as the Wildcats’ co-special teams coordinator and running backs coach.
Brown was Seabreeze's head coach from 2019 to 2022 before taking an assistant coaching job at Valdosta State University. He led the Sandcrabs to the playoffs in 2020 and was named the Florida Athletic Coaches Association's District 9 Coach of the Year. In 2021 he led Seabreeze to its first district championship in 14 years.
Before he was hired at Seabreeze, he was the defensive coordinator at Father Lopez for two seasons.
B-CU head coach Raymond Woodie Jr. hired Brown in January after a position opened up on the coaching staff. He met Brown in May 2024 when Brown was transitioning from coaching wide receivers at Valdosta State to Abilene Christian University in Texas where he was slotted as a running backs coach and the program’s recruiting coordinator. During the two weeks he spent in Daytona Beach preparing for his move to Abilene Christian, he spoke with B-CU’s then assistant head coach, D.J. McCarthy, who encouraged Brown’s desire to talk with the student athletes on campus.
“I let them know that alumni in the area, and out of the area as well, are behind them and are supportive,” Brown said. “We see their progress. We’re not expecting things to change tomorrow but I wanted to let them know that we’re encouraging them and we are here as a support system for them.”
In February 2023, Woodie was hired as the head coach at B-CU, taking over a program coming off of a two-year, 2-9 record. He has spent the past two seasons building a “winning culture” and focusing on player development. Last season, his team’s Academic Progress Rate (APR) increased 91 points and the GPA went from a 2.4 to 3.25. Out of 120 players, 19 made the President’s List with a 4.0 GPA.
Woodie said Brown possesses the two components that are necessary in creating a successful football program. He said when hiring a coach, he always looks for a family man and someone who demonstrates loyalty to him and his mission for the football program.
“The players that we teach and mold need positive role models to look up to and to talk to,” Woodie said. “They need to see the loyalty. Is he (Pat) following coach Woodie’s mission? If I leave, I know he’s going to be pushing the message that I have in place. He asks questions, he's receptive to instruction and has no ego.”
Brown played wide receiver at Rutgers from 2007 to 2009 before transferring to B-CU in 2010. After graduating from Rutgers with a bachelor's degree in economics, Brown played a year in the Canadian Football League with the Saskatchewan Roughriders. During the off season, he returned to B-CU to attain a master's degreee in transformative leadership and took on the role of graduate assistant coaching the Wildcat wide receivers.
“That was six months of the other side of being a collegiate coach,” Brown said. “Being in the meeting rooms with them and seeing how they evaluated players gave me insight to that set up and break down at 23 years old. I got a window into the coaching world at that point.”
From 2012-2013, Brown played professionally for the German Football League with the Hamburg Blue Devils. After his professional career, he returned to New Jersey where he began his foray into Pop Warner football. Brown said his primary motivation for coaching has always been to mentor young players.
“My coaches always said I was going to be a coach because I was in those leadership roles on the teams that I played,” he said. “Basketball — I was always a point guard and football, before I got into college, I was always a quarterback.”
Brown said the coaches that he grew up with in the youth league and in high school were always mentoring their players. He said they galvanized whole communities and kept a lot of kids off the streets. He and his friends did not live in the worst neighborhoods, but Brown said he noticed how easy it was for players and students to get distracted and veer off course.
He’s (Pat Brown) a diamond in a rough. I just think that if he keeps progressing, keeps learning like he is, he’s going to go a long way. He has grit, he’s a hard worker, he’s caring and he’s loyal. He’s a family man, number one, and when you when you see that, it’s a lot that he brings to these student athletes. They see a really great father and great husband. He goes over and beyond the call of duty.
— Raymond Woodie Jr., B-CU head football coach
“I was looking at what the difference was,” he said. “I had a lot of positive male (role) models in my life — my dad, my grandfather, uncles, cousins, coaches. I had a true village, in that sense. The only difference was the male figures I had in my life and the male figures they didn’t have because we were in the same social background — went to the same high school, had similar family structures besides those positive male figures. I was just seeing that over and over again.”
Brown and his wife, Dr. Michelle Brown, met at B-CU when he was involved with the football program and she was playing softball. They decided to move to Daytona Beach together where Brown continued to coach Pop Warner football in Port Orange and work in Ormond Beach. Once he accepted a job with the Department of Children and Families in 2015, he wanted to keep all of his activities close to home and volunteered with the Daytona Beach Pop Warner program run by football commissioner Thomas Roland.
In 2017, Solar Flex owner Joshua Roberts had been operating his business for a little over one year when he was asked to be Father Lopez Catholic High School's football team’s strength coach and help with team development. He discussed the team’s goals with then head coach Matt Knauss and thought Brown would be a good fit as the defensive coordinator. Brown and Roberts had only had two interactions with each other previously— during practice at B-CU and at Amped Fitness. It was close to midnight when he reached out to Brown.
“We really didn’t have a tight relationship — I was the new kid on the team (at B-CU),” Roberts said. “But from the beginning, he was like, ‘Hey, man, I see you working — keep working.’ A couple years later, I caught Pat in Amped Fitness working out a couple times and he said ‘Man, you always work hard.’ He was always positive and that goes a long way. My mom used to say to me that people forget what you say to them, they’ll forget what you do for them but they’ll never forget how you make them feel. That was my story with Pat.”
They coached together at Father Lopez for two seasons until Brown accepted the head coach position at Seabreeze and Roberts went with him as his assistant coach. During Brown’s four-year tenure, the Sandcrabs grabbed the district championship in 2021. Brown took over a team that went 1-9 in 2018 and compiled a 5-5 record in 2019.
Woodie said Brown reminds him of his own career trajectory and ideology. Woodie was 23 years old when he became the head football coach at Bayshore High School in Bradenton and took the team to the state playoffs seven times. He was then the head coach at Palmetto High School before launching his college coaching career at Western Kentucky University in 2012. He was an assistant coach at the University of South Florida, the Oregon, Florida State and Florida Atlantic before taking on the head coach position at B-CU.
“He’s a diamond in a rough,” Woodie said of Brown. “I just think that if he keeps progressing, keeps learning like he is, he’s going to go a long way. He has grit, he’s a hard worker, he’s caring and he’s loyal. He’s a family man, number one, and when you see that, it’s a lot that he brings to these student athletes. They see a really great father and great husband. He goes over and beyond the call of duty.”
Roberts said he not only loves that Brown is back in the area but applauds him in bringing his knowledge and expertise back to B-CU.
“I get my best friend back,” he said. “I love the idea of him coming back here to be able to take the knowledge that he’s learned over the years, as well as what he’s learned at the last two places he was at, and coming back to help this area really flourish again.”
