When Liberty head coach Hugh Freeze found an opening on his staff following the 2019 season when linebackers coach Kyle Pope left to take over the defensive line responsibilities at Memphis, he had one objective: to find the best available coach for the job.
His search landed with Corey Batoon.
“I felt it was best for us to hire the best available coach,” Freeze said in March when asked about his hire of Batoon. “Without a doubt, I think we hired the best available coach. Batoon is a great teacher, a really solid leader of men, a tremendous amount of experience and wealth of knowledge. I think he’s added a ton of value to our staff. For me, it was an easy decision. We’re going to hire the best coach that we can. It’s not about me, it’s about us. We have a very strong defensive staff, in my opinion, and I think he just bolstered that.”
Batoon joins Liberty after spending the previous two seasons at Hawaii as defensive coordinator and safeties coach. His relationship with Coach Freeze dates back to 2010 when both were position coaches at Arkansas State. Batoon then worked under Freeze in 2011 when he took over as head coach at Arkansas State, and Batoon stayed under Freeze through 2016 as they moved to Ole Miss.
“It’s not really a transition coming back working for Coach,” Batoon said of Freeze. “We’ve been together a long time, clear back to our days as position coaches at Arkansas State. Then, he became the head coach and I had a chance to see what his program is like and see how he molds the staff and the chemistry that is involved in the staff and obviously the cohesion with the players.”
Batoon and Liberty’s current defensive coordinator Scott Symons have also known each other for a long time. Symons was an assistant coach in Arkansas from 2008-2013 as he coached at Harding, Arkansas State, and Arkansas Tech.
“I’ve known Scott for a long time, clear back to our days at Arkansas State when we were with Coach Freeze and got to know Scott,” said Batoon. “He was coaching at another institution in state. He would come and visit and (we) had an opportunity to stay in contact.”
Batoon and Symons talked frequently during the season last year as both teams played New Mexico and BYU. They floated ideas and schemes off one another to help each other’s respective teams. Now, they will do the same while coaching on the same staff.
“There’s a lot of carryover in terms of the systems that we run,” Batoon said of his system at Hawaii and Symons’ system at Liberty. “There’s good familiarity. The biggest thing I need to do as a coach here, i just learn the terminology. The pieces of the puzzle are very similar system wise. It’s just, you call it apple, I call it orange. That’s been tough on me because I’ve been in this system so long, just to learn different names. But the teaching, progressions, the X’s and O’s, the knowledge standpoint, it’s all basically very similar. That transition has been really good.”
Batoon is originally from Honolulu, Hawaii, and the past two years were the first of his career where he got to coach in his home state. So, to move 5,000 miles away from home was quite the transition for the Batoon family this offseason.
“There’s a lot of great memories that I have as an assistant coach working for Hugh,” said Batoon. “So, the opportunity to come back, for our family, my wife knows half of these wives. It’s a rare situation as a college coach, when you walk in, you move your family 5,000 miles away across the country, to be able to walk in on day one and know half the people in the building. (It’s great) when your kids and your wife comes up in the building and they know everybody.”
The Batoon family has enjoyed living in this part of the country for the first time, and with COVID-19, it has allowed them to spend more time together than is typical with a Division I college football coach’s schedule.
“We were out west for basically our whole career,” Batoon said. “We were at Montana, Arizona a long time, in California playing and coaching. Having the opportunity to go to Arkansas and kind of raise our girls in the South, at first you don’t know what that is. You’re way out of your comfort zone moving from Arizona and California. Arkansas, what a blessing. The place is a lot slower in this region. It’s very similar as it is in the islands. Family is very important. Faith is very important in this area.”
His oldest daughter lives in Hollywood but has been working remotely. She had the opportunity to spend some time this summer with the family in Virginia. His youngest daughter is a senior at Ole Miss and has been in Lynchburg for about 6 months doing her work virtually.
“Geographically, it is a ways away from our island home, but just in terms of what we’re used to – the social norms, if you will, it’s very similar,” he said. “It kind of is going home for me in many ways. Hawaii was home. For me, coming to Liberty, it’s another way of just coming home. It’s been a real easy transition.”
*photo courtesy Liberty Athletics
