‘There’s gonna be some change’: Shinnick introduced as new Towson Football Head Coach
By: Jake Shindel, Sports Editor
New Towson Football Head Coach Pete Shinnick was introduced to the Towson community at a press conference on Wednesday. Shinnick said he hopes to be able to announce some new staff hires in the next few days.
Shinnick, most recently the coach at the University of West Florida, was the first coach in program history, and says that he expects his first season at Towson will be very different from his first season at UWF.
“I would love to not have the record I had my first year at UWF, that would be great to start off with,” Shinnick joked. “When [West Florida] hired me, they gave me a phone and a desk. The exciting thing about this is this is gonna move fast, and this is gonna go quickly. I think we have a very good foundation here. I’ve got very high expectations as to what our first season can look like.”
The son of Don Shinnick, former Baltimore Colts linebacker, Shinnick is looking forward to the homecoming, and being able to say that he lives in Towson.
“Growing up the son of a football coach, people would always ask you where are you from,” Shinnick said. “And when you lived outside of Chicago, outside of St. Louis, outside of Oakland… my coaching stop was about 10-12 different places, I would always say, ‘Well I was born in Baltimore.’ It’ll be very fun now to say when people say ‘Where are you from,’ ‘I was born in Baltimore, and now ‘I’m from Towson.’”
At the press conference, Shinnick alluded to a change in some coaching staff positions. He also praised the current staff for its professionalism throughout the process, noting that they made the process of being hired much easier.
“There’s gonna be some change, there’s gonna be some new faces coming in, and there’s gonna be an opportunity for different faces in there,” Shinnick said.
Shinnick comes to Towson boasting an impressive track record as head coach. At UWF, he led the team to a 56-21 overall record, advancing to the Division II Championship game in his second season with the team, including going 12-2 in the 2022 season and winning the Gulf Coast Conference.
Director of Athletics Steve Eigenbrot said that since the beginning of the nationwide search for a new coach, Shinnick’s name stood above the others.
“The most surprising thing about the last few weeks, is without a doubt, that from the first moment we looked at the stack of resumes, the man we hired was on the top of that pile,” Eigenbrot said. “We took a second pass through the candidate list, Pete was still on top. We did Zoom interviews, we walked away, and to a person, we said, ‘Man, that guy was really good.”
