Bill Cubit, pride of Sharon Hill, leads Illinois into Happy Valley
Bill Cubit may be the first-year head coach at Illinois but he hasn't forgotten his Delaware County roots, and his old friends from that area haven't forgotten him, either.
Bill Cubit may be the first-year head coach at Illinois but he hasn't forgotten his Delaware County roots, and his old friends from that area haven't forgotten him, either.
Cubit, 62, a native of Sharon Hill who became Illinois' offensive coordinator in 2013, took over the main job on Aug. 28 after Tim Beckman was fired amid allegations of mistreatment by former players. The move touched off a major reaction from the folks back home.
"The reaching out of the kids from Sharon Hill and Academy Park and Widener is unbelievable," Cubit said Monday from his office in Champaign, Ill. "I'm touching base with a lot of the guys, a lot of the players from Widener and Sharon Hill."
"I had a kid email me. He said, 'You'll never remember back in '79, you told me if I quit the football team then I'll quit a lot of other things in life. I wanted to let you know I didn't.' The guy has done multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He's been a consultant to the Secretary of Defense. He's met the president."
Cubit said when he invited the man to speak to his team, he said, " 'I'm more excited about this than I was meeting the president.' So it's little things like that."
Cubit's coaching resumé might fill a book, with stops at Academy Park High School, Swarthmore, and Widener (where he was head coach) as well as Missouri, Stanford, Rutgers, and Western Michigan, which had been his only major college head coaching job before this year.
He didn't necessarily like the circumstances that led him to take over at Illinois, but he and his team have responded. The Fighting Illini are 4-3 (1-2 in the Big Ten) heading into Saturday's game at Beaver Stadium against Penn State.
"You feel bad when somebody loses their job," he said. "But the other thing is, the people here are looking upon you to go out there and get this thing done. You have a responsibility. So it's been a lot of fun. It's a lot of work. I think I've eaten at home one time since I had the job, and that was during a bye week. But I'm grateful for the confidence they had in me."
Bill Cubit's inspiration has been his mother, Loretta, who died of cancer on Aug. 5 at her Glen Mills home. She and her son talked every day, and she dished out advice as she learned more and more about the coaching profession, in which Cubit has spent nearly 40 years.
"She was funny," he said. "The more she found out about it, the more she'd say, 'Billy, you've got to relax. You just can't stress out.' After she passed away, I was driving to work and it just hit me what she was saying. I said, 'You know, I'm just going to have fun.' So that's what I'm doing every day."
He said Saturday's trip to Beaver Stadium might be a little emotional. His father had just passed away in 2013 when Illinois last visited Pennsylvania, and now he'll be thinking about his mother.
But he won't dwell on the negative.
"I'm just some little kid from a little town called Sharon Hill," he said. "You just work hard, put your head down. My parents, that's all they said to do, just work. It's paid off for me. I know I'm one of the fortunate ones out there, that a kid could rise to this level."
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