Ryan Day’s trust in Chip Kelly began decades ago in small-town New Hampshire
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Jake Trotter, ESPN Senior Writer
TWENTY-FOUR YEARS ago, Delaware was rolling over New Hampshire, leading 31-3 late in the third quarter. The second-ranked Blue Hens were a perennial Football Championship Subdivision power. But UNH had something Delaware didn’t: Ryan Day and Chip Kelly. Two of the game’s most innovative offensive minds, who, even then, had an inherent trust in each other, molded from their Manchester roots.
Long before he became Ohio State’s head coach, Day quarterbacked one of the biggest comebacks in college football history. Kelly, then UNH’s offensive coordinator, kept dialing up creative passing plays, and Day kept completing throws. Then, on a fourth-and-19, Kelly called “Charlotte Angle.” Day hit Brian Mallette on a slant, and Mallette flipped the ball to a receiver sprinting the opposite direction for a touchdown, tying the game. In overtime, Day found Mallette again on his school-record 65th passing attempt on a wheel route, giving the Wildcats a stunning 45-44 victory.
On the victory bus, Day called his buddies back home. They didn’t even realize UNH had won. They had turned the TV off by the third quarter.
Today, Day and Kelly are together again.
They reunited this offseason when Day relinquished playcalling and convinced Kelly to leave his post as UCLA’s head coach and become Ohio State’s offensive coordinator.
On Saturday, in a Big Ten showdown, their second-ranked Buckeyes travel to No. 3 Oregon, where more than a decade ago, as Day put it, Kelly made his name “revolutionizing” offense.
Now on the same side again, they’re hoping to capture their elusive first national championship.
“We’ve been around each other for so long that we share a lot of the same views of how the game is supposed to look,” Kelly said. “That makes it so much easier. … It’s been great.”
Though he’s now the boss, Day is 15 years younger than Kelly. Still, the two have a unique bond forged by a shared history and shared experience growing up in Manchester, where they played sports for the same youth coaches, attended the same high school, played quarterback for the same college and later coached on the same staff there.
“Probably the biggest influence in my life in football,” Day said of Kelly. “From my hometown. … He was the first one to really get into college coaching and then he recruited me. I shared with him then that I wanted to be a coach and then he kind of took me under his wing. … Kind of gave me my start.”
That came in Manchester — New Hampshire’s biggest city, with a population just a bit larger than the capacity at the Horseshoe. It’s where Kelly and Day discovered a common calling coaching football.
AS A TEENAGER, Chip Kelly seemed to thrive in just about anything he tried. The Manchester High School Central Class of 1981 yearbook named Kelly its “most athletic” and “best looking” student.
The son of a local attorney, Kelly was quarterback captain of the football team, a star ice hockey player and a state champion in track, running the second leg of the 4×100-meter relay team. Frank Kelley, one of Kelly’s football teammates and who ran the first leg on that relay team, remembered taking Kelly water skiing for the first time on Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire’s largest lake.
“Usually people who’ve never water-skied before, they’re not up there for very long,” Kelley said. “He’s water skiing and the guys are getting pissed off because he’s not falling. So we start throwing stuff at him, life preservers. … He was just a natural at a lot of the stuff he did.”
Kelly attended Central in its heyday, when enrollment was among the largest in New England. The public school blended students from all parts of Manchester, including the affluent north end, the middle class on the east side and the inner city.
“You had friends from all walks of life. … it was wonderful,” said Selma Naccach-Hoff, who has taught at Central for 40 years and had Kelly in a mythology class. “It’s a nurturing place.”
Kelly was a senior when Central’s most famous future alum — actor and comedian Adam Sandler — was a freshman. One of Frank Kelley’s sisters was Sandler’s bar mitzvah date when he turned 13. Sandler, Kelly and Day have all been inducted into the Central Hall of Fame. Sandler has given the Central commencement address several times over the years, especially when he has had a niece or nephew graduate.
Central, however, hadn’t had a winning football team in years until Kelly came through the program. Bob Leonard took over as Central’s head football coach, just before Kelly’s freshman year. As a sophomore, Kelly took over as starting quarterback.
“He was a coach when he was a kid,” said Leonard, who also coached Kelly in track. “He understood what we were doing, and he always wanted to know more about what we were doing.”
Kelly didn’t live far from Leonard, who was then in his 20s and lived with the other coaches. On Sunday afternoons, Kelly and some of his teammates would walk or bike to Leonard’s house to watch film in the living room. Leonard would hang a sheet over the fireplace, serving as the screen for the 16-millimeter projector.
If Leonard’s players were out on the town, he didn’t worry — as long as Kelly was with them.
“He was a good leader,” Leonard said, “and the group of kids he played with, they were good kids, they hung together and stuck together.”
Kelly led them on the field, too. Leonard gradually gave Kelly freedom to call the plays he wanted out of their I-formation, bootleg offense.
“If he looked at me and his eyes said, ‘I know what I want to do,'” Leonard recalled, “I’d tell him, ‘Go with it.'”
Kelly also played deep safety defensively, and, as Leonard noted, “was there to clean up the mess” if any of his teammates got beat.
“He didn’t scream and yell,” Leonard said. “He always had a big smile — ‘Let’s go and do this.'”
The Little Green won as many games as they lost, a big step forward from where they had been. Leonard noted that Kelly and his class “left a legacy” and a foundation for players who would come later, including Day and his younger brother, Timmy, who would go to play quarterback for UMass.
Leonard resigned from Central after Kelly’s final game to get married (Kelly attended the wedding) but later returned to coach defense under Jim Schubert, who remained Central’s head coach for 16 years through Day’s career.
After graduating from UNH, Kelly also came back to Central on Schubert’s staff, running the offense for a season. Kelly began experimenting with a fast-paced tempo that would later change football. That came with growing pains and, at times, exasperated his former coach.
“There’s a picture somewhere with my arms around his neck on the sideline,” Leonard said, laughing, “I say, ‘You go three-and-out again, I’m going to kill you right here because the defense can’t stand this anymore.’ But it was fun watching the offense. He had free reign. That’s where it all started. And we had a lot of fun that year.”
SELMA NACCACH-HOFF never had Ryan Day in class. But she had Day’s future wife, Nina Spirou, and her twin sister in world literature, an advanced placement course.
“So I did see a lot of Ryan,” Naccach-Hoff said. “They were a cute couple, really. His rosy cheeks distinguished him back then, and they still do now. It’s really quite fun to see.”
Naccach-Hoff remembered Day being sweet, “almost embarrassingly so,” to Spirou and his teachers and other classmates.
“You got a sense of Ryan’s character,” Naccach-Hoff said. “Supportive, kind, doing the right thing.”
Day has spoken out about his father, who died by suicide when Day was just 8 years old. He would say that loss gave him an “edge” on the field. But the family tragedy also put the onus on Day to help his mother raise his two younger brothers, Chris and Tim.
“He kind of became the father in a way to them,” said Mike Murphy, who coached Day in Pop Warner football. “He became a little more mature. And he played that way, too.”
Murphy’s son, Matt, one of Day’s friends growing up, remembered how Day always seemed older than other kids their age.
“A lot of things in some ways were beneath him,” said Matt, now a middle school teacher in Manchester. “Like, ‘You guys are going to go egging houses? That’s not really my thing.’ He was not interested. Like, ‘I’m not going to let people down. I’m going to do the right thing.'”
Following in Kelly’s footsteps, Day developed into a star athlete. He played point guard in basketball, was a standout catcher in baseball and became a three-year starting quarterback.
“Leadership was not in question when you talked about Ryan Day — he always stood out that way,” said Schubert, who had also played quarterback at Central. “I don’t think he ever criticized another player the entire time he played for me. His teammates followed him in every sport. Great character, great individual.”
The team had a motto going into Day’s junior year: “Believe and achieve.” The players wore that phrase on the back of their team T-shirts during offseason lifting and conditioning. Before the season, Day and Murphy found a piece of plywood and painted it green and white, the school’s colors. On it, they wrote, “If you believe, you will achieve today.” Mimicking the sign from Oklahoma and Notre Dame, “Play Like a Champion Today,” Day and Murphy hung up theirs on the wall right outside the Little Green locker room. The players would slap the sign before their home games while taking the field.
“Maybe it was kind of dorky,” Murphy said, “but we thought it was cool.”
That season, Central advanced all the way to the 1995 state championship game against Merrimack. The Little Green fell behind early.
“We were struggling,” Schubert said. “He brought the team together during a timeout. Ryan said, ‘Look, let’s get this together, men.'”
Led by Day’s arm, Central roared back to win by 17 points for its first state title in 25 years. Down the road as an assistant for UNH, Kelly was paying attention, salivating at the opportunity to recruit Day to the Wildcats.
SEAN McDONNELL WAS coaching receivers for Boston University in the 1980s when he received a call from a player he’d once coached against in Manchester.
Chip Kelly was still an assistant at Central but was hoping to move to college. He knew McDonnell was from Manchester and wondered whether he could come up to Boston and talk offense. McDonnell figured they’d chat for a few minutes. Instead, the two exchanged ideas on the chalkboard for several hours.
McDonnell was so impressed that when he ended up at Columbia, he told then-Lions head coach Ray Tellier that he should interview Kelly. After the interview, Tellier told McDonnell, “We’ve got to turn this interview into a recruiting session. He’s good, I really like him.”
Kelly joined the staff at Columbia, then followed McDonnell to UNH. In 1999, when McDonnell was promoted to head coach, Kelly became his offensive coordinator. One of their first moves was naming Ryan Day the starting quarterback.
“We were at the incubator stages of us starting to do some creative things on offense,” McDonnell said. “Then we had Ryan, just an unbelievable sponge with Chip. … And besides being a great player, his leadership abilities were tremendous. Those guys would run through a wall for Ryan. It was a pretty cool thing to see.”
McDonnell recalled even then Day and Kelly working well together executing game plans. And game-to-game those plans could change. One week, Kelly would implement the speed option and run the ball every down. The following week, the Wildcats would spread the field and pass it almost exclusively. McDonnell said the endless series of wrinkles kept practice fun while keeping opposing defenses guessing. But whatever the Wildcats did then, they went fast.
Day’s ability to lead and adapt made it all work.
“There was so much innovation happening then,” Mallette said. “And Ryan was the kind of leader, you just looked at him in the huddle and his eyes and just saw how determined he was going to be in whatever situation that was coming. … He was such a fierce competitor.”
That was on display in one of the biggest victories of Day’s career. In 2001, UNH trailed in-state rival Dartmouth 38-35 with under 2 minutes left. The Wildcats had blown a 21-point lead in the second half and seemed destined for a gut-wrenching loss. Mallette recalled the Ivy League students chanting “safety school” thinking the win was all but in the bag.
But then Day drove UNH down the field. With only a few seconds remaining, he rolled right. As he was about to get pummeled, Day lofted a pass toward Mallette at the back of the end zone for the winning 24-yard score.
“Ryan was the same [then] as he is now,” Kelly said. “Very well prepared, knew what he was facing. … You knew [then] that guy has it.”
As others had seen a future coaching star in Kelly coming up, Kelly saw the same potential in Day. Kelly brought Day on the offensive staff at UNH in 2002. Then in 2005, Kelly called another Manchester native in Dan Mullen, who was offensive coordinator at Florida under Urban Meyer. Mullen hired Day as a graduate assistant.
In 2017, after stints under Kelly with the Eagles and 49ers, Day joined Meyer’s staff at Ohio State.
“I’ve been very fortunate to be around great coaches and great mentors,” Day said. “And [Kelly] was obviously a big part of that.”
SEAN McDONNELL TRAVELED to Columbus last month to watch Ohio State defeat Marshall 49-14. He spent time with Ryan Day on Friday night, watching Day’s son play high school football. After the Buckeyes won Saturday, McDonnell hung out at Chip Kelly’s house with Day. While talking football like old times, they all watched Michigan knock off USC that evening together.
“It’s good to see both of those guys in a position where they feel very comfortable,” McDonnell said. “Chip’s having a ball coaching the offense. I think Ryan’s able to do some head-coaching things. … By not having to call the plays and be so involved in the offense, he’s in a very good place, from my observation.”
McDonnell came away from his visit believing this could be a special season for the Buckeyes. He noted the trust the two had at Manchester seems as strong as ever. Day used that same word this week when reflecting on his relationship with Kelly all these years later.
“When you have trust, you can get through a lot,” Day said. “Because you can be direct with somebody and know that you care about him, and no matter what is said, you can put your arm around each other afterwards.”
JIM ABBOTT IS sitting at his kitchen table, with his old friend Tim Mead. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they were partners in an extraordinary exercise — and now, for the first time in decades, they are looking at a stack of letters and photographs from that period of their lives.
The letters are mostly handwritten, by children, from all over the United States and Canada, and beyond.
“Dear Mr. Abbott …”
“I have one hand too. … I don’t know any one with one hand. How do you feel about having one hand? Sometimes I feel sad and sometimes I feel okay about it. Most of the time I feel happy.”
“I am a seventh grader with a leg that is turned inwards. How do you feel about your arm? I would also like to know how you handle your problem? I would like to know, if you don’t mind, what have you been called?”
“I can’t use my right hand and most of my right side is paralyzed. … I want to become a doctor and seeing you makes me think I can be what I want to be.”
For 40 years, Mead worked in communications for the California Angels, eventually becoming vice president of media relations. His position in this department became a job like no other after the Angels drafted Abbott out of the University of Michigan in 1988.
There was a deluge of media requests. Reporters from around the world descended on Anaheim, most hoping to get one-on-one time with the young left-handed pitcher with the scorching fastball. Every Abbott start was a major event — “like the World Series,” Angels scout Bob Fontaine Jr. remembers. Abbott, with his impressive amateur résumé (he won the James E. Sullivan Award for the nation’s best amateur athlete in 1997 and an Olympic gold medal in 1988) and his boyish good looks, had star power.
That spring, he had become only the 16th player to go straight from the draft to the majors without appearing in a single minor league game. And then there was the factor that made him unique. His limb difference, although no one called it that back then. Abbott was born without a right hand, yet had developed into one of the most promising pitchers of his generation. He would go on to play in the majors for ten years, including a stint in the mid ’90s with the Yankees highlighted by a no-hitter in 1993.
Abbott, and Mead, too, knew the media would swarm. That was no surprise. There had been swarms in college, and at the Olympics, wherever and whenever Abbott pitched. Who could resist such an inspirational story? But what they hadn’t anticipated were the letters.
The steady stream of letters. Thousands of letters. So many from kids who, like Abbott, were different. Letters from their parents and grandparents. The kids hoping to connect with someone who reminded them of themselves, the first celebrity they knew of who could understand and appreciate what it was like to be them, someone who had experienced the bullying and the feelings of otherness. The parents and grandparents searching for hope and direction.
“I know you don’t consider yourself limited in what you can do … but you are still an inspiration to my wife and I as parents. Your success helps us when talking to Andy at those times when he’s a little frustrated. I’m able to point to you and assure him there’s no limit to what he can accomplish.”
In his six seasons with the Angels, Abbott was assisted by Mead in the process of organizing his responses to the letters, mailing them, and arranging face-to-face meetings with the families who had written to him. There were scores of such meetings. It was practically a full-time job for both of them.
“Thinking back on these meetings with families — and that’s the way I’d put it, it’s families, not just kids — there was every challenge imaginable,” Abbott, now 57, says. “Some accidents. Some birth defects. Some mental challenges that aren’t always visible to people when you first come across somebody. … They saw something in playing baseball with one hand that related to their own experience. I think the families coming to the ballparks were looking for hopefulness. I think they were looking for what it had been that my parents had told me, what it had been that my coaches had told me. … [With the kids] it was an interaction. It was catch. It was smiling. It was an autograph. It was a picture. With the parents, it ran deeper. With the parents, it was what had your parents said to you? What coaches made a difference? What can we expect? Most of all, I think, what can we expect?”
“It wasn’t asking for autographs,” Mead says of all those letters. “They weren’t asking for pictures. They were asking for his time. He and I had to have a conversation because this was going to be unique. You know, you could set up another player to come down and sign 15 autographs for this group or whatever. But it was people, parents, that had kids, maybe babies, just newborn babies, almost looking for an assurance that this is going to turn out all right, you know. ‘What did your parents do? How did your parents handle this?'”
One of the letters Abbott received came from an 8-year-old girl in Windsor, Ontario.
She wrote, “Dear Jim, My name is Tracey Holgate. I am age 8. I have one hand too. My grandpa gave me a picture of you today. I saw you on TV. I don’t know anyone with one hand. How do you feel about having one hand? Sometimes I feel sad and sometimes I feel okay about it. Most of the time I feel happy. I hope to see you play in Detroit and maybe meet you. Could you please send me a picture of you in uniform? Could you write back please? Here is a picture of me. Love, Tracey.”
Holgate’s letter is one of those that has remained preserved in a folder — and now Abbott is reading it again, at his kitchen table, half a lifetime after receiving it. Time has not diminished the power of the letter, and Abbott is wiping away tears.
Today, Holgate is 44 and goes by her married name, Dupuis. She is married with four children of her own. She is a teacher. When she thinks about the meaning of Jim Abbott in her life, it is about much more than the letter he wrote back to her. Or the autographed picture he sent her. It was Abbott, all those years ago, who made it possible for Tracey to dream.
“There was such a camaraderie there,” she says, “an ability to connect with somebody so far away doing something totally different than my 8-year-old self was doing, but he really allowed me to just feel that connection, to feel that I’m not alone, there’s other people that have differences and have overcome them and been successful and we all have our own crosses, we all have our own things that we’re carrying and it’s important to continue to focus on the gifts that we have, the beauty of it.
“I think sometimes differences, disabilities, all those things can be a gift in a package we would never have wanted, because they allow us to be people that have an empathetic heart, an understanding heart, and to see the pain in the people around us.”
Now, years after Abbott’s career ended, he continues to inspire.
Among those he influenced, there are professional athletes, such as Shaquem Griffin, who in 2018 became the first NFL player with one hand. Griffin, now 29, played three seasons at linebacker for the Seattle Seahawks.
Growing up in Florida, he would watch videos of Abbott pitching and fielding, over and over, on YouTube.
“The only person I really looked up to was Jim Abbott at the time,” Griffin says, “which is crazy, because I didn’t know anybody else to look up to. I didn’t know anybody else who was kind of like me. And it’s funny, because when I was really little, I used to be like, ‘Why me? Why this happen to me?’ And I used to be in my room thinking about that. And I used to think to myself, ‘I wonder if Jim Abbott had that same thought.'”
Carson Pickett was born on Sept. 15, 1993 — 11 days after Abbott’s no-hitter. Missing most of her left arm below the elbow, she became, in 2022, the first player with a limb difference to appear for the U.S. women’s national soccer team.
She, too, says that Abbott made things that others told her were impossible seem attainable.
“I knew I wanted to be a professional soccer player,” says Pickett, who is currently playing for the NWSL’s Orlando Pride. “To be able to see him compete at the highest level it gave me hope, and I think that that kind of helped me throughout my journey. … I think ‘pioneer’ would be the best word for him.”
Longtime professional MMA fighter Nick Newell is 39, old enough to have seen Abbott pitch for the Yankees. In fact, when Newell was a child he met Abbott twice, first at a fan event at the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan and then on a game day at Yankee Stadium. Newell was one of those kids with a limb difference — like Griffin and Pickett, due to amniotic band syndrome — who idolized Abbott.
“And I didn’t really understand the gravity of what he was doing,” Newell says now, “but for me, I saw someone out there on TV that looked like I did. And I was the only other person I knew that had one hand. And I saw this guy out here playing baseball and it was good to see somebody that looked like me, and I saw him in front of the world.
“He was out there like me and he was just living his life and I think that I owe a lot of my attitude and the success that I have to Jim just going out there and being the example of, ‘Hey, you can do this. Who’s to say you can’t be a professional athlete?’ He’s out there throwing no-hitters against the best baseball players in the world. So, as I got older, ‘Why can’t I wrestle? Why can’t I fight? Why can’t I do this?’ And then it wasn’t until the internet that I heard people tell me I can’t do these things. But by then I had already been doing those things.”
Griffin.
Pickett.
Newell.
Just three of the countless kids who were inspired by Jim Abbott.
When asked if it ever felt like too much, being a role model and a hero, all the letters and face-to-face meetings, Abbott says no — but it wasn’t always easy.
“I had incredible people who helped me send the letters,” he says. “I got a lot more credit sometimes than I deserved for these interactions, to be honest with you. And that happened on every team, particularly with my friend Tim Mead. There was a nice balance to it. There really was. There was a heaviness to it. There’s no denying. There were times I didn’t want to go [to the meetings]. I didn’t want to walk out there. I didn’t want to separate from my teammates. I didn’t want to get up from the card game. I didn’t want to put my book down. I liked where I was at. I was in my environment. I was where I always wanted to be. In a big league clubhouse surrounded by big league teammates. In a big league stadium. And those reminders of being different, I slowly came to realize were never going to go away.”
But being different was the thing that made Abbott more than merely a baseball star. For many people, he has been more than a role model, more than an idol. He is the embodiment of hope and belonging.
“I think more people need to realize and understand the gift of a difference,” Dupuis says. “I think we have to just not box everybody in and allow everybody’s innate light to shine, and for whatever reasons we’ve been created to be here, [let] that light shine in a way that it touches everybody else. Because I think that’s what Jim did. He allowed his light to permeate and that light, in turn, lit all these little children’s lights all over the world, so you have this boom of brightness that’s happening and that’s uncontrollable, that’s beautiful.”
NEW YORK — Chicago Cubs center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong is projected to receive the largest amount from this season’s $50 million pre-arbitration bonus pool based on his regular-season statistics.
Crow-Armstrong is on track to get $1,091,102, according to WAR calculations through July 8 that Major League Baseball sent to teams, players and agents in a memo Friday that was obtained by The Associated Press.
He earned $342,128 from the pool in 2024.
“I was aware of it after last year, but I have no clue of the numbers,” he said Friday. “I haven’t looked at it one time.”
Pittsburgh pitcher Paul Skenes is second at $961,256, followed by Washington outfielder James Wood ($863,835), Arizona outfielder Corbin Carroll ($798,397), Houston pitcher Hunter Brown ($786,838), Philadelphia pitcher Cristopher Sánchez ($764,854), Cincinnati shortstop Elly De La Cruz ($717,479), Boston catcher Carlos Narváez ($703,007), Red Sox outfielder Ceddanne Rafaela ($685,366) and Detroit outfielder Riley Greene ($665,470).
Crow-Armstrong, Skenes, Wood, Carroll, Brown, De La Cruz and Greene have been picked for Tuesday’s All-Star Game.
A total of 100 players will receive the payments, established as part of the 2022 collective bargaining agreement and aimed to get more money to players without sufficient service time for salary arbitration eligibility. The cutoff for 2025 was 2 years, 132 days of major league service.
Players who signed as foreign professionals are excluded.
Most young players have salaries just above this year’s major league minimum of $760,000. Crow-Armstrong has a $771,000 salary this year, Skenes $875,000, Wood $764,400 and Brown $807,400.
Carroll is in the third season of a $111 million, eight-year contract.
As part of the labor agreement, a management-union committee was established that determined the WAR formula used to allocate the bonuses after awards. (A player may receive only one award bonus per year, the highest one he is eligible for.) The agreement calls for an interim report to be distributed the week before the All-Star Game.
Distribution for awards was $9.85 million last year, down from $11.25 million in 2022 and $9.25 million in 2023.
A player earns $2.5 million for winning an MVP or Cy Young award, $1.75 million for finishing second, $1.5 million for third, $1 million for fourth or fifth or for making the All-MLB first team. A player can get $750,000 for winning Rookie of the Year, $500,000 for second or for making the All-MLB second team, $350,000 for third in the rookie race, $250,000 for fourth or $150,000 for fifth.
Kansas City shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. topped last year’s pre-arbitration bonus pool at $3,077,595, and Skenes was second at $2,152,057 despite not making his big league debut until May 11. Baltimore shortstop Gunnar Henderson was third at $2,007,178.
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