LINCOLN, Neb. — Chocolate with sprinkles, that was SJ’s pick. Her dad, Jeff Hulme, ordered a glazed donut. She called it their ritual. Every Friday, she sat under his desk, eating that donut while coloring. But really, she listened. And she learned about football.
First at Fort Bend Clements High in Sugar Land, Texas, and later at Mansfield High after the Hulmes moved north in Texas when SJ was 7, the players came into Jeff’s office to talk. SJ thought no one could see her on the floor, but the players knew she was down there. Her feet stuck out.
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Today a bright staffer and one of four women in full-time positions as part of coach Matt Rhule’s first Nebraska administration, SJ begged her mom, Mindi Hulme, and Jeff, the head coach, to let her shadow Jeff on the sideline.
She was tired of standing with the cheerleaders on Friday nights. It was too far from the action.
They said yes in 2010 when she was in fourth grade. SJ carried a towel and a water bottle, and she wore a giant bow atop her head so Mindi could spot her from the stands. When a play spilled near the edge of the field in her direction, Jeff’s players formed a wall to keep her safe.
Around that time, too, SJ came to understand why Jeff and Mindi legally changed her name from Sydney Jane to Sydney James. She was an only child, but it wasn’t supposed to be that way. After her birth in 2000, Jeff and Mindi, for medical reasons, were advised not to have any more children.
“I just remember telling my wife, ‘You know, I’m not going to have a son, so I want my daughter on the field with me as much as possible,’” Jeff said.
James is a family name on Jeff’s side. It’s a football name. His father, Jim, played at Rice.
“She’s got it in her blood,” said Jeff, whose father-in-law, Lane Wade, played at Texas Tech.
Jeff played tight end at Tech for Spike Dykes from 1988 to 1992 and for Art Briles at Georgetown (Texas) High School. Now at Mansfield Timberview, Jeff will enter his 20th season as a Texas high school head coach this fall.
James, the name, fit for his daughter. And if SJ couldn’t have a biological brother, she sure could have 75 of them on a football team.
“I had already fallen in love with the game,” SJ said. “But that’s when I was like: ‘OK, I have to continue to do something with football. I need to put a lot of love into this to get a brother out of it. They’re showing me the amount of love that a brother would give a sister. And so I need to give the same amount back.’”
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From there, she traveled a fast track.
For Rhule, the choice was easy to hire 22-year-old SJ, who works in coach support and football operations at Nebraska — just as it was to tab Susan Elza as the Huskers’ chief of staff, Kiara Mayo as the assistant director of football operations and to retain Brittany Oligmueller as the director of on-campus recruiting.
He wants to promote women and create opportunities for them, he said. But not because they’re women.
“They all have a long history of being involved in football,” Rhule said.
Mayo started at Vanderbilt as a student equipment manager. She came recommended to Nebraska secondary coach Evan Cooper, and Rhule saw qualities in her that he liked three minutes after they met, he said.
With SJ, he admired her assertiveness and desire to work.
“I love that she grinded her way up,” Rhule said. “Just knowing that she knows what it’s like to see the high and lows, that perspective is really important. And she knows football. She’s not just trying this because it’s cool. She knows what comes with it. She knows the hours. She knows the expectations and the finality when things don’t go right.”
The photos at coach Jeff Hulme’s desk, with SJ front and center. (Courtesy of Jeff Hulme)Jeff Hulme keeps a photo at his desk from 2004, his first season as a head coach. In it, he’s with Mindi, and she has SJ on her hip after the coach’s first win at Clements.
“From that moment on,” Jeff said of SJ, “she was everywhere.”
From under his desk to alongside the cheerleaders to her spot at his side, SJ “sort of became my confidante,” her dad said.
Thank you Sydney James for being by my side every step of the way. You are an incredible young lady with an amazing future ahead of you. Love you sweetie, Coach.
— MLHS (@LHSCoachHulme) December 8, 2018
After her freshman year at Mansfield, a 12-win season for her dad in 2015, Jeff got the job at Waco Midway.
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SJ played competitive tennis, but her role in football increased. Jeff talked strategy with her. If she offered advice and he chose to do something different that failed, he heard about it.
“He knows I have a very strong opinion,” SJ said.
He valued her perspective on his players. They were, after all, SJ’s classmates. She saw them as much or more often than him.
“If we were going to hang out on a Tuesday to study, that didn’t matter,” SJ said. “When it’s game time, this player is either going to show up or he’s not.”
Waco Midway finished 8-3 in Jeff’s first season, then it won 15 of 16 games in 2017, which coincided with Rhule’s first year at Baylor. Less than 10 miles from the Big 12 campus, a few of Jeff’s players caught the attention of the Baylor staff. Rhule lived in the Midway district.
While in high school, SJ taught tennis through a summer camp program at the university. Among her students was Bryant Rhule, Matt and Julie Rhule’s oldest of three children.
SJ saw the Baylor coach at tennis camp, watching Bryant. She wanted to tell Rhule about her love of football, but she was unsure how to approach him. So she talked to her dad about it.
“You can’t always go through me,” Jeff told her. “You’ve got to make your own connections.”
She introduced herself, talking first about Bryant and tennis. Then she told Rhule that she admired his work at Baylor.
“I’m going to be in football one day,” she told him, “and I’d love to work for you.”
SJ graduated from Midway in 2019. She left Texas to attend Ole Miss and opted not to pursue a job in football until she had spent some time on campus. She hated watching games from the stands, she said. The other students distracted her.
“I was like, ‘Y’all need to be focused on the game,’” she said.
Her dad preached patience. He had a hunch that Matt Luke would not last long as the Rebels’ coach. Jeff was right. Ole Miss fired Luke and hired Lane Kiffin in December of her first year. Kiffin hired Jeff Lebby as the offensive coordinator and Randy Clements as the offensive line coach, a pair of former Baylor assistants with connections to SJ’s dad.
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“Her circle got a little smaller,” Jeff said.
Lebby, in particular, went to bat for SJ, pushing Kiffin to hire her. She spent three seasons on his staff as an undergraduate, rising to an administrative spot at the side of the head coach.
She still followed Rhule from afar. Years after their first encounter in Waco, Rhule visited Oxford, Miss., for an Ole Miss pro day. SJ saw him and reintroduced herself. He remembered her. She reminded him of their first conversation. Rhule gave her his cell number and told her to keep in touch.
When he was out of a job last fall, fired by the Panthers, SJ sent him a text. It led to a meeting in January at the AFCA Convention in Charlotte, N.C., several weeks after Nebraska hired Rhule. He and several Nebraska staffers met with SJ in the lobby of Kimpton Tryon Park Hotel, where Rhule was staying.
It represented a leap from SJ’s comfort zone. She was happy at Ole Miss, where she graduated in 3 1/2 years with a degree in sports management. She had a job she enjoyed and a boss she liked in Kiffin.
“I needed to step up and see where I could go,” she said. “But still, I was like, ‘What the heck am I doing? This could really happen.’”
It did happen. After the convention, Rhule, back in Lincoln, huddled with Elza, the former athletic director of the University Interscholastic League in Texas and a longtime friend of SJ’s dad. Elza, a Waco Midway graduate like SJ, encouraged Rhule to make the hire.
She came right away and got to work.
Jeff and Mindi rented a U-Haul in early March, driving nine hours from Mansfield to Oxford to collect SJ’s belongings, then another 12 hours to Lincoln.
They’ve been back to Nebraska twice since to see her, most recently last weekend for the Red-White game.
“She’s in a great environment,” Jeff said, “and obviously a historical program. She’s a coach’s kid. I think coaches’ kids, when they’re around sports, they get it. They understand the dynamics. They understand coaches are going to yell. If you can handle that and not take it personally, you’re going to go far.
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“And just from a mom’s point of view for Mindi, I don’t know if you can be around better people than Sydney’s going to be around.”
SJ works primarily with Rhule. But she handles scheduling and other administrative jobs for the Nebraska assistants, too. Rhule said he wants his young staffers to work in numerous areas around the program to discover where their passions lie.
SJ’s desk sits near Rhule’s door. From it, she can see the coach on one side and Elza on the other. Aside from her dad, Elza rates as SJ’s most important mentor.
“She has encouraged me to do way more than I was expecting to do here,” SJ said, “and I probably don’t thank her enough for that. I love going in her office every day. I’m not going to lie, she’s hard. But she’s amazing. She knows exactly what’s going on at all times.”
Elza said she sees some of herself in SJ.
“She’s super young, but I am amazed,” Elza said, “because she’s just so mature. She’s savvy.”
SJ is not at Nebraska, Elza said, to network and advance in her career.
“She’s here to do her job,” Elza said. “She’s here to get better and adapt and make our football program better. I mean, she walks the walk and talks the talk a little different because of her time in football with her dad.
“You could have a son, and he wouldn’t accomplish nearly as much in football as she has at such a young age.”
(Top photo: Mitch Sherman / The Athletic)
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