Editor’s note: This story is part of the Secrets of the Coaching Carousel series exploring unique aspects of college football coaching changes and more.

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Complete with a guesthouse, this 9 1/2-acre property offers waterfront views and incomparable serenity. The private dock will quickly become one of your favorite spots to fish and swim nearly year-round. Enjoy a spacious porch that’s great for entertaining and a primary bedroom with an adjacent TV room. We understand that football coaches are typically on the move in December and January, so call now for a tour. It’s time to end your home search and get back to the Air Raid.

Sounds pretty good, right?

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If a real estate website had posted a home description specifically for Mississippi State coach Mike Leach, it may have read a little something like that. Leach looked at several Starkville homes after taking the Bulldogs job in January 2020 but couldn’t get the first one he saw out of his head. His wife, Sharon, loved the home, too.

“There’s whole states that don’t have a setting in their entire state as good as some of these ponds in the trees in Mississippi,” Leach said. “It’s just outstanding, so we were lucky to find that place.”

Twenty years as a head coach and more than four decades in football have made Leach an expert in real estate. He’s not alone. Moving is inherent to college football, as coaches and their families know. High-dollar homes are sometimes traded from coach to coach, or in L.A., coach to celebrity. The perks of an estate, be it basketball court, boat dock or basement man cave, can be used in recruiting. And real estate chatter can also be the first giveaway a coaching search is nearing … or not. Remember all the rumors that Alabama coach Nick Saban’s wife, Terry, was supposedly house hunting in Austin, Texas?

“It’s funny, my wife and I … like for the South Carolina job, when you’ve interviewed for it, you know you’re in the mix for it, you don’t want to jinx it, but she’s a wife. She’s obviously going to start looking at real estate and seeing what’s on the market,” said South Carolina coach Shane Beamer.

The Athletic spoke with Leach, Beamer, Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin and others to compile a real estate guide for college football coaches who, sooner or later, will be on the move.

Step 1: Find a real estate agent

Local agents aren’t shy about pitching their services when coaching staffs change over.

“Real estate agents are smart,” Beamer said. “When a new coaching staff comes in, it’s like, I don’t want to use the word blood in the water, but in a lot of ways, they realize that there’s going to be people coming into town that need homes to buy.”

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Added Kiffin: “You do get a million right away.”

The process of acquiring an agent, Kiffin said, usually starts with an athletic director, donor or someone from inside the program recommending one who has typically already handled previous coaching moves.

When Beamer left Virginia Tech following his dad’s retirement and headed to Georgia prior to the 2016 season, he used a real estate agent recommended by Lainie Bobo, wife to Georgia assistant Mike Bobo. The couple had plenty of insight on the area, given that Mike spent 14 years on the Georgia staff before he took the head job at Colorado State in 2015. In 2018, when Beamer left Georgia for Oklahoma, coach Lincoln Riley’s wife, Caitlin, recommended an agent she had previously used. Then when the Beamers came back to Columbia, S.C., where Shane was an assistant in 2007 and 2008, they had a better feel for where they wanted to live, having been there before.

“A lot of times it’s just someone that has been doing the coaches a long time and kind of understands the process,” Kiffin said. “Like most of us aren’t going to spend hours looking at each house and all that. See how many you can get set up and how fast they can do it.”

Leach is still good friends with his real estate agent from Texas Tech, Carolyn Moegle, whose husband Bobby retired from high school athletics in 1999 as the nation’s winningest high school baseball coach.

Given the type of trust coaches require, sometimes business extends into friendship.

“Oh, absolutely. It’s hard not to,” said Victoria Shuman, a real estate agent in Morgantown, W. Va., who sold coach Dana Holgorsen’s home after he left for Houston. “I’ve become friends with the majority of my clients because you do spend so much time with them and it’s their personal home.”

Step 2: Make the wish list

Most coaches agree that top schools for their children are high on the priority list. In Leach’s case, a strong softball program for daughter Janeen became added to the criteria when the family lived in Lubbock. Janeen earned all-district honors for four consecutive years.

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But outside of schools, coaches’ wish lists vary. Leach also prioritizes proximity. He wants to be close to campus, within walking distance when possible, and he has never wanted a “head-coach mansion” so pricey that he couldn’t sell it later. Living on 12-acre Sawyer Lake, though, has its perks. Any time he’s free, he can take his jon boat to fish or hang at his dock, where he also fishes and swims.

“Actually in the middle of the night, if I’m all sweaty or something, I’ve actually jumped in that sucker,” Leach said. “We oughta get some scientist to check it out, but (it’ll be) 40 degrees outside (and) the temperature of that lake is about the same as a cool swimming pool.”

Kiffin also loves the water. He lived on the Tennessee River when he coached the Volunteers in 2009 and on the Intracoastal Waterway when he coached Florida Atlantic from 2017-19. When he bought his country club home in Oxford after his first season with the Rebels, it didn’t have a pool. So he put one in. His top priority is the backyard, which he rules houses out over “all the time.”

“We’d go to houses, and I would walk straight through to the backyard. Because I work so much, I’m not really home very much,” he said. “So the last thing you want to do is go from sitting in the office all day to sitting inside. The backyard feel and view usually is a big deal.”

Kiffin said it might surprise the public to hear that his favorite home among all the ones he’s lived in as a coach was his place in Knoxville.

“We just loved the house. It was a great house on a huge lot. … There was so much space, the backyard, and it kind of just was a feel, too,” he said. “You walk in this huge backyard, pass the pool, down to the boat dock, fishing with the kids. It was a really awesome, cool family feel. Had Jet Skis. And I think part of that, too, is the people of Tennessee helped that, too, just because you have that Tennessee, awesome, safe home feeling.”

For Beamer, the yard is also high on the list. He has a dog and three children, who are about to get a swimming pool for the first time later this month when the family moves into their permanent Columbia home during South Carolina’s idle week. They’ve been renovating for months.

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His home in Athens had a back porch, fireplace, television and grill that he spent almost all of his free time enjoying.

“I’m not picky, but just give me an area where I can sit outside and build a fire when the weather’s cool and watch TV,” he said.

Plenty of coaches, including Beamer, also view their homes as recruiting tools. Coaches can host prospects on unofficial visits, so long as the homes are “within one mile of campus boundaries,” per NCAA rules. Clemson’s Dabo Swinney, Missouri’s Eli Drinkwitz and North Carolina’s Mack Brown have all taken advantage. Beamer might be a little too far from the end of South Carolina’s campus for unofficial visits, but NCAA rules allow coaches to be with recruits within 30 miles of campus for official visits.

Holgorsen’s West Virginia home took nearly 2 1/2 years to plan and build while he stayed in a top-floor condo of a local hotel.

A staircase lined with NFL jerseys of former West Virginia players led recruits down to the basement, where top recruiting staffer Ryan Dorchester estimates he’s spent “months” of his life. Dorchester, who followed Holgorsen to Houston, said it featured several televisions, a restaurant-style bar, pool table, theater room, card table and arcade games, including pop-a-shot.

Holgorsen also had a wall in one of his first-floor restrooms built entirely out of West Virginia coal, a fire pit outside and a rock garden in the shape of the state of West Virginia. Players often came over to chop wood for fires if they needed to blow off steam.

“Prior to that home being constructed, we didn’t really have a place that we could take (recruits) that it was like, ‘Wow, that’s impressive,’” Dorchester said. “That’s why the house was so important.

“It was a huge deal.”

Step 3: Get your house packed and sold

Shuman has been a real estate agent in West Virginia since 1989 and a broker since 1996. She said it’s not the norm, but there have been times when she knew a coach was on his way out before the general public did. Confidentiality clauses don’t allow her to disclose details.

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“They would be calling to have me come and look at the house so that they can get things ready,” she said. “It’s normally the spouse, honestly.”

Holgorsen listed his home at $2.95 million, according to Zillow, on Feb. 8, 2019, and it sold for $2.1 million on April 6, 2020.

“Dana’s house is very unique. So it was a little bit tougher, took a little longer,” Shuman said. “It was over that $2 million mark, which is a high price point here. There’s a lot of homes here in that range, but not a lot of them turn over. Most people build them and stay. And his was very unique in the design. He was a bachelor, single. So it was kind of a really cool, large bachelor pad.”

Shuman sold the home to clients from California. She said it’s not uncommon for coaches to buy homes from other coaches, though it can be awkward — especially if the previous coach left the school on bad terms. In some cases, she said, tumultuous exits can impact a house’s marketability.

Kiffin and Leach both have stayed away from buying homes from other coaches, particularly ones that have been fired.

“It just didn’t feel right,” Leach said. “You know that they battled, they struggled, they did virtually everything they could.”

“Maybe it’s not, like, good vibes,” Kiffin added.

Beamer, a first-year head coach, is moving into a home he believes was previously owned by a former Clemson cheerleader. At Georgia, he lived in now-Auburn offensive line coach Will Friend’s former home, with renters between them.

“At one point we were at Virginia Tech, and my dad was trying to hire Mike Bobo from Georgia,” Beamer said, adding that Bobo wanted to bring Friend with him. “And I can remember talking to Mike on the phone the day that he was going to make the decision, and I can remember Mike telling me, ‘I’m over here, I’m in Will Friend’s basement, he and I are sitting here talking and I just don’t know if we can pull the trigger.’

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“So anytime I was in that basement I’d always feel like, ‘Man, dang it, Mike.’”

Beamer said he sold the home to Georgia coach Kirby Smart’s college roommate when he left.

When it’s time to have the house packed, Leach said, there’s never really time to have a garage sale. So he hauls his junk with him from place to place. The exception is when he moved to a cottage he and Sharon bought in Key West, Fla. After Texas Tech fired Leach, the couple packed up six boxes of clothes and essentials and put the rest of their belongings in storage for two years.

“There was a point to where I wish that storage unit had burned down because Key West, I quickly discovered how irrelevant a bunch of that junk I had was,” Leach said. “I should have hired an arson(ist).”

Step 4: Start looking for homes during the transitional period

Leach bought a house in Kentucky without his wife seeing it, and it ended up being one of the couple’s favorite homes. They even sold it on their own in three days when Leach became Oklahoma’s offensive coordinator in 1999. But as a general rule:

“You can look at a house, but if your wife’s not there, you’re not making no decision,” said Dennis Erickson, a two-time NFL head coach and seven-time college head coach. “I promise you that. That is not happening.”

Erickson stayed in a hotel for about six months when he took the head coaching job at Miami in 1989, while he waited on his wife and children to join him. In the limited downtime coaches have during spring ball, they can look for homes on the weekends. Holgorsen also stayed in a hotel — at Oklahoma State for an entire season — but more because he didn’t know how long he’d be in Stillwater. He paid for a year at a Residence Inn, Dorchester said.

And Beamer stayed solo in a condo across the street from Williams-Brice Stadium for several months before his family joined him and moved into a rental house in the Five Points area of Columbia.

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Kiffin had to have one of the most glamorous temporary stays in college football when he rented soccer star Landon Donovan’s former home for a little less than a year while at USC. The Manhattan Beach property, which Kiffin described as two connecting houses, had all the works: a movie theater, restaurant-style bar with flat-screen televisions,  sauna, steam room, pool, hot tub, cold-plunge station and a space for Pilates.

Kiffin eventually bought a home in Manhattan Beach. It wasn’t “quite as exciting as Landon’s house,” but still had a nice yard, pool, hot tub, fire pit and great neighbors that he’s still close with. He sold that home to movie star Vince Vaughn, whom he’d coincidentally already met and hung out with backstage at a Kenny Chesney concert.

For assistants, the transition can be more jarring and less Hollywood. Just ask Lisa Dewitt, the wife of Jovan Dewitt, who coaches outside linebackers and special teams at North Carolina. In the 20 years the couple has been together, Lisa estimates they’ve moved 13 times, including through blizzards and tornadoes, with the first move coming just one week after their wedding.

“We’re pulling into Kansas, we’re stopped at a stoplight and I look over and next to us is a truck with a goat in the front seat of the car,” Lisa said. “And I looked at him and I said, ‘What are we doing?”’

Lisa’s held a teaching license in at least six states and has furnished homes with lawn chairs and air mattresses while waiting on furniture too many times to count. Life as a Power 5 assistant is much more comfortable — Jovan followed Scott Frost to Nebraska from UCF in 2018 — but Lisa still remembers vividly the living conditions when they were just getting started. There was the one-bedroom apartment they shared with a roommate in Michigan where she could hear mice in the walls. At Fairmont State in West Virginia, they lived in the basement of a dormitory and split one parking space while Lisa was five months pregnant. Jovan has slept on yoga mats in his office and sneaked into locker rooms to shower while between homes.

Nothing beats the time the two were on the road for a move in the early 2000s, this time to Michigan Tech, when Jovan got a call from alma mater Northern Michigan. Lisa was in a car behind Jovan’s U-Haul and communicating with her husband via walkie-talkie because they only had one cellphone. Lisa couldn’t figure out why her husband radioed her and asked to pull over.

“I just got another job offer,” Lisa recalls him telling her.

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Jovan took the job, and Lisa’s real estate search that she thought would be at Michigan Tech shifted 100 miles to Northern Michigan.

“You can’t make this stuff up,” she said with a laugh.

Step 5: Say goodbye, make the move and settle in

Saying goodbye is one of the hardest parts. Beamer experienced those emotions when he returned to Norman, Okla., for his final trip to his old house and saw it empty before the family’s going-away party. Pulling kids out of school is never easy, and for as much as coaches move, they can get attached to homes.

“You realize how hard that is when you’ve got all these great memories,” Beamer said. “And now you’ve just got an empty house.”

But families reuniting is always a plus. Every coach interviewed for this story agreed that spouses have played crucial roles behind the scenes.

Then it’s time to get kids into new schools and switch over addresses, car registrations and doctors. In Beamer’s case, he got a piece of mail in March intended for the previous owner.

“I saw it and I was like, ‘Huh, this is kind of interesting. Of all people to be getting this in the mail, it was me,’” he said with a laugh. “It was too good not to tweet out.”

Bought a house in Columbia ….Just went to check the mail and this was in the mailbox …

Yeah, I think you guys are going to have to count me OUT this year 😂#ForeverToThee 🤙🤙

— Shane Beamer (@CoachSBeamer) March 24, 2021

Beamer said his new home will have a room solely dedicated to his football memorabilia. He was supposed to have one in Norman before it got converted into a guest bedroom and playroom for the kids.

“I totally leave that up to my wife,” he said, adding that he “doesn’t even try” when it comes to decorating. “Absolutely not.”

Interior design isn’t exactly Kiffin’s thing either — “nope,” he said. But Leach is into it. He’s most proud of his contributions to the main bedroom suite and a former tack room on stilts that was once used for saddles. He calls it “the treehouse.”

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“I’m actually pretty good at that sort of thing,” he said. “Even though we have some disagreements, my wife would agree that I have a good eye for what goes together.”

(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic)