Football was the sport of choice for most of the boys in the DeVries household growing up.
All three of Darian DeVries’ brothers played on the gridiron in college.
Jared DeVries was an All-American on the Iowa football team and played for the Detroit Lions for 12 seasons. Another brother, Dusty DeVries also played football at Iowa, while his youngest brother, Jay, played football at Wartburg College.
According to the Daily Iowan, Darian played football in high school. He was the starting quarterback for Aplington-Parkersburg H.S. in Iowa, which was ranked No. 1 in the state and went 11-1 when he was a senior.
But he also averaged 21.5 points per game on the hardwood while leading his school to back-to-back undefeated state championship seasons.
A bit undersized for college football, he chose the basketball route (Northern Iowa) for college.
But the football fire still burns.
Legendary IU radio voice Don Fischer asked DeVries what he’d be doing if he wasn’t a basketball coach last week at an alumni event.
“I wanna be Coach Cig,” DeVries quipped, as he looked over his shoulder at IU football coach Curt Cignetti, who was seated in the room.
“That would be so fun. I wanna be a football coach. I don’t know if I want to be a head coach. I want to be a linebackers coach. But I couldn’t be a linebacker. I graduated high school at like 6-foot-2 and 165 (pounds). There’s not many linebackers at that size, are there Cig?”
“Only walk-ons,” Cignetti responded.
When Cignetti took the stage and fielded the same question from Fischer, Cignetti offered several possibilities.
“Well DeVries stole my line,” Cignetti said. “I was gonna say I wanna be Don Fischer because I was a big sports fan, I was a Pittsburgh guy, Pirates, Steelers, Penguins, I was thinking maybe I would be an announcer.
“I can tell you when I was a little kid what happened, I think I wanted to be a rock-n-roll drummer. I was in first grade, and my dad is coaching at Pitt, and I got the garbage cans at the front of the driveway and I’m banging on them…”
It’s at this point Cignetti started singing “She Loves You” by the Beatles and imitating drummer Ringo Starr.
The dream quickly died in his Leechburg, Pa. driveway.
“He grabbed those cans and sticks out of my hands and put a baseball glove in my hand, I had no shot after that,” Cignetti said.
Cignetti’s father, College Football Hall of Fame inductee Frank Cignetti, was a high school coach at Leechburg H.S. when Curt was born. Frank would go on to be an assistant at Pitt and West Virginia, and then the head coach at West Virginia as Curt grew up.
Curt grew watching his father work for a legend in the college game, Bobby Bowden, who was the head coach at West Virginia. He has said he knew at a young age he would follow in his father’s footsteps and become a coach.
Immersed in the game throughout his childhood, Cignetti acknowledged there was only one real path for him.
“Look, I couldn’t have possibly done anything other than this,” he told Fischer and the crowd. “That’s just the fact of the matter.”
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