Eastern University built a football team from scratch. Billy Crocker made it into ‘something special.’

Billy Crocker’s booming voice carried across the parking lot behind Valley Forge Military School in Chester County off the Main Line. He was giving instructions to his players during a Thursday afternoon practice in late October, the final session of the week.

You wouldn’t have known this football team had only been in existence for five years. The practice was structured in a way where players made their way to each drill as if they were programmed to do so.

The Eastern University football field is located one mile from the school, with the turf, home and away stands, and a modern track surrounding it. It has transformed from a grass field with its old, beat up wooden home stands in 2022 and its lack of modernized athletic facilities in the nearby buildings.

This is home for Crocker. It’s an eight minute drive to Villanova’s campus, Crocker’s former job for 12 years, and less than 20 minutes from his wife’s hometown of Conshohocken. Crocker made coaching stops at Connecticut (2017-18) and Elon (2019-21), both of which as defensive coordinator after spending five in that role at Villanova.

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Five years ago, when Crocker was Elon’s defensive coordinator, he was traveling to Elon’s road game against Richmond when he got a text from Eastern athletic director Eric McNelley. At that time, Crocker says, McNelley lived close to Richmond, Va., but was still working for Eastern. The pair met for coffee the morning of the Richmond-Elon game in October 2021 to gauge Crocker’s interest in being a head coach for a brand new football program that was set to get up and running in 2022.

After several phone calls between Crocker and Eastern’s administration, the turning point of the process came when McNelley drove to North Carolina and showed up at a Little League Baseball game for Crocker’s son, for whom he was helping coach.

“There are other [Elon] coaches there, whose [kids] are on this team. And I’m like, ‘Dude, l don’t want this out [there] because we’re in the middle of our season,’” Crocker told The Inquirer in his office at Eastern. “Then I kind of started to go through the formal interview process during the season, and then [McNelley] and Kent Sparks, our provost, came down again, and we had breakfast, ironically enough, the morning before our Villanova game [in November 2021], and that’s when they were like, ‘Hey, we think it’s you. We’d love you to do it.’”

It wasn’t an immediate yes from Crocker. He would be moving from Division I to III football, with a program that hadn’t yet built nor had the proper facilities to field a college football team. He “kept asking for a lot” from the Eastern administration to ensure “they were committed to doing it the right way.”

Crocker admits he wouldn’t have taken a job at an existing Division III football program, but “to build a program and start a program,” would be a different challenge not many coaches have experienced.

Nearly a half-decade after accepting the head coach position at Eastern — and solidifying a permanent home for his growing family — Crocker has transformed a program who didn’t compete in games that counted until 2023.

“There’s been a lot of people who have had a hand in this … allowing us to do it the way we see fit,” Crocker said. “I think you see the investment in athletics at this place with more stuff going in on campus, and I think the biggest thing too is the local area. That’s super important to us.”

Brett Nabb was prepared to play college lacrosse at Immaculata when Crocker and Eastern showed interest in him while he was a senior at Middle Township High School near the Jersey Shore.

In fact, no one else recruited him to play college football, nor showed interest, he says. Middle Township was a Group 2 New Jersey high school, and the school had about 35 kids on its football team. Nabb played quarterback and safety on a team that played a junior varsity and varsity schedule.

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“Guys that played varsity on offense Monday afternoon, they’re playing JV on defense. That’s kind of how we were,” Nabb said. “The competition, I don’t think was as competitive as like these other guys have played like in the city or closer to the Cherry Hill area.”

The opportunity to play college football, along with his major, business administration, attracted Nabb to Eastern, he says, despite Division III schools not being able to offer athletic scholarships.

When Crocker took over the program in January 2022, he was adamant that they would be a club team first and not compete right away. He had to recruit players and wanted time to properly prepare them for the rigors of college football, while putting them through a full weight room regiment.

When Nabb stepped onto campus that fall, he joined about 90 other freshmen, as part of Crocker and his coaching staff’s plan. They didn’t take any players with previous college playing experience.

“You had to convince people on a vision, right? And I think one thing that helped was my background, was to sell, ‘Hey listen, here’s where I’ve been, here’s what I’ve been a part of, here’s what I believe in, and I think what I believe in works,’” Crocker explained. “I’ve been really fortunate to work with and work for some really great coaches, to coach some great players. … Now that success has started earlier than I think we anticipated, I think that’s proof.”

Recalled Nabb of those early practices, and one of six quarterbacks Eastern brought in: “We were just super young, fiery, competitive, and lots of guys wanted it now. They couldn’t see the big picture of what we were trying to do.”

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There were five games that first fall, three of which were JV games and two were intersquad scrimmages, which is why Crocker and his players refer to the fall of 2022 as “year zero” since those games didn’t count toward their record. There wasn’t a weight room nor a locker room, and games were played in their practice jerseys, Nabb says.

By the following spring, that group of about 90 had dwindled down to about 40 players. Senior cornerback Tahjere Jackson-Alston, who stuck it out from those early days, “wanted to start history.”

“I always been like more of an underachiever,” Jackson-Alston, a West Philadelphia High graduate, said. “I like being the underdog on the team. So I knew obviously coming here, it was going to be hard. It was going to be a real, rare start for a program. So I just wanted to take that chance.”

In 2023, Eastern’s debut season, it went 2-8 while playing home games at Penn’s Franklin Field. Nabb took over as the starting quarterback in the sixth game of that season and hasn’t relinquished the role.

Year 2, in which Eastern was picked to finish last again in the Middle Atlantic Conference, didn’t get off to a promising start. The Eagles, playing on their home turf in what is now called O’Hara Field, lost four of their first five games, then rattled off wins in three of their next four to enter the final game of the 2024 season with a 4-5 record.

Fairleigh Dickinson University-Florham was the next up, a senior-led team, and it showed early on in the game. Eastern trailed by as many as 26 points in that first half and went into the break trailing 33-14.

Senior receiver Chris Rivera, then in his second season with the program, said what happened next was the “turning point.”

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“A switch flipped, and we realized even when people are doubting you, you’re the underdog, we can still win, and we can still fix our mistakes,” Rivera said. “I think that’s where a lot of us realize we had something special here.”

Eastern came back to win that game, 37-33, setting up a 2025 season in which the program won its conference and first-ever playoff game to advance to the third round of the Division III playoffs.

“We came back and won the game against a very good team … and our kids were like, ‘Whoa, OK, we can do this here,’” Crocker said. “And that just kind of rolled us right into the offseason, right into spring, right into next fall, where again we still weren’t picked to finish first [in the MAC] or anything like that.

“Our kids thought, ‘No, based on that, we can go win this [conference],’ and that confidence really helped roll into that next season.”

Like Villanova football’s mantra, Crocker decided to bring “tap the rock,” with him to Eastern as “a metaphor for we’re not going to see success every day.” And many times along this journey, from Crocker’s early days on the job to developing his teams into conference champions, the path to the program’s success hasn’t been linear.

Much of the program’s turnaround, Crocker says, is attributed to the players who stayed and developed at Eastern; from Nabb, the reigning MAC offensive player of the year, to Jackson-Alston to Gashawn Moody, another Philadelphia native who graduated last year, and even those who didn’t see the process through.

“Those guys who came as the original class and stuck it out, and some that are still here, I’m forever indebted to [them],“ Crocker said. ”They believed, and to see where they have come as young men, is as rewarding, if not more than what they’ve done on the field."

Crocker, now in his fifth season at the helm, had opportunities to coach elsewhere after leading Eastern to an 11-2 season last year, but chose to stay, citing that the program has “the resources here to continue to be successful.”

Now, Eastern (6-2) is two wins away from a consecutive conference title, with Stevenson University up next for the Eagles’ final home game of the season on Saturday (12:30 p.m.). With his college career winding down, Nabb believes Eastern has “something special here.”

“I think we have the best coaching staff in all divisions of football,” Nabb said. “We’re so lucky to have these guys to coach us and instill the will and knowledge and strength to go out there and play on Saturdays. … [The coaching has] been a complete master-class since year zero.”

Added Jackson-Alston: “I’m grateful that the incoming classes come and see everything that we end up gaining over the years. I want the younger guys to look up to us. I want them to carry the legacy. … I want them to be even better than us. I want them to see that you [can] come here and trust the process and do your job and you [could] end up starting or even if you’re not a starter, you just go out there and ball.”