Ingle Martin | Notre Dame DC Clark Lea "Loves" The Game, Competing
When they were high school football stars at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville back in the late-90s, early-2000s, Ingle Martin, Clark Lea and some teammates would work as counselors at Time To Rise, a summer camp in Nashville.
“The highlight of the camp was a basketball league,” Martin explains.
As counselors, Martin, Lea and the others served as coaches and general managers. They took it very seriously, putting campers through a tryout phase before conducting a draft and ultimately trying to lead their squads to victory.
“It got competitive quickly,” laughs Martin, who would go on to play quarterback at Florida and Furman before a few years in the NFL.
Lea’s path took him to Vanderbilt as a fullback before embarking on his own coaching career. It’s a path that didn’t surprise Martin in the least.
“Clark’s always been a guy who loves the game,” Martin says. “He’s been eating up sports his whole life. He loves competing. He loves thinking about how to compete and how to win.”
Lea worked his way from a graduate assistant to linebackers coach at UCLA, Bowling Green, Syracuse, Wake Forest and eventually Notre Dame, where he’s entering his third season as defensive coordinator.
“Obviously, the guy’s done a tremendous job at Notre Dame and giving them a chance to put themselves over the top these last couple years,” says Martin, who is now himself the head coach at Christ Presbyterian in Nashville.
“Hopefully, they get over it this year and get into that last game to give themselves a shot.”
It’s obvious there is a tremendous amount of mutual respect between Martin and Lea both as players and now as coaches.
Martin made the trip up to South Bend a couple summers ago to meet with Lea to talk schematics and more.
“He will dissect every part of it from what kind of shoelaces the guy likes to wear to something about what they like to do out of a 3x1 set when the back is offset or this kid is in the game,” says Martin. “He’s able to comprehend so much.
“I just know he does not leave any stone unturned and he’s got a great work ethic.”
Lea and Martin have even more to talk about these days after the Irish offered 2022 linebacker Langston Patterson of Christ Presbyterian.
Knowing Lea and Patterson as well as he does, Martin sees the potential for a perfect fit.
“He’s going to want to be at a place where relationships matter,” Martin says of Patterson. “Coach Lea is in this to make these young men better people. Yeah, you’ve got to be a good football player to attract a school like Notre Dame, but you also have to be a guy who fits the culture and fits what Coach Lea is looking for.
“For Langston, he and Coach Lea are very alike in that. To have a guy who’s going to put a lot on you and expect a lot from you I think would be huge for Langston.
“He’s going to have to find a place that fits with what he’s looking for on the academic side and the athletic side along with the position coach and coordinator side. Right now, I think Notre Dame is one of those places.”
Martin also believes Lea would embrace a player like Patterson.
“I think Langston is the same type of kid, he’s just 17,” says Martin. “For Clark to have a guy he can count on who will work as hard as him to know what is needed to be done on the field to get them into the right defense is huge.
“Again, that’s why Langston is getting the attention he’s getting because he can play and he’s going to be able to process information.”