Now on Michigan State’s coaching staff, Devon Spalding is basking in being home
Spalding once promised his wife that they'd move to Michigan to be closer to home — but he didn't expect it to happen this soon.
East Lansing — Michigan State running backs coach Devon Spalding had every intention of upholding a promise to his wife. He just didn’t think he’d make it happen so fast.
See, Spalding had promised his wife, Megan Bowie-Spalding, a fellow Michigan native, that they’d return to the state during his coaching career. They both wanted to be closer to home, that much they knew. But getting married in the summer of 2024 while Spalding was on staff as the running backs coach at Wisconsin, there was no guarantee such a move could happen any time soon.
But then the opportunity to join Pat Fitzgerald’s inaugural staff at MSU arose during this past winter, and Spalding leapt at the opportunity.
“Once she decided to go on this journey with me, I made a promise to her that if I ever had an opportunity to go back home, I'd go back home and be able to get as close to our family,” Spalding said.
A Canton, Michigan, native and former star at Westland John Glenn High School, Spalding had a strong college career playing running back at Central Michigan before eventually turning to coaching, making stops at Cincinnati, Youngstown State and then Wisconsin before the chance to come back to his home state cropped up. And after years of being a seven-hour drive from home, both Spalding and Bowie-Spalding are now just about an hour away from the neighborhood they both grew up in.
“That's the thing, man, I'm blessed,” Spalding said. “Not a lot of people have the opportunity to coach this close to home. So no, I didn't think it was gonna happen this fast, but very blessed that it did.”
That Spalding and his wife have known each other since they were little is just another wrinkle in what’s been a pleasant homecoming story for the Spartans assistant this year.
Spalding has always been close with his family, he said, and it's a small and tight knit group composed of him, his two brothers, his mother, plus his grandparents, primarily.
Plus, his mother and Bowie-Spalding’s mother are good friends, too.
“We're a very close knit group and being close to them mattered a lot to me,” Spalding said.
Spalding didn’t have any direct connection to Fitzgerald, but his network was within a degree of separation.
Spalding’s known current MSU offensive coordinator Nick Sheridan since the latter took a job as CMU’s running backs coach (only to leave about two weeks later for another job, something Spalding chuckles about now).
And Spalding spent time at Youngstown State with Armon Binns, who went on to coach with Fitzgerald at Northwestern and offered up a rave review of the head coach to Spalding.
“He called me,” Spalding said, recalling the conversation. “'Man, this is the best guy in the world to work for. Unbelievable human, cares about his staff. You know, family man, family oriented,’ and he's like, 'You ever get an opportunity, you gotta work with him.'”
The votes of confidence in Fitzgerald, the connection to Sheridan and, perhaps most important of all, fulfilling his promise made it a simple choice for Spalding to come to MSU.
And now that he’s back closer to home, Spalding still has to remember that he’s just a (relatively) short drive away from getting back to see his mom, mother-in-law, and the rest of his family.
“It's funny because I talk to my mom just about every day and, you know, make plans on coming home,” Spalding said. “And I'm still in the mindset that I'm a seven hour drive away. I'm like, man, ‘I don't know.’ She's like 'You're an hour down the road.' Like, oh, yeah, you're right. You're right.”
Spalding’s free time to get in his car and make a trip home will dry up with the season beginning, but the drive on I-96 from Lansing to Detroit goes the other way, too. Spalding is excited about plenty of friends and family getting to come watch the games he’s coach.
His younger brother, Dominic, is also on the staff in East Lansing.
And in less than a year in his new job as Michigan State’s running backs coach, Spalding is already basking in being, more or less, back home.
“I've been home more times in these eight months that I've been back in Michigan than I was in three years at my previous spot,” Spalding said. “So, it's really, really cool.”
