Wayne Lineburg is the special team’s coach for Wake Forest and a graduate and former football player at Radford High School. He returned to the area Saturday when Wake played Virginia Tech.
From the sidelines
By Marty Gordon
The Wake Forest football team made a visit Saturday to Lane Stadium, and with it came a lot of familiar faces including special team’s coach Wayne Lineburg.
Lineburg’s father, Norman, was a long-time coach at Radford High School and is a member of the Virginia High School Coaches Association Hall of Fame. Wayne was an all-district quarterback while playing high school football for his father at Radford.
Lineburg’s brother Robert is the athletic director at Radford University and his cousin, Mike Young, is the new head basketball coach at Virginia Tech.
Lineburg joined the Demon Deacon coaching staff as tight ends coach and special teams coordinator in 2017, and in his first year, oversaw the development of tight end Cam Serigne who earned first team All-ACC honors and set the conference record for receptions, receiving yards and touchdown catches by a tight end in a career. In addition, placekicker Mike Weaver set the school season scoring record with 115 points and became the first Demon Deacon to lead the ACC in kick scoring.
Lineburg and Wake Forest head coach Dave Clawson coached together at Richmond from 2004-06 when Lineburg served as the Spiders’ offensive coordinator and running backs coach. During their time together in Richmond, the Spiders set school records in total offense and touchdowns.
A 1996 graduate of Virginia, Lineburg was a four-year quarterback for the Cavaliers and played on three bowl teams.
He started his coaching career in 1996 as an assistant coach at William & Mary before returning to Virginia in 1998 as a graduate assistant coach. He rejoined William & Mary as running backs coach and recruiting coordinator in 2000 before joining Clawson’s staff at Richmond in 2004.
Lineburg was named the wide receivers’ coach at Virginia in 2007 and moved to running backs coach in 2009. He returned to Richmond in 2010 for a four-year stint in several positions including offensive coordinator, associate head coach and recruiting coordinator while also coaching, at different times, quarterbacks and running backs. In 2011, Lineburg served as the interim head coach at Richmond.
As the associate head coach at Richmond in 2013, Lineburg assisted with an offense that helped lead the Spiders to wins over two ranked teams while producing the 24th-ranked offense in the FCS. In 2012, the Spiders ranked 20th in the nation in passing offense and 21st in scoring offense while posting an 8-3 record and earning a share of the Colonial Athletic Association title.
In 2014, he was hired at Connecticut where he served as special teams coordinator and wide receivers coach in his first season before taking over the quarterbacks the last two seasons.
But Lineburg wasn’t the only southwest Virginia connection on the opposing sidelines. Wake junior defensive end Carlos “Boogie” Basham Jr. was a graduate of Northside High School in Roanoke. Also, the Demon Deacons has nine other Virginia natives on the roster with five starting. They included: tight end Jack Freudenthal and DT Sulaiman Kamara, both from Richmond; safety Trey Rucker of Fairfax; and linebacker Traveon Redd of Martinsville.
There were also several other connections on Saturday including: Wake DT Dion Bergan Jr. and Tech freshman Mario Kendricks who are both graduates of Kissimmee, Fla., Osceola High School.
Wake’s Blake Whiteheart and Tech Divine Deablo were teammates at Winston-Salem’s Mt. Tabor High School.
Tech’s Jalen Holston and Wake’s Nasir Greer were teammates at Stockbridge Ga. High School.
Wake’s Trey Turner and Tech’s Tahj Gary, both played at Atlanta’ Woodward Academy.
