A trip to Manchester: Explaining Ryan Day’s identity
Rachel Young 
MANCHESTER, N.H. — This isn’t the town Ryan Day grew up in anymore.
Change is inevitable everywhere, but the gradual evolution of a community is more evident in smaller towns. Manchester isn’t a town anymore. It’s a city, with a population that has increased almost 30 percent from Day’s childhood.
But there’s a place here that has withstood time, a place that picked a moment in history and decided to stay there. The Puritan Backroom is a family restaurant off Hookset Road that initially opened downtown, on Hanover Street, in 1917. It relocated to its current location in 1938 as a hot dog window that also sold candy and ice cream; the owners opened a back room in 1974 for dining, hence the restaurant’s name. In the 1990s, the owners acquired a building across the parking lot for use as a community center, where people have graduation parties, funerals, family reunions and anything else worth celebrating or mourning. Happy or sad, the community does it together here.
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In the Backroom, it’s still 1974.
Pull off Hookset Road, drive by the large Puritan sign on the front of the building, navigate slowly past the line of people standing at the side window ordering ice cream and park in the back. The doors under the purple awning welcome you to the past. There’s a small reception area to the right where people wait to be seated and catch up with their neighbors, and to the left there’s a bar with a display of liquor bottles and small TVs. Behind it all, there’s a large room with oak accents filled with tables, booths made of wood and leather, and green wallpaper with gold flower accents that probably was installed the day the room was built. And everyone in here seemingly is family — a brother, a cousin, a distant relative.
Sit at the bar and be prepared for conversation if the bartender doesn’t recognize you.
“You from out of town?” she asks.
“Yes. From Columbus, Ohio.”
“What are you having?” she asks. “Never mind, let me guess — tenders and spicy fries?”
That’s the dish here: A plate overflowing with a pound of perfectly breaded and fried chicken tenders, with fries. On the side, there’s duck sauce, a light, clear condiment that makes the tenders sweet.
“You’re not using the duck sauce? You have to use the duck sauce,” a man sitting two stools down says before returning to his Canadian Club and ginger ale. It’s 11:14 a.m.
Ron Ullrich is in his upper 50s; he has a full head of white hair, a big belly and is wearing a blue pullover sweater and jeans. He was right about the duck sauce, but that was just was his excuse to talk to the stranger. That’s what people do in this restaurant.
“So you’re a reporter, huh? Working on a story on Ryan Day? Well, let me tell you that we’re all going to be watching here in Manchester. Give him a message for us: He better win.”
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That’s nice, but will people actually care?
“Yes, we will,” interjects a younger man across the bar with a thick, brown beard and an old, sweaty Boston Red Sox cap. “We all care.”
Day held a mop at the Backroom for a few weeks during a summer in his teens. “We all worked there at one point in our lives,” says Jim Statires, Day’s childhood best friend whose extended family owns the Puritan.
Day, the 40-year-old, first-year coach at Ohio State, hears about that interaction while sitting on a plush leather sofa in his large office. He tilts his head back, closes his eyes and takes some time to reflect. It was as if it was all hitting him for the first time, that this kid from Manchester is the Ohio State football coach. “The hairs on the back of my neck are standing up,” he says.
When he was a child, Day used to go to the Backroom and talk about the people who made it from Manchester and the surrounding area. Guys like Mike Flanagan, a Cy Young winner for the Baltimore Orioles. There are others of more recent vintage, like football coaches Chip Kelly of UCLA and Dan Mullen of Florida, former San Antonio Spurs big man Matt Bonner, former St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Chris Carpenter and actor/comedian Adam Sandler.
Now people are talking about Day in the Backroom. Some have memories of him as a kid. Some knew his family. But everyone, relationship or not, feels connected to him.
“In that community, everyone feels a piece of that,” Day says. “Everyone had a hand in that.”
The lineage of Ohio State football for the past 70 years has been defined by coaches from Ohio. Woody Hayes spent his whole life in Ohio. Earle Bruce, who was born in Pittsburgh, played at Ohio State in the 1950s before becoming a Buckeyes assistant and eventually succeeding Hayes. Jim Tressel is from Ohio. Urban Meyer is from Ohio, and his mentor was Bruce. The lone exception was John Cooper, who was born in Tennessee and didn’t arrive in Ohio until his last coaching stop started with the Buckeyes in 1988. Cooper constantly was criticized for underachieving with great teams because he didn’t get the Michigan rivalry, which is something encoded in everyone’s DNA in Ohio.
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That brings us to Day, a Manchester man.
“I’ve never dove into this in my mind,” he says. “I came from a town where who you are matters. There’s a pride in who you are. And in the sports world, it was the Celtics and the Red Sox and the Patriots. There is a sense of pride in that. That’s who we were. There’s an identity with that. And that’s what this place is. Ohio State is in the blood of every person in Ohio. If we were ever to win a national championship here, I would cry. I would cry like a baby. I would want to do a parade in Columbus and Cleveland and Cincinnati. I know what this team means to the people in this state.
“That’s the way I was brought up. That’s how I was brought up in that town. That’s the way we were all brought up there. I wasn’t born in Ohio. But I know what identity is.”
To find Day’s identity, you have to go to the place that helped create it. Thus, The Athletic went to Manchester, got a personal tour of the town from one of Day’s brothers, spent a morning with his other brother and generally retraced the childhood footsteps of Ohio State’s new coach.
Tim Day pulls up to the front of the TownePlace Suites in south Manchester in his black Chevy Tahoe with matte black alternate rims. He’s here to give the real tour of Manchester, the one of his childhood shared with his brothers, Ryan and Chris.
Tim, 35, is a medical device salesman and is dressed like he came straight off the pages of a Vineyard Vines catalogue: A blue button-down shirt, navy blue slacks, blue dress shoes and a Hamilton Khaki Pilot watch with a brown leather strap. He’s taking time out of his busy morning to re-live his past before heading back to Boston for a long afternoon of meetings.
The phone rings as the wheels begin to move. It’s Ryan. And he reminds his brother of the most important sights, like the street on which Kelly grew up, Sandler’s childhood home and, of course, the numerous fields and asphalt lots they transformed into playing fields.
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“He’s always coaching,” Tim jokes.
You can use Google Maps to look up the Days’ childhood home or the schools they attended, but Manchester has grown. The population has increased because people find it’s more affordable to commute an hour to Boston than live in the city. The local college, Southern New Hampshire University, has numerous TV ads for its online curriculum, and it has expanded its campus in large part because it has attracted 90,000 online students. And the downtown area on Elm Street near SNHU Arena, which the local millennials ironically refer to as “Manch-Vegas,” has enjoyed a renaissance, with trendy bars and restaurants that weren’t there 20 years ago. The mill yard on the Merrimack River has been renovated, turning aged, brick industrial buildings into chic office spaces. But to spend a morning with Tim is to see the Days’ childhoods as it was.
The natural first stop was 96 Bayberry Lane, their childhood home. It’s a two-story colonial, with nine windows covered by tan shutters. There’s an attached garage with a large oak tree on the lawn, which Tim says the boys often used for makeshift end zones. The house is light sage in color, but the paint is chipping, the garage door is slightly open and there’s a wooden crate on the untrimmed front lawn. This disappoints Tim, who glances over with a somber look on his face. “This was the best place to grow up,” he says.
The house is off Union Street, a major drag in Manchester. The road starts on Bayberry Lane, merges into Brae Burn Drive, then wraps around back onto Union Street. The neighborhood is covered with trees and bike routes to the nearest parks and schools, and all the homes have large front lawns. To understand the genesis of Day’s relentless desire to win, you’ll find it on this street, where 12 kids who grew up on this wraparound played college sports.
“The only thing we did when we were kids was play sports,” Tim says, “and we were competing against real athletes. We did it so much that most of us went on to play college sports.”
Tim puts his Tahoe back in drive and heads for Sudden Pitch, a family club that has tennis courts, a pool and large fields. It was maybe $500 for the summer in the early ’90s, and parents would pay the fee and drop their children off on summer days with a few dollars to buy hot dogs for lunch. The boys made up pool games, like whether one could throw a pass to another jumping into the pool and get the pass back before the other boy was in the water. The rules always were coordinated by Ryan. He was the man of his house from age 9, after his father committed suicide.
Last week, Day announced the Ryan and Christina Day Fund for Pediatric and Adolescent Wellness at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, which is part of the “On Our Sleeves” initiative. The Days also pledged $100,000 to the hospital’s cause for mental health treatment.
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“Without getting into too many details, when you grow up and you’re young, you go through a range of emotions from angry to sad to resentment,” he said at the Fund news conference, reflecting on his father’s suicide. “Then as you get older, when you reach your 20s and your 30s, it kind of makes more sense what happened. You have a better perspective of what it is. … Then as I got older, I started to realize it was a sickness and that there’s people out there that need help.”
Day’s father’s suicide doesn’t define him, but it deeply impacted him.
“After that, I had to grow up fast,” he says.
On the playing field and at home with his brothers, he was the leader. He was the rules-maker. He was the coach.
Throughout the remainder of Tim’s tour, the common theme is competition. At Webster Elementary School, Tim points to the windows at the bottom of the building, which were used to determine the strike zones for stickball. Random trees were end zones. Sidewalks were out of bounds. The Day boys’ childhood was one never-ending sporting event, which included golf, baseball, football and basketball. And when there wasn’t an available court, there were made-up games.
That is why the three brothers, each two years apart, wound up being three-sport athletes at Manchester Central High. Tim brags that he’s the best athlete in the family — “I shattered every one of Ryan’s football records in my one healthy season at quarterback,” he says with a child-like grin – but Ryan had the smarts. Ryan was the catcher on the baseball team, the quarterback on the football team, the shooting guard on the basketball team.
Ryan led Manchester Central to a state football title in 1995. In his senior year, he led the Central basketball team to the New Hampshire Class L semifinals against Concord High. Concord was a heavy favorite, given that Bonner — an eventual 12-year NBA veteran – and future Syracuse forward Ethan Cole were on the roster. Concord beat Central by almost 40 points when they played during the regular season, so in the playoffs, Central coach Mike Fitzpatrick decided his Little Green squad would slow the pace and play keepaway. They ran the clock on every possession and had the ball on the final possession with a chance to win. Statires, the point guard, dribbled around until five seconds remained on the clock, then found Ryan, who took a contested 3-pointer from the top of the arc.
“It was like Kawhi’s shot,” Day says, comparing it to Kawhi Leonard’s Game 7-winning jumper against Philadelphia that sent the Toronto to the NBA Eastern Conference Finals last month. “It bounced up off the rim — but mine didn’t fall back in.”
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Ryan is still bothered by the miss more than two decades later. “But that was my shot to take. I’d take it again right now.”
“Absolutely he would take it again, and most likely make it,” Statires says. “The shot was halfway down.”
There’s a reason Day has a plaque in the glass case in the Central High hallways commemorating the school’s hall of fame. His is a few over from Sandler’s; Kelly also has a plaque. Turn through the pages of the 1997 yearbook, and Day is everywhere. On the page memorializing the baseball team, Day is quoted: “This year’s squad has a lot of potential. We have six returning seniors and some promising underclassmen. If we gel as a team and our pitching comes through, we’ll be there in the end.” The man had coach-speak down when he was a teenager.
And “that shot is mine” attitude remains, too. That attitude is the reason he was a star athlete in high school and a reason Sean McDonnell — and then-offensive coordinator Chip Kelly — recruited him to the University of New Hampshire to be the team’s quarterback. “We gave him a half-scholarship at the beginning,” McDonnell says, “but it quickly turned into a full one.”
When Day was a redshirt freshman, he vied with fifth-year senior Mike Apple for the starting job. Day won the battle, and McDonnell remembers sitting in his office for a meeting with Kelly, Day and Apple. It wasn’t an easy meeting, but Day just had a better way with the team. And over the next four years, Day wound up breaking every major offensive record in UNH history. The football from Day’s first win — which was McDonnell’s first game as coach — remains prominently displayed in McDonnell’s office. UNH 37, URI 14.
The records have since fallen, but the legend of Ryan Day hasn’t. Bob Callahan, the recruiting coordinator at UNH, was a manager for the football team when Day was playing. Callahan has one defining memory of Day in his head. One day at practice when Day was a freshman, he took a shot to the chin. On the next play, he stood in the pocket, stepped up and threw a dart down the seam of the defense. The ball hit the receiver in the hands, but he dropped it. Ryan ran down the field, grabbed the receiver’s face mask and yelled, “If I’m going to sit back there and take hits for this team, catch the damn ball when I get it to you.”
“He’s always had that ‘it’ factor,” says Callahan, who had a recruiting position at Boston College when Day was on the staff. “He was always one of our best closers at BC in recruiting. He brought great talent to that program. People relate to him. People want to be around him. That’s why he was the leader of the teams here at New Hampshire, and that’s why he’s in the position he’s in today. He’s always been special.”
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Tim could have been the next UNH star, but he didn’t want to follow in his brother’s footsteps. McDonnell says he thought his program had Tim in the bag because of the family connection, but Tim chose to play quarterback at UMass instead; he is eighth on the Minutemen’s career passing list. “That’s still one of the worst recruiting misses of my career,” McDonnell says with a smile. “Could have used another Day in the program.” McDonnell did keep one Day in his program by giving Ryan his first coaching position, overseeing tight ends in 2002, after he graduated with a business degree.
Tim still wants to beat his big brother at everything. The day before Ohio State’s game against TCU last season — the last of the three games in which Day was interim coach for a suspended Urban Meyer — Tim and Chris were in Ryan’s room at the team hotel. They were hanging out and giving Ryan some needed family time, but they also had a tennis ball and created a game where a player needed to bounce the ball off a certain part of the wall and make it into the trash can. “We’d all argue about whether the points counted,” Tim says. Ryan was 39, the day before Ohio State’s biggest nonconference game of the season, his final one as interim coach, and he and his brothers played a game that involved throwing a tennis ball into a garbage can. What a way to prepare for the biggest job interview of his life.
Tim also is protective of his brother, and he knows how this town can be. Kelly was the first big-name coach from Manchester, but he’s a private person and has conditioned friends and acquaintances from Manchester to never speak with reporters. To Kelly, his past is private and isn’t relevant to his coaching career. As with everyone from Manchester, Kelly had a lot of the same influencers as Day. People are hesitant to talk because they don’t want to say the wrong things. That’s part of the reason Fitzpatrick — one of Ryan’s most important mentors — didn’t want to meet for this story. He sent a text message instead that reads like a press release. “Ryan was an extraordinarily intelligent athlete,” Fitzpatrick wrote. “He also brought great intensity and toughness to every practice and game. Ryan was a great teammate. We are all very proud of his accomplishments and wish him continued success!”
But Tim’s presence helped break down the walls. And through the streets lined with trees and the endless sea of New England colonial homes with vinyl siding, he shed light on what this place really was: Manchester was one, giant sports field where Ryan refused to lose.
Chris Day, the middle brother, initially wanted to meet for coffee early in the morning because meetings with him happen in one of two settings: over coffee or over beers. But he was caught up at work, so he sends a text message with an address in a small town outside of Manchester, an address he knew would be difficult to find.
The destination was on a small road not easily visible from the main street. Through the thick tree line is a large, three-story brick building with no identifying markers on the front. The only defining characteristic of the building, other than it looking half-vacant, are the address numbers.
“You passed the test,” he jokes via text before walking down the stairs and opening the front door.
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The first stop is a thumb-print scanner in front of three separate doorways, and then it becomes clear what this place is. In the second-floor lobby, there’s a framed picture of President Donald Trump, an American flag and a sign, written in block lettering on the wall, saying “Drug Enforcement Administration.”
Chris is a DEA officer. This day, he’s wearing a long-sleeved gray T-shirt with an Ohio State logo on the chest, and he leads the way into an empty conference room, where he’s blocked out an hour to talk about his older brother.
“I’ll tell you what,” Chris starts. “This is all great. But he better fucking win.”
Chris isn’t as big as his brothers, but you know not to mess with him, given his line of work. To illustrate how invested he is in Ryan’s career, he talks about the windows he’s broken in his home while enthusiastically watching Ohio State games. He even had a role in OSU’s prep for the TCU game. Ryan was in the team hotel drawing up plays and perfecting the script for the first quarter. After he made some last-minute changes, Chris drove Ohio State quality control assistant Corey Dennis to a nearby FedEx to have it laminated before the team left for AT&T Stadium. “Fuck it,” Chris said, “I’m in the DEA; I’ll protect that shit.”
Maybe because he is a hardened law enforcement officer, Chris, 38, is quite introspective, and peels back the layers on Tim’s earlier tour of Manchester to reveal how it matters to Ryan’s life now in Columbus. On the surface, Ryan’s résumé is that of a wanderer. For 15 years, he never stayed put. He started at New Hampshire in 2002, then bounced from Boston College to Florida, and then back and forth between Boston College and Temple; he had two stints at both places. Then he was hired by Kelly with the Philadelphia Eagles, and followed him to San Francisco. After Kelly and his staff were fired by the 49ers, Ryan, who had been a graduate assistant for Meyer at Florida, was hired at Ohio State. This will be his third season in Columbus, and it’s only the second time in his coaching career that he’s been in the same spot for that long. So now that he’s the coach at Ohio State, what comes next if he has success?
As much as people in Manchester are rooting for Day, there’s an almost comical disconnect. Manchester isn’t a college football town, so people don’t quite understand the gravity of the position. They may not know that he’s making $4.5 million a year. They certainly don’t understand the juggernaut he’s inherited. They don’t see the passion Buckeyes fans have for this program, or understand the pressure Day is under to win and win now. If he were the coach of the New England Patriots, they’d completely get it because that’s what they grew up knowing.
But Chris has been to Ohio State. He has seen with his own eyes what Columbus is like on fall Saturdays, so we discuss a fake scenario: If Ryan wins a national title in the next three years and Bill Belichick retires in the next five, could Ryan conceivably be the top candidate for the New England Patriots in 2023?
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That’s when Chris turns into a cop again. That’s when he sternly sets the record straight, because even after having spent a few days in Manchester, there still is something about this town and how it shaped Ryan that isn’t landing. Manchester is a family town. It’s about loyalty, setting up roots, becoming one with the community. It’s about standing for something, knowing your neighbor, raising your children the right way. Bouncing all over the country as a football coach and jumping at the next opportunity doesn’t fit what Manchester taught Ryan.
“Picture an immigrant, or our families who came over from Scotland and Ireland,” Chris says. “All of those years of all of our family ties, yours, everyone’s, how they got over here, it’s a fucking battle. They end up in Manchester or Columbus, and they stay there. Well, Ryan hasn’t fucking ended up anywhere. So all these years, he’s gone place to place to place, and he wants to settle in. If he can get settled in and win, that’s what he wants. He wants what he had in Manchester somewhere else. He wants it to be in Columbus. That’s a fact.”
But what if the Patriots come calling?
“In my opinion,” Ryan says, “and this is what blows everyone’s mind away — this is a bigger job than the Patriots. You can be anywhere in the country and there are Buckeyes everywhere. This is the biggest and best job in football.”
Tim doesn’t remember the year, but it was when Ryan was a graduate assistant. Maybe it was when he was with Meyer in Florida in 2005. Ryan called Tim with questions about his job and what it took to become a medical supplies salesman. At the time, Ryan was making $1,000 a month and struggling to help support he and his wife while pursuing his coaching dream. Between the low pay and bouncing all over the country, he wasn’t sure if he wanted it anymore.
Ryan remembers that conversation. But his wife, Nina, stopped it from being a significant one. “If Nina ever said we had to stop and go home, we would have gone home,” Ryan says. “It would have been over.”
He isn’t bluffing; he has chosen family over his career in the past. In 2009, when Kelly was at Oregon and Ryan was at Boston College, Kelly offered Day the offensive coordinator job and Day accepted. But shortly thereafter, over cake at a family party in Manchester celebrating the new job and a grandfather’s birthday, Day realized he didn’t want to move his family to Eugene, didn’t want to move so far away from his New England roots. So he called Kelly and told him he had reconsidered and wasn’t coming. Kelly later hired Mark Helfrich. (Want to ponder an interesting bit of alternative history? Helfrich eventually succeeded Kelly and was coach of the Oregon team that Ohio State beat in the 2015 national title game.)
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“I looked at Nina, and she was ready to go,” Day recalls. “I broke down crying, and I said, ‘We can’t do this. I am not moving all the way to Oregon.’ Chip said, ‘That’s why I love you, because you love your family.’ He said he was going to keep trying to hire me, but that I was making the right decision because I was making it for my family. And I didn’t go.”
Kelly eventually did hire Ryan once he got to the NFL, but it took more years of understanding how this business works — and more support from his wife — for Day to get comfortable with uprooting his family’s life.
Nina is a Manchester girl; she and Ryan met when they were kids. They played on the same T-ball team at age 5. They grew up together before falling in love.
“During his career, we had plenty of conversations about whether we wanted to continue down this road,” Nina says. “Given the level of sacrifice and commitment it takes to coach, I do remember many occasions of him approaching me and asking me whether I thought he should take another path. I knew from the beginning he was different from most coaches. I knew he had it. I always told him that I never wanted him to give up because it was hard. I knew in my heart if he had an opportunity he was going to seize it, and I knew you have to be patient in this business.”
Day was patient. And he was diligent in learning from the best. He has worked under seven head coaches, including McDonnell, Kelly, Meyer, Al Golden and Steve Addazio. Nina’s father, Stan Spirou, won 640 games as the men’s basketball coach at Southern New Hampshire, and also has been a mentor.
“He’s been grooming himself for this his entire life,” Chris says of his brother. “Look who he has been learning under.”
Kelly reached the pinnacle of football coaching in the NFL. Day loves Kelly and views him as his main mentor. Day also doesn’t want Kelly’s life. He has been dying to settle down.
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Ohio State was that opportunity for him. He always viewed this as a long-term solution, though not even he could have predicted he’d take over for Meyer after just two years in Columbus. When Ryan was promoted to coach in December, he didn’t earn it alone. Nina earned it with him.
In February, the couple bought a home outside of Columbus, in the suburb of Delaware. “We are putting a stake in the ground here,” Ryan says of Nina and their three children, Ryan Jr. (11), Grace (7) and Nia (5).
Day never has been the flashy type; he drove a Ford Edge he bought while at Boston College until recently upgrading to a Chevy Tahoe, but without the decked-out rims like his younger brother.
Columbus is Ryan’s new Manchester. Columbus is Ryan’s new identity.
But as his brother said, “He better fucking win.”
