Ring A Bell?

The Bell family reunion is like no other. 

Members don’t just sit and chat, catching up about life or sharing the latest family gossip. At least, that’s not all they do. The Bells, from great-grandkids to their great-grandparents, break a sweat.

“Thirty-year-olds, 35-year-olds laying out playing volleyball, and just going crazy trying to win,” Kolton Bell said. “Sometimes it’d get heated, sometimes people would get mad, but [that] just was kind of the price of playing.”

Kolton, a survivor and occasional victor of the Bell family games, is one of three children of Gators football legend Kerwin Bell. Or, more accurately, a should-be legend, whose legacy is one intrinsically tied to a team Florida would sooner erase than acknowledge. He's better represented by his familiar coaching impact. Bell’s high expectations and competitiveness, passed down to his children, outlasted his own name recognition in a town that typically erects quarterback shrines.

A premier quarterback in his time, Kerwin doesn’t quickly come to mind in Florida football history. Joining the team in 1983 as a walk-on and redshirting his first year, maybe at first, he was easy to overlook. Drawing from Live Oak, Florida, his small-town background made him under-recruited and underestimated despite leading Lafayette High School to a state championship.

But what came next should have made him a household name. After becoming Florida's starting quarterback the following year, Kerwin made waves. He was the 1984 SEC Player of the Year as the Gators (kind of) won their first SEC Championship, and he was an honorable mention All-American in 1985 and 1986. He was named team captain in 1987.

Kerwin threw for 7,585 yards and 56 touchdowns, putting him sixth-most all-time for passing yards in Gators football history and eighth in passing touchdowns — though he led Florida in each when he graduated.

He was inducted into the UF Athletic Hall of Fame in 1997, but the mention of his name in Gator Country seemed to stop there. Instead, it was on the sidelines that he separated himself from the rest.

Across four different stops, including his current head coaching position at Western Carolina, which he’s held since April 2021, Kerwin has made his mark. 

“We got a couple things that we think we've done that not a lot of people have done,” he said about his career — the plural representing his numerous coaching lives, and the staff he’s dragged through each of them. “We won a championship everywhere we've been, including the National Championship at Valdosta State, and then offensively, we've led the nation, the entire nation, we led three different places, not just at one school, not just at two schools, but at three different locations we were able to lead the nation in offense.”

One of those places was Jacksonville University, where Kerwin brought family to football. He and his other son, Kade, crossed paths at the collegiate level. Kerwin was the head coach, and Kade was the quarterback. 

Powered by two Bells, the Dolphins’ squad flourished. Kade said that while it was tough playing with his dad’s high expectations – higher than anyone else on the team – he learned a lot both on and off the field. He was the right guy for the challenge. 

“My brother was definitely the most competitive in the family, I could say even maybe more than dad,” Kolton said. 

However, the impact of playing for his dad was even more immense off the field. Some of his biggest lessons came in the locker room, on bus rides or in his dorm room where he was roommates and close friends with his teammates. He got to hear what they thought about Kerwin, not just as a coach, but as a person, a leader, a motivator and as someone they could look up to. He saw how Kerwin impacted their lives, helped them graduate and made sure they were good people – husbands, fathers, mentors – not just good players, when they left. 

It was through this, and all that time in Jacksonville, that Kade learned what his values as a coach were going to be, as he always knew a career on the sidelines would be for him. Just as he predicted, after finishing out his playing career, Kade turned to coaching like his dad. He’s now the offensive coordinator at the University of Pittsburgh and carries his father’s values with him. 

“I tell my kids all the time here: ‘I'm gonna be hard on you, and I'm gonna push you. But hey, one day, I want to be at your draft party. I want to be invited to your wedding. I want to be able to see your kids one day when you have kids and grow up.’ That's the type of man and coach I want to be,” Kade said. “I think he's had a big impact on that, just because he's always believed in that.”

With Kade now having children of his own, both sides of Kerwin’s impact are felt – the taught lessons and the natural affinity for sports. Kade’s son knows just five words, and one of them can clearly be attributed to his grandfather. One-year-old Beckett, much like the rest of his family, knows “ball.”

And he’s not the only young Bell who is following suit. 

“Almost all of our little cousins play sports,” Kolton said, reminiscing of the family get-togethers. “They get super competitive, all of them around the same age. And it's kind of morphed into now, where the older people watching all the younger kids get out there and play.

“It’s just a sports-centric family.”

Kolton and Kade’s childhood wasn’t much different from that of the cousins they now view from lawnchairs. While they both said they weren’t forced strictly into football by either of their parents, playing sports was always in the cards. “Ever since we were growing up, my mom and dad [were] putting a baseball bat or football or basketball in our hands,” Kolton said. 

From there, it was up to the brothers to decide which sport they liked best. Funny enough, even with Kade pursuing sports at the collegiate level and Kolton leaving his football career behind in high school and pursuing law, for Kolton, it was football, and for Kade, it was basketball. 

But nonetheless, it was all the same. It was all competition. 

While their parents may not have forced them into any one sport, playing at a high level was always a must. In fact, their mom was so determined to see them excel, she even broke a couple of rules – and the law.

When Kade was four years old, his mom, who he said wanted him to play sports even more than Kerwin, was set on getting her son on a football team with five and six-year-olds. To do so, she forged his birth certificate, and Kade was off to the big leagues, or bigger leagues.

The same intensity applied to youth rec basketball, where Kerwin coached both brothers. 

“He probably coached that the same way he's coaching now all the players in Western Carolina,” Kolton said. “It wasn't just like a rec league. It was like, we're in the NBA. And we were going to learn the offense, and we were going to play the hardest and we were going to be in the best shape.”

Kade was on the team from the time he was 5 years old to when he was 10, and they didn’t lose a game in his five years. With Kolton’s team, Kerwin took his only loss in the first game of their season together, and then the team won out en route to a championship.

Before any of his pee-wee victories, though, he almost never started coaching. After thinking he would never want to coach as a player in college, his mind was changed by none other than Steve Spurrier. 

About two years after graduating, Kerwin returned to Florida as a graduate assistant under Spurrier. He saw “almost perfection on the field,” which really caught his attention as a quarterback. 

“Kerwin could see the difference in the way I coach, and his coach, Galen Hall and those guys,” Spurrier said. “And he probably said, ‘You know, if I'm ever head coach, I'm trying to do things a lot like Coach Spurrier did.”

Meanwhile, he spent his time in the pros. He was selected in the seventh round of the 1988 NFL draft by the Miami Dolphins to begin rotating stints in the NFL. He also played in the Canadian Football League, with Kolton and Kade growing up in both Canada and Florida. 

But once his playing days were over, it was time to coach, and not just rec basketball. He got his first gig in 2007 and hasn’t looked back. This year, he embarks on his 20th season, and each hasn’t been anything short of exciting. Kolton said his dad’s success has been fun to watch, even for those beyond the Bell family. He has his coworkers involved.

“All my friends here, we will have a Western Carolina watch party,” he said. “They're all invested too, because they know Dad. I've always had to be fans of different teams wherever my dad's been, and he's always won where he's been, so it's been easy to be a fan of where he's at.”

It’s a certain type of player that makes a consistently winning coach – one that Kerwin clearly was and maybe learned to be while leading Florida through seasons it would like to forget. Remember, Bell's freshman season in 1984 was marred by a string of NCAA sanctions that still haunt Florida's program.

Thus, his affinity for a challenge didn’t hurt. Head coaching positions are rarely vacated for good reason. He watched as his coach, Charley Pell, departed in 1984 amid those cheating allegations. Intrinsically, coaching jobs open because someone failed or messed up. While that may deter some, for Kerwin, that’s an opportunity not just for him, but to uplift a program, turn it around and, most importantly, win. “He had this crazy competitive gene that’s obviously part of the reason he was so successful,” Kolton said.

The greatest thing about genes? You pass them down. But the extent to which Kerwin did is rare. Beyond Kolton, who now brings his competitive nature to the office, and Kade, who still brings his’ to the gridiron, his daughter Kenzley also played college ball. She signed to play volleyball for Suffolk University in Boston and was the first volleyball player to do so from her high school. 

“The Bell family is very competitive,” Kolton said. “We just had a very big, competitive family who just love sports. … Growing up, watching him play, [was] definitely a factor.”

Whether on the sidelines of E.J. Whitmire Stadium or the sidelines of the family backyard, Kerwin gets to watch all that has come from simply his love of competition. And maybe, with all of that, whether someone in Gainesville knows him seems far less significant.