After a short vacation break, we're back with our wildly popular semi-regular series of interviews with Auburn assistant coaches who happen to be in their offices when I visit the athletic complex.

This installment is with safeties coach Tommy Thigpen, who I spoke with last a week and a half ago when he was in his office while on vacation. Here's some of the stuff he had to say ...

• I found it odd that he was hanging out in his office while technically on vacation. He didn't. "That's what we do," Thigpen said. "The first year, to me, is there's a lot of things that need to be done. You need to be around your kids. Study recruiting. It's a great place. If it wasn't such a great place, I probably wouldn't be in the office. But here, you love coming to work."

• Thigpen seems happy with his decision to come to a football-crazy state like Alabama compared to a place like North Carolina, where other sports can monopolize the conversation from time to time. "People here are fanatical," he said. "And you hear about it, that people are fanatical about football, but then you live it and it's totally different. You're never going to understand the scope when somebody says that's the most important thing in the state until people actually start talking to you about it. So I've never lived that. And I'm living it now."

• I thought it was interesting that he didn't reference the University of Alabama by its name. He just said the "team up north."

• I thought Thigpen had an interesting background. He grew up in El Dorado, Ark., where he strayed in school, in part because of the environment he was in. At one point, a friend of his was killed and Thigpen's grades were suffering. He decided a change was necessary and prior to his 11th grade year moved to Dumfries, Va., outside of the military base in Quantico, where his father was stationed. It was an instant turnaround. "I just needed a male role model, so I went to live with my dad," Thigpen said. "Never told me to study one day, and from a 1.8, 1.9 (GPA) I went to a 4.0 just from changing one environment to the other. ... The people I hung around with in high school in Arkansas, nobody looked past high school. They never looked that far. In Dumfries, everybody wanted to go to college. That's why I talk about the environment, if you're around a bunch of people who have the same goals, of course your goals might start to change."

• After being named a Parade All-America and winning Virginia's state defensive player of the year honors his senior season, Thigpen wanted to play football on the East Coast so his dad could make an easy trip to see him play. He chose North Carolina, which is only a three- to four-hour drive from Dumfries.

• Thigpen had great things to say about Mack Brown, who he played for at North Carolina. "The best communicator I've ever met," he said. "He can talk to anybody from any background. You can be the richest guy in the world, you can be the poorest guy in the world, you can be Catholic, you can be Baptist, no matter what background you're from, when he walked into your house, he made you feel like he was part of you. Your parents felt like he was part of you. I always thought that Mack in the end would be a politician, because he can talk to anybody. Again, you can be at the lowest end of the economic spectrum or the highest. Each one of them. To me, that's an art. ... He was really good at talking to people that weren't from his background. And he never made anybody feel that he was above them. That was the one thing that even today I model myself after as far as talking to anybody from any spectrum."

• Thigpen had a brief professional playing career as a member of the New York Giants (1993-94) and Barcelona Dragons (1995-96) of the World League. After teaching for a year, he decided to get into coaching. Brown's staff at North Carolina -- one that had several African American coaches -- helped him make that career choice. "I wanted to be what those guys were," Thigpen said. "And as a young kid, I didn't have many role models that I could idolize. Because in Arkansas, there wasn't much advancement for African Americans. It was a lot of us were born into different lots. If your mom worked at a factory, you were probably going to work in a factory. And so for me, my idol was the guy who was making $12-13 an hour, which was the UPS guy. Then you go to school and see all these guys have graduated from college and they look just like me. And they're loving what they're doing and they're good at it. And it took me a minute to understand what I wanted to do until I started teaching school for a year. That's when I realized I loved teaching, I loved talking, I loved socializing. I love strategizing, and that's when i decided I wanted to be a football coach."

• Thigpen is widely regarded as a top-notch recruiter. He says it all comes down to communication. "To me, kids always use the term, they say, 'Just be real,'" Thigpen said. "And all that means is be yourself. Kids can see through a lot and know when you're genuine. It's like anything else, the more you can communicate and make them feel comfortable, that they know you."

• He keeps up with all the latest fads -- Facebook, Twitter, MySpace -- but knows they don't replace the human element of recruiting. "You still have to have human contact," he said. "I mean, you've never gotten a kid to commit off of Facebook. It takes a human element of having somebody there right in front of you and having a relationship and looking them eye-to-eye and having a trust factor and your body language and everything you do. So there's an art behind that as well."

• Here's his take on keeping up with the technology to communicate with recruits these days: "If you get annoyed (at learning different mediums), then you're probably in the wrong business. If you know your audience and your crowd, you've got to look at it like you're in a salesman job. If you're in corporate American and the fad changed, you can do two things: you can stay the same and let everyone else pass you or you could assimilate and do what everyone else is doing, that being the kids, and get on board and at least try to speak the dialogue that they're doing."

• Thigpen started his coaching career as a GA at North Carolina. He'd move on to Tennessee State as a linebackers coach before joining Bowling Green and an up-and-coming coach by the name of Urban Meyer in 2001. He knew Meyer was going places even then. "You could tell," Thigpen said. "We had average talent, but we were beating teams that were better than us. So we did a great job of just maximizing talent. I thought we were phenomenal at getting the best out of each kid, and then putting those kids in the right position to play."

• We didn't just talk about football. Thipen is an avid fisherman who on occasion heads out to do some deep sea fishing. Where does he go in Auburn? "I've been using peoples' ponds," he said. "I don't do lakes. That's too much work. Give me a little private pond, I'm good. I can work the whole pond." Thigpen used to go out fishing to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. On one trip, he said his group hauled in 800 pounds of tuna. He's not big on putting his prize catches on the wall. "I'm not the taxidermy kind of guy," he said. "I'm the kind of stick-it-in-your-freezer and eat them on a good day."