Charles Watkins joined the Concordia Chicago Football staff in the fall of 2018 as the defensive coordinator.
Watkins is a former NCAA Division I wide receiver who played at Wagner College in Staten Island, NY and Duke University in Durham, NC. While at Duke, Watkins had his first taste of coaching as a wide receivers’ coach at Orange High School in Hillsborough, NC. Coming from a family where his mother was a teacher and his grandfather a principal, the combination of football and teaching/coaching opportunities would soon become permanently intertwined.
In 2014, Watkins relocated to Iowa to play indoor football with the Cedar Rapids Titans while also serving as a substitute teacher in Iowa City. The following year, he was hired as a secondary coach and passing game coordinator for Coe College in Cedar Rapids. It was Watkins’ first experience coaching the defensive side of the ball, but his three years at Coe proved an asset to the program. Among his achievements were helping the Kohawks to an 11-1 record and an Iowa Intercollegiate Athletics Conference championship in 2016, and assisting Coe to set a Division III defensive record with five interceptions and nine total turnovers in a playoff game. Watkins also coached the IIAC Defensive Player of the Year and a D-III and AFCA All-American defensive back in Dylan Stepleton.
Watkins would experience football at another level with a four-month stint in early 2018 at Division II Southeastern Oklahoma State University as a wide receivers’ coach and academic coordinator. Later that year, he would return home to serve as a graduate assistant coach at Rutgers University in Camden, NJ, where his responsibilities included wide receivers and special teams.
A member of the Academic Dean’s List and a two-time member of the All-Atlantic Coast Conference Academic Honor Roll, Watkins earned his BA in sociology with minors in education, marketing and management from Duke University in 2013.
