BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — When Brent Key took a glance outside his room at the Sheraton Hotel this week, he spotted the Regions Center skyscraper downtown, a building decorated for the holiday season. It was a site that pinged nostalgia for Key, a Georgia Tech alum and now coach of the Yellow Jackets who is trying his darnedest to make the Birmingham Bowl about anything but him.
But try as he might, Key can’t escape the fact that the Friday game between his Jackets and Vanderbilt at Protective Stadium very much is about him.
“He’s got so much support here,” Key’s mother, Donna Key, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “People are sending me pictures like crazy. His cousins are going to practice and taking all their little friends — he’s spending all his time taking pictures with all the cute little kids. All the friends he grew up with, all the cousins he grew up with, family, they’re all here. They’re out in droves here.”
Key, 46, left Birmingham — and Clay, Alabama, to be more specific — almost 30 years ago. Sure, he’s been back hundreds of times (he joked this month he has journeyed along I-20 on thousands of trips) on recruiting visits and to reunite with family, and he lived down the road in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where he was an assistant coach during the latter part of the last decade, but there hasn’t been a homecoming quite like this.
Old friends have been visiting Key at the team hotel while he works the phone recruiting for the 2025 roster. Key’s high school football coach spoke to the Jackets after Thursday’s practice. Rickey J’s bakery in Birmingham got word that Key was in town and sent over a caramel cake, Key’s favorite, to Donna’s house.
“He’s just got support from everybody,” Donna said.
As a child, Key grew up in Trussville, Alabama, before Key and his mother moved to Clay when Key was 12. Key’s father, James Key, and Donna divorced when Key was young. James Key died in 2011 at the age of 60, and there never was much of a relationship between him and Key.
So Donna and her parents were the guiding lights for Key, a child who tested for the gifted program at school at the age of 7, who was active in church and on the scholar’s bowl team, was a Cub Scout and was a youth baseball standout. He was close with his maternal grandfather Don Martin, a man who ran glass-making businesses across the state and taught Key how to fish and to play golf and other sports.
Martin taught Key much about life, too, Donna said.
It wasn’t until junior high school that Key, who Donna called a mild and sweet child, was allowed to play football. He always had liked the sport, but when he finally put on the pads, he instantly fell in love. He also had another father figure enter his life in the form of Hewitt-Trussville High School coach Jack Wood.
“Brent always, No. 1, he always worked extremely hard. That’s probably one thing that sticks out to me as much as anything,” Wood told the AJC. “He worked in the offseason, in the weight room, the running program. Everything he did he got better and better. And he worked real hard in the classroom. He was a very good student, and that’s the most important thing there. He was a good teammate. I think that’s how the other guys there viewed him, and that’s the ultimate to me.”
Key became a pretty good offensive lineman, despite weighing only 225 pounds as a senior. His work in the classroom and on the field earned him a scholarship offer to play for Tech.
He left Alabama for Atlanta in 1996.
“I still can see it my head. I was up in his room packing, and he was up there with several of his friends because they were so all excited for him,” Donna recalled. “I was kind of sad, and he was like, ‘Oh, it’s no big deal. I’m just going over there for school. I’ll be back all the time.’ He wasn’t.”
Key’s work ethic didn’t waver in Atlanta. Between practices, games and studies, Key needed to make extra money, so he worked pressure-washing decks and windows during his underclassmen years, then at a concert venue as part of the security team as an upperclassmen.
Nineteen years after Key played his last down at Bobby Dodd Stadium, Key returned to Tech to be his alma mater’s offensive line coach. In 2022 he was named the program’s interim coach eight games into that season before being handed the full-time title in November of that year.
Now Key has a chance to lead the Jackets to eight wins in a season for the first time since 2016. An eighth victory could come in the same city in which Key witnessed his first college football game in person alongside Martin: the 1985 All-American Bowl between Tech and Michigan State at Legion Field.
“This means the world to me, the family and friends that will be around,” Key admitted earlier this month. “Birmingham is college football. Always has been. To play in a bowl game here is pretty special.”
As for Wood, he said will attend the game Friday. Tech offensive lineman Jordan Williams and defensive lineman Jordan van den Berg said the veteran coach told the team about the importance of hard work and effort leading into the matchup with Vanderbilt, qualities Wood recognized early on from a young Key.
Donna, however, won’t be able to make the game, as she’s recovering from a pair of surgeries. But she’ll have some family friends over to watch it on TV and to help her cheer for her son, one of Birmingham’s sons.
