Belle Vernon graduate hired to lead Virginia Tech football’s player personnel
Mark Diethorn was hired as the director of player personnel for the Virginia Tech football program.
Mark Diethorn
Little did Mark Diethorn know that when he played the NCAA Football video game on his PlayStation 2, he was laying the groundwork for his profession.
Diethorn, a 2004 graduate of Belle Vernon High School who earned a bachelor’s degree in business information technology in 2007 from Virginia Tech, returned to Blacksburg in June after being hired as the director of player personnel for the Hokies football program.
“I became hooked on college football during my freshman semester at Virginia Tech, and I truly never thought that working for the program was a possibility,” he said. “I didn’t play football past ninth grade. I was skinny, nonathletic and lacked a work ethic, which was not a great combination.
“Through high school and college, I frequently played the ‘dynasty mode’ on NCAA Football, where you had to recruit and build a roster. I guess that is where I worked on my craft.”
Diethorn didn’t pursue a part-time job or a volunteer gig with the football program while attending college.
“The interesting thing is, I never worked in football as a student at Virginia Tech,” he said. “I was a student in the crowd at Lane Stadium. … I grew up a diehard Steelers fan but after my first semester (at Virginia Tech), I was hooked on college football.”
Diethorn graduated a year early and returned home from Blacksburg.
“After graduating from Tech, I accepted a job at PNC in downtown Pittsburgh,” he said. “I got the thought of pursuing football as a career about six months into my job and started writing six to seven letters a day to NFL and college teams on my lunch break.”
How many teams or programs replied to Diethorn?
“I didn’t get one response,” he said with a laugh. “I was naïve to how hard it was to break in, and I decided it would be easier to get my foot in the door at the college level.”
So Diethorn made a decision that did not sit well with his parents.
“After a few months, I made up my mind (that) I was going to put my two weeks in at PNC and go back to college,” he said. “… My parents weren’t thrilled and in hindsight, I can’t blame them.”
Diethorn applied to graduate school at Florida, and after being accepted, he moved to Gainesville.
“I found a one-bedroom apartment on Craigslist and took out a loan to start grad school,” he said. “I found a night job to barely make ends meet. … It took months, but I kept reaching out to the football program and believe it or not, it is harder than you think to volunteer.”
After being persistent for so long, Diethorn finally received a call.
“Finally, I was afforded the opportunity to stuff recruiting envelopes and I must have stuffed and sealed 3,000 envelopes on my first day,” he said. “They let me come back and started giving me more tasks.”
The connections Diethorn made at Florida, he said, led him to be hired as a recruiting assistant by Pitt in 2012.
While at Pitt, Diethorn met fellow BVA alumnus Joe Rudolph, who is now the associate head coach and offensive coordinator at Wisconsin.
“He is one of the best people and smartest minds in the business, and he challenged me every day which allowed me to learn,” he said. “It led to head coach Paul Chryst promoting me to assistant director of player personnel at Pitt in 2014.”
Diethorn then became the director of football recruiting at Pitt from 2015-18.
The promotion came about when Chryst and Rudolph left for Wisconsin and offered Diethorn a position in Madison.
“It was one of the harder career decisions that I had to make,” he said. “I really liked the players that we brought into the program, like James Connor, Tyler Boyd and (another BVA graduate) Dorian Johnson. … Combine that with Pat Narduzzi’s vision and offering me the promotion to stay, I wanted to see things through at Pitt.”
However, the lure to return to Virginia Tech three years later was too much for Diethorn to pass up.
“It had been the only college I visited when I was in high school and the campus is beautiful,” he said. “I thought that if you had to draw up a perfect campus, this was it.”
He correlated what his heart told him in 2004 to returning back to his alma mater.
“It was hard leaving Pitt. I invested six years in the program,” he said. “You form bonds with players and their families and it was special to be able to work for the university and football program in my hometown. … To come back (to Virginia Tech) 10 years later and lead the recruiting efforts is surreal.”