Empathy, strength, understanding: How Coastal Carolina coach Jamey Chadwells wife Solmaz reshaped

Like most folks, Jamey Chadwell can tell you exactly where he was and what he did on Sept. 11, 2001. He was a 23-year-old offensive assistant at East Tennessee State, his alma mater. The Buccaneers were preparing to face VMI that Saturday. Chadwell was in a meeting when someone ran into the room and told them to turn on the TV. A plane had hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center. Minutes later, everyone watched in shock as a second plane flew into the other tower.

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“My daughter!” screamed Danny Triplett, another ETSU assistant as he ran out of the room to get his phone. Triplett’s daughter was a student at NYU. (She was unharmed.)

Chadwell spent much of the rest of that day in the school’s sports information director’s office watching the TV coverage of 9/11, still somewhat in shock, as his mind couldn’t get past one thought — ‘How in the world did this happen in our country?’

Eleven months later, Chadwell’s own world would change and the impact of that shocking day would affect him in ways he never could’ve imagined. This is a story about love, understanding and 9/11, and the way it all came together to reshape the mind of one of the biggest rising stars of the coaching world.

Solmaz Zarinneh was studying for her master’s while working as a graduate assistant athletic trainer with the East Tennessee State football team when Jamey Chadwell first noticed her. Chadwell says now that when he first got introduced to Solmaz and she said her name, it went over his head. He just was taken aback by how beautiful he thought she was. She told him she was from Athens, Tenn., a small town — although not quite as small as the place he came from, Caryville — and it was only about 90 minutes from where he grew up. She had an accent.

“She sounded country,” he says.

They soon became friendly and he invited her to go with him to a Fellowship of Christian Athletes meeting. They seemed to have such similar backgrounds and values. Solmaz’s little town was best known as the birthplace of Mayfield Dairy Farms, “the best ice cream ever!” she says.

Solmaz and Jamey began dating. The following spring she remembered looking over at him and telling a friend, “I’m gonna marry this man someday.” But their relationship took a turn when ETSU announced in 2003 that it was dropping football. Chadwell was going to be out of work and she still had a year left of school. He landed a job at Charleston Southern, and it was during their year apart, she broached some issues about some of their differences.

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For as similar as the towns they grew up in, Solmaz’s background was different. She wasn’t born in Tennessee. Her family had moved there in 1982 after escaping from Iran when she was 3. It was Solmaz, her dad, and her mom, who was pregnant with her younger brother.

“We entered the United States and were captured by the border patrol,” she says. “We were sent to California to await trial. We were put in jail. So we contacted my uncle since we didn’t speak the language.”

Her uncle had been a foreign exchange student at a small college in Tennessee, where the family ultimately settled. Solmaz’s dad, who had made Persian rugs back home, went into the used car business. The family spoke Farsi at home. She was raised Muslim but converted to Christianity in her junior year of high school.

Initially, she never wanted anything to do with religion, Solmaz says, because she felt that was what tore the country of Iran apart. But she had a couple of friends who went to a church in town and then her mother started going. The more she learned, the more she didn’t view it as religion but more about their relationship with God that drew her in.

Growing up in Tennessee, Solmaz said the family didn’t experience any bigotry. “I think maybe because it was a small town,” she said. “Everybody was familiar with each other. It was like now you have these foreigners entering this small town and I guess it was kind of eye-opening for them. I remember going to school and the students always wanted to know about my culture and loved to hear me speak in Farsi. I never experienced any type of racism until 9/11 happened.”

A few days after 9/11, Solmaz, who was at Lee University in Cleveland, Tenn., wanted to go home to be with her family for the weekend. She and her father walked into the local Wal-Mart and suddenly, the place where she grew up seemed to have changed.

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“I remember people following us, because I guess they were afraid we were going to do something,” Solmaz said. “They categorized us as terrorists because you could tell that we looked foreign. I remember getting hateful looks from people. At that moment, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh. This is the worst feeling. I would never wish that upon anyone.’ Growing up in that town, and because everybody knew you, you would never be associated or looked down upon. It was heartbreaking, and that’s when my eyes truly opened to just what society is really capable of.

“I grew up as a Muslim and people knew that. They automatically assumed Islam with terrorism, and that is a common misconception, because unfortunately that’s a lot of what you see.”

The family’s used car lot was vandalized. “People sprayed stuff on the cars: ‘Terrorists’ and ‘Leave the Country,’” Solmaz said. “How do you explain that to myself or my brother as to why people do these things? I’m not saying the whole town was like that. Don’t get me wrong. There’s always a group of people — you’re gonna have bad seeds everywhere you go.”

For about six months, the family was especially anxious. Solmaz said the vandals were caught; other people around town were apologetic. Even when the venom waned, Solmaz and her family still coped with a jolted sense of reality. Her father changed his name from Mohammed to Mike. If Solmaz was out and there was a female wearing a headdress on, someone would comment, “That’s one of your people.”

If someone, noticing her dark features, asked her, “Where are you from?” she’d cringe; “Ugh, here I go. I gotta say Iran, because that’s where I’m from.”

“The reaction you get from people,” she says. “You can tell from the immediate look upon their face, what’s going through their minds.”

Those interactions, as awkward as they may have been, were benign. What really mattered was how the people she opened up her life to saw her and her family and their culture. Solmaz believed there were no issues when it came to Jamey’s heart and how open-minded he was, in that he would love her unconditionally and embrace raising their family with some of the customs and traditions she wanted her children to learn, but initially she wasn’t sure how his family might respond.

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“I spoke Farsi at home, and I wanted to teach my children Farsi as well,” she says. “To some people, that might’ve been an issue. It definitely crossed my mind, going into a family that all they’ve known is a small town. They’re from a sweet tea and fried chicken place. Here I am, a foreigner from the Middle East. I was definitely worried about their perspective on things.”

In Solmaz’s home, they ate all of their meals on the floor on a cloth. They celebrated Persian New Year’s, Nowruz, and she wanted to instill some aspects of the traditional Persian wedding into hers. Those things certainly weren’t common where Chadwell grew up in Caryville, which he says, “Was 100 percent country and 100 percent White.” The high school he attended for three years had one Black student among its 1,500 kids, he says.

In the year they were apart, when Chadwell was at Charleston Southern while she was in Tennessee finishing her master’s, they had a lot of deep conversations, about her customs and her nationality and things that were important to her. She understood that he probably didn’t know what he didn’t know, but he was open to it all.

“Let me know if you have any questions because when we do this, this is it,” Solmaz told him. “There’s no going back. We need to move forward together. I need you to always be supportive and stand by me because I am probably going to experience things. I may come home crying because of something somebody said that was just hurtful or ignorant. Our children may.”

Marrying a college football coach, Chadwell knew, presented its own challenges because of the crazy hours and the instability. “Don’t marry me,” he told her, more than once, “it’s gonna be hard.” The complexity of their relationship didn’t really sink with him at the time.

“It was obviously unique although I didn’t think about it being unique at the time,” Chadwell says. “I didn’t think about that as a young person — ‘Hey, if we get married and have children, what does that look like?’ It was probably not in my thoughts at all. I was worried about having a job.

“When you grow up in a smaller town, you’re not exposed to different nationalities or different things of that nature. I don’t want to say I was sheltered by any means but I didn’t have a worldly view is probably the best way to put it. I was trying to understand who she was, and how she was raised and her family compared to how I was raised. I tell people all the time that God has a sense of humor with how he brings people together.”

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Jamey’s parents had a lot of questions, but once they realized that Solmaz grew up in Tennessee, it seemed to calm their minds. Since getting married, they have moved around the state of South Carolina and also had a one-year stint in Mississippi. Places where she figured she might have to deal with racism, she was pleasantly surprised she hadn’t. “It’s actually been in the bigger cities where I’ve experienced things,” she says.

After they were married, Solmaz opened up to him about the bigotry she has experienced, but there were, and are, a lot of things that she has kept to herself.

“I try not to let the ignorance of people affect me,” she says. “It is hard but I tell myself that their thinking does not define me. I know who I am. My husband knows who I am. My family knows who I am.”

At home, Solmaz has taught the family’s three children — Jameson (12), Sahel (7) and Soraya (6) — how to speak Farsi. Her husband too has gained quite an education. As his career has ascended, first taking Division II North Greenville from being a two-win team into an 11-win team just in two years and then building Coastal Carolina into an 11-1 team that finished No. 14 in the country last year, Chadwell’s also become more understanding and empathetic.

The level of hatred and ignorance that he’s learned about has resonated so deeply with him because it’s hurt someone so close to him.

“When you know somebody that you love and care about that has experienced it or their family has because of what they look like or where they’re from, it really opens your eyes and changes your perspective,” he says. “It was really eye-opening for me to see what she and her family experienced, but also I took it as I saw how strong she was through it. She didn’t allow that circumstance or allow what others thought to derail who she was. The strength displayed there was great for me; seeing how she’d handled something that I’d probably never have to go through, and our children are going to be great because of these experiences that she’s had and how she’s fought through them and how she’s persevered through them.”

(Photo: Scott Winters / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images; inline photos courtesy of the Chadwell family)

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