After coming back to Boone to coach at his beloved alma mater as an assistant, Shawn Clark became App State’s head coach late in the 2019 season and has led the Mountaineers to ring-worthy success while also taking down several ranked opponents.
One of those ranked wins even triggered the first Boone visit from ESPN’s College GameDay.
Hired as the 22nd head football coach in App State history on Dec. 13, 2019, Clark completed his fourth full season in 2023 with his third bowl victory, a third straight season with a win against a Top 25 opponent and a third season with at least nine victories. App State is one of only five Group of Five programs in the country (and 14 FBS programs nationally) with at least three nine-win seasons since the start of 2020
Clark, whose contract runs through the 2026 season, has a 35-18 record following a 2023 campaign in which the Mountaineers won the final five games of the regular season with a “Keep Digging” mantra, captured the Sun Belt Conference’s East Division title and finished 9-5 thanks to a 13-9 victory against Miami (Ohio) in the Cure Bowl.
Clark added the 2023 bowl win to postseason victories in 2019 and 2020. He also won a Sun Belt East title in 2021 on the strength of a 10-2 regular season that year.
The Mountaineers have won three of their last five games against ranked teams thanks to top-20 victories in 2023 (at previously unbeaten James Madison), 2022 (at No. 6 Texas A&M) and 2021 (against Coastal Carolina). The 2023 season included two victories against teams with double-digit wins, as JMU was 10-0 at the time and Miami (Ohio) took an 11-2 record into the bowl matchup.
Clark was the only first-year FBS head coach in 2020 to win at least nine games, and he followed that by directing the Mountaineers to double-digit victories in 2021. A 17-14 win at No. 6 Texas A&M in 2022 — the program’s highest-profile victory since the 2007 upset of Michigan — led to ESPN’s College GameDay airing from Boone the following week.
With App State alum/country music star Luke Combs picking his alma mater as ESPN’s guest picker and Lee Corso putting on the giant Yosef head, the Mountaineers delivered with a dramatic victory against Troy.
The second half of the 2023 season included rivalry wins against Marshall, James Madison and Georgia Southern to finish atop a tough East Division in which all seven teams qualified for a bowl.
Clark has helped lead record-setting runs to conference titles and bowl victories, not just at App State, where he played from 1994-98 and had served as an assistant since 2016, but also in four other leagues during his two decades of college coaching experience.
An offensive lineman in college, Clark was a two-time All-American (1996 and 1998) and three-time all-conference selection (1995, 1996, 1998) for teams that went a combined 45-16 during his first five years in Boone. In fact, as a player during the 12-0 start in 1995 and a coach for the 2019 team that has set a single-season record for wins by an FBS program in the state of North Carolina, Clark has been part of the two App State teams to post 11 regular-season victories.
Clark graduated from App State with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice in 1998 and earned a master’s degree in education from Louisville in 2003.
His wife, Jonelle, was a standout softball student-athlete at Eastern Kentucky and was inducted into EKU’s Athletics Hall of Fame in 2008. The Clarks have two children: a daughter, Giana, and a son, Braxton.
Clark made his official head coaching debut while leading the Mountaineers to a 31-17 victory against UAB in the 2019 R+L Carriers New Orleans Bowl eight days after his introductory press conference. Ranked 18th in the final Amway Coaches Poll of the season, App State went 13-1 to become the first Sun Belt team and the first FBS team from North Carolina to win 13 games in a season.
In 2020, while playing in the nation’s No. 5-ranked league, the Mountaineers secured a Myrtle Beach Bowl title and were one of just 13 teams nationally with at least nine victories — the three losses were against teams with a combined 28-5 record. They were the outright leader in wins by an FBS program in the state of North Carolina for the third straight year and either the outright leader or co-leader for the sixth straight year.
In 2021, the Mountaineers’ 10-2 regular season included signature wins against in-state foe East Carolina (36,752 fans witnessed App State jump out to a 33-9 lead in Charlotte’s Bank of America Stadium against the AAC’s third-place finisher), longtime rival Marshall, 14th-ranked Coastal Carolina and Black Saturday rival Georgia Southern (the 27-3 win tied for App State’s second-largest margin of victory in the modern era over the Eagles before being topped by the 28-point margin in the 2023 win).
Reaching double-figure wins in 2021, App State became one of just eight FBS programs with at least five 10-win seasons since 2015.
Working for championship-winning programs at Louisville and Eastern Kentucky before being part of a bowl win for Big Ten member Purdue and coaching at Kent State, Clark has been a vital part of App State’s historic FBS success.
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