Scott Frost Touched by WVU’s Unexpected Tribute to Late Coach Shawn Clark

Late last month, UCF offensive line coach Shawn Clark passed away unexpectedly at the age of 50. As you could imagine, it deeply impacted UCF head coach Scott Frost, the coaching staff, and the players who spent many hours and days with him leading up to the regular season.

Clark was in his first year on staff at UCF after having served as the head coach at Appalachian State from 2019-24, where he compiled a 40-24 record and finished the 2019 season ranked 19th in the country.

Clark is a Charleston, West Virginia native, so many of the folks in West Virginia's staff knew him and even coached with or against him. WVU corners coach Rod West and cornerback Jason Chambers were with him at App State just last year.

On Monday, Scott Frost told reporters how thankful he was to receive this big envelope from WVU following Clark's passing.

“The first thing I want to say about Coach Rodriguez is, after what happened with Coach (Shawn) Clark passing away, I got a big envelope of letters from, I think, everybody in their athletic department, individually written and signed. I think that speaks to the class of who Coach Rodriguez is, and obviously, the people in that athletic department. I want to say thank you for that. We received a lot of notes and messages, but I opened the envelope and all of the cards fell out. I thought that was a really high character thing to do.”

“A lot of us knew Shawn and were deeply moved by it, and I know how much Scott thought of him, too," Rodriguez said during his radio show on Monday night. The week Clark passed, Rodriguez told Tony Caridi on the radio show that he was one of the first people to text him congratulations when they won the Conference USA championship last season at Jacksonville State.

Clark clearly had a big impact on people wherever he went — be it his time at Eastern Kentucky, Purdue, Kent State, Appalachian State, or UCF.

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