Craig Hardin literally had other things on his radar while in the cockpit of an F-16 Fighting Falcon. The seed was always there, buried in the back of his mind, ready to sprout when the time was right.

Now, some years removed from his career in the skies, his title of Air Force Colonel now a memory, Hardin finds himself once again a pilot, albeit of a different plane. The plant has grown.

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Hardin, 59, sits next to his wife, Karen, on the edge of a lake in New Hampshire, where kids play, dogs bark and the temperature sits comfortably below triple digits. Time seems to crawl. He’s just finished preparing for his nightly quest fishing bass, ushering in dusk as the sun splays itself over the crystal-clear water.

You’d expect that level of readiness with Craig Hardin.

He would soon say goodbye to his annual escape north and return to home base in Fort Worth. Summer workouts for V.R. Eaton High School’s football team will ramp up significantly in intensity, especially with Hardin, the school’s defensive coordinator, in the fold.

Relatively, football, or at least coaching it, is a new beast for Hardin. He’s loved it all his life, ultimately spurning an opportunity to play collegiately at an Ivy League school for the Air Force Academy thanks to relentless pressure from his mother and a Richland High counselor, Lynda Hamilton.

Hardin ultimately did suit up for Air Force’s football team, but quickly realized it wasn’t his true passion. He got the bug to fly jets, naturally, and that’s exactly what he did. And damn well, at that.

“I tell people Top Gun came out in May of 1986, I went to pilot training in June of 1986 kind of at the height of that surge,” Hardin said. “Once you get in it, I think, like, competitive nature [takes over], you just keep trying to do better and you keep challenging yourself. The Air Force does a great job of presenting opportunities and I was fortunate, and I guess at some point I must have been pretty good at it, and just kept moving up in the F-16 world.”

Hardin logged nearly 3,000 hours in F-16 jets, spending time in Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq. After 9/11 he was among the first units to arrive in Afghanistan, leading Special Forces operations to coordinate directly with Afghan locals in order to ensure their protection as American military intervention scaled up.

He called it a career with the Air Force after 23 years of service, three of those spent as an instructor at the Weapons School, in part due to a Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma diagnosis. While Hardin defeated it, a year of surgeries and chemotherapy took a toll, rendering him unable to keep flying and staring down a career change.

“Going through something like that, you kind of pause and take a big picture of what’s going on in life and what you’re doing,” he said. “And I just decided that I was going to do what I wanted to do.”

Coaching beyond recreational youth soccer wasn’t something Hardin had delved into before. But with a clean bill of health and a slate wiped clean, he decided to eschew safer, higher-paying work in his previous field to gamble on himself and the game he loved.

After gaining coaching certification, Hardin and his family moved back to north Texas, where he started bouncing around Fort Worth as he embarked on the coaching carousel: a year at Western Hills High School, two at South Hills High School, and overlapping for a season with Ellis Miller, who he met at Northwest High School. The staff there scattered after the head coach left, as Hardin headed to Grapevine High for a year before spending two at Paschal High as the defensive coordinator. When Coach Miller took the reins at V.R. Eaton in 2017, he called Hardin and asked him to be their new defensive coordinator. Hardin obliged.

Hardin, who assumed the position ahead of just the second season in the school’s history, has relished the stability of the role under Miller, with just one staff change on the defensive side in the last five years. He credits Miller for sticking to his guns and believing in the men around him.

“He’s not afraid to hire – let’s be honest, hiring me, as a colonel in the Air Force,” Hardin said. “I guess most people would probably say I have a pretty big personality and I’m pretty vocal about stuff. But he’s a great leader from the perspective of listening to people and communicating and then coming up with a vision, and then let’s go out and execute it.”

The Eagles have made the postseason in three of the six years Hardin has been on the staff, most notably in 2020 when they went three rounds deep before falling to Prosper. Aside from last year – “We were horrible,” notes Hardin – Eaton has been nothing but solid defensively, with Hardin largely to thank.

While there are some aspects of leadership he can apply from his past job, the transition from instructing about ballistic missiles to honing a cornerback’s press technique was never going to be seamless.

“There’s times where, I’ll be honest, being an O6 (Colonel) and then starting over as a teacher and as a position coach,” Hardin said, “there’s times where I would look in the mirror and go, ‘What in the hell did you do?’

Hardin paid his dues, though, and now finds himself helping to lead a program he’s proud of and aiming to be a good impression on a very impressionable generation of young men. A family rivalry is just the cherry on top.

Jake Hardin, Craig’s son, realized his desk job wasn’t the life he wanted for himself, nor the one that put him in the position to make a positive impact on other people’s lives, and, just like his dad, made the switch to coaching football. He found work as a receivers coach at Byron Nelson in 2017 and hasn’t looked back, now entering his second year with Timber Creek as its passing game coach – both schools being rivals of Eaton. 

Jake drew first blood, beating Eaton twice with Byron Nelson in 2018 and 2019, but his father has roared back to life, shutting out the Bobcats in his son’s final year there and welcoming his son to Timber Creek with a loss to even the all-time record at 2-2.

“He knows who all my kids are and I know who all his kids are and we can talk with each other and enjoy the ups and downs of the season together,” Jake says of his dad, who he calls his best friend. “I know he wants me to go 9-1 and him to go 10-0, and I know that I want us to go 10-0 and I want him to go 9-1.”

“It’s really fun personally, because it gives us just another thing to have in common and share with each other, and kind of carry each other’s burden. But professionally, it’s not as fun. Because he’s so good.”

The competitive-yet-friendly rivalry the Hardins now enjoy wasn’t always guaranteed. Jake recalls the day he found out something was wrong with his dad, a regular Sunday night spent eating Chinese food and watching the Dallas Cowboys, when Craig started to feel sick. He went to the hospital the next day, and Jake found out on his senior night that his dad had cancer – “the first game that my dad ever missed.”

“Have you ever been to a chemo ward?” Jake asks, fighting back tears. “Man, it’s really sad. And his chemo, it really took a lot out of him. But, again man, it’s just a testament to his strength and his perseverance that he was able to overcome it.”

Timber Creek and V.R. Eaton, son and father, will square off for a fifth time this season to set the record straight. Coming off a down year, Craig mentioned plans for a new scheme defensively. Beyond the wins and the losses, though, Craig Hardin, a man with a lifetime of experiences, sees the most value in keeping things in perspective, cherishing the days he’s been given.

“When you go through cancer, when you go through chemo, you spend a fair amount of time alone,” Craig Hardin said. “And you spend a fair amount of time alone with your thoughts and you spend a fair amount of time alone in prayer, and when you survive something like that you kind of say, ‘Okay, I guess I’m not done here. What am I going to do?’”