The first dream job was to become a politician. Daron Roberts always wanted to help people, and he thought a career in politics would help him make an impact.

But the ultimate dream job? Well, it is listed right there in his Mount Pleasant (Texas) High School yearbook. "Become the head coach at Mount Pleasant when I retire."

Retirement, of course, was a long way off. At 18, Roberts had a full career ahead of him. He received his undergraduate degree at Texas and then went on to law school at Harvard. But believe it or not, it was law school that pushed him into coaching well before retirement.

Today, Roberts is going into his first season as West Virginia receivers coach thanks to a relationship he built with Dana Holgorsen while he was in law school.

So how did his career trajectory diverge? Roberts took a sports law class during his second year at Harvard. His professor knew he was from Texas, and he knew that Roberts had a desire to coach one day. So he assigned him a paper on quite a topic -- what, if any, were the similarities between coaching and practicing law?

Now for the bigger question -- would Roberts be able to interview then-Texas Tech coach Mike Leach? Roberts worked for the Lt. Governor of Texas while he was an undergrad, so through him he was able to eventually get into contact with Leach. They talked for two hours on the phone. Then Leach invited him to visit campus.

That is where Roberts met Holgorsen, who was an assistant under Leach at the time. They talked football, and Roberts told him he wanted to coach one day. The two lost contact, but the topic of that paper stuck with Roberts.

So did the idea of getting into coaching.

"My notions of public service started to change," Roberts said in a phone interview. "I started to re-think ways of being a public servant, and seeing it not only from the viewpoint as an elected official. My real interest was working with young men. If I look back on it, as I became more and more exposed to life outside of Texas and saw how much education and mentorship broadened my world view, I wanted to play that same role. At some point I determined I didn't need to be a U.S. Senator to do that."

What really cemented his decision? A trip to a football camp at South Carolina in 2006. Roberts was clerking at a Houston law firm at the time. A friend of his from Austin was set to go to the camp in Columbia and asked Roberts to come along at the last minute to fill in for someone else.

"It was the best 48 hours of my life," Roberts said. "I was a secondary coach and also a dorm tutor. I loved it. That was the key experience for me to really make the decision that this is something I wanted to do. I knew after that camp I had to coach football. I remember getting back on the plane to Houston and thinking to myself, 'I don’t think I’ve had that impact in a short period of time in a long time.' The experience blew me away."

Roberts went back to Harvard, intent on taking the bar exam in July 2007 and then evaluating his coaching options. But he got a call from Herman Edwards, then coach of the Kansas City Chiefs. Roberts had sent a letter to the head coach and defensive coordinator of all 32 NFL teams, and 50 college teams asking for a chance. A friend of his from Texas was working for the Chiefs organization at the time and vouched for him.

Edwards offered Roberts a job as a training camp intern. The first day of camp was the second day of the bar exam. Roberts never said a word to Edwards, but asked his father for advice.

"He said, 'Listen. If you're going to coach, you need to coach,'" Roberts recalled. "You don’t want him to question your interest level."

He got on a plane and went to Kansas City, and never took the bar.

"I don’t think I would have arrived at the decision to become a coach had I not gone to law school," Roberts said. "I don’t see it as a waste in time or money. I feel the process of being at Harvard and learning more about myself enabled me to take a chance. So I really do believe it was a necessary step."

After Kansas City, Roberts became an assistant with the Lions but still kept alive his hope of coaching college football. He ran into Holgorsen in Arizona before kickoff of the national championship game in January. Roberts congratulated him on the new job at West Virginia, and the two caught up.

A short time later, Holgorsen was in need of a receivers coach and called Roberts, who jumped at the opportunity.

Now, in addition to coaching, Roberts also is going to teach a seminar class in the spring in the honors college on speech as a leadership tool at critical moments in history. Roberts was putting the finishing touches on his syllabus this summer, and has included speeches by Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.