On January 17, 2024, Stony Brook football and head coach Billy Cosh announced the hiring of DJ Gillins to the program.
Gillins, who will take over as the running backs coach, comes from Long Island University where he had been the wide receivers coach since 2022. He also had previous coaching stops at Utah State (2019), Arkansas (2019-20), Utah (2020-21) and Iowa Western Community College (2021-22). He worked with wide receivers during all of his coaching stops, with his first full-time role coming at IWCC.
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He was a quarterback at four different schools in his college career, playing at Wisconsin (2014-15), Pearl River C.C. in Mississippi (2016), SMU (2017) and UTSA (2018).
A three-star recruit, Gillins was rated as the No. 3 dual-threat quaterback and No. 17 overall player in Fla. in the class of 2017.
The Jacksonville, Fla. native earned a bachelor's degree in sociology from SMU in 2018.Â
