Sources: North Texas to hire Justin Owens as new Director of Recruiting
North Texas is set to hire longtime Dallas-Fort Worth high school coach Justin Owens as its new Director of Recruiting, sources tell Rivals.
Under new head coach Eric Morris, North Texas has shown an early emphasis on recruiting the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, and the hiring of Owens, also known as Coach O, reflects that agenda early on in Denton.
Owens, who served as the running backs coach, special teams coordinator and recruiting coordinator at Ferris High School for the past two years, has a deep history as a coach and evaluator around the Metroplex.
His football career started as an offensive lineman at Dallas Kimball where he graduated in 1999. He then played at Cisco Junior College and West Texas A&M before graduating from the latter in 2004.
His coaching career started at Dallas Spruce out of college as the offensive line coach from 2004-07 before being elevated to offensive coordinator in 2008. Owens then served as the running backs coach and recruiting coordinator at Dallas Madison from 2009-10 before returning to his alma mater at Kimball to be the offensive coordinator from 2010-12. His last stop in his first stint as a coach was at Prime Prep where he served as the offensive line coach from 2013-14.
Owens then took seven years off as a high school coach to instead host "Offertunity" exposure camps around the state of Texas for high school athletes where he helped garner exposure for thousands of young players.
In that time, he also served a brief stint as the offensive coordinator for DFW 7-on-7 power Texas Flex where he coached All-Americans such as Evan Stewart, Garrett Nussmeier, Johntay Cook, Andrew Mukuba and dozens more.
In his return to coaching, Owens was hired at Ferris in 2021 and will leave the Yellowjackets after helping to improve rushing totals in each of his two seasons.
Owens is most known around the state of Texas for his strong relationships with high school coaches, especially in the DFW Metroplex. The hire gives Eric Morris and his staff an immediate footprint in the recruiting hotbed that is DFW while also providing instantaneous assistance towards filling the 2023 class for the Mean Green.