The second practice of training camp hasn’t even started yet, but Kevin Patullo is more nervous than he was during the Super Bowl.

The Philadelphia Eagles’ passing game coordinator walks onto the practice field and pauses a few times to have a version of the same conversation with a handful of different people. The topic is no surprise to anyone who knows Patullo. His daughter, Lauren, just might be the coolest athlete on the team.

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Patullo’s audience nods along and smiles as he holds his hands about 3 feet apart, demonstrating the distance of a few missed putts. Had those gone in, Lauren might have shot a 68. See, she’s down in Pinehurst, N.C., playing in the U.S. Kids Golf World Teen Championship, a three-day tournament for girls 15-18. After firing a 1-under 71, Lauren is one stroke off the lead and one of only four players under par.

She turned 15 only a month ago.

For the rest of the day, when he’s not watching Jalen Hurts throw to A.J. Brown or shuffling through practice film or sitting in meetings, Patullo will be anxiously awaiting shot-by-shot text message updates from his wife. Welcome back to football-season fatherhood.

A week earlier, father and daughter arrive at their country club in South Jersey for another day of practice. As has become customary, they’re wearing matching outfits, with Lauren in a light blue skirt and black top and Kevin in black shorts with a light blue polo.

Lauren is fresh off a third-place finish in a tournament outside Philadelphia, but there are some things to clean up before the trip down to North Carolina. Primarily, they’re here to work on her swing path, to make sure her takeaway isn’t too far to the inside. On the range, she begins by hitting a few wedges to warm up. Then Kevin hands her a practice tool — a plastic mat with three color-coded lines designed to help cross-check the takeaway. Lauren places ball after ball on a dimple in the middle of the mat and thwacks away. Behind her, Kevin watches intently, occasionally recording video of her swing.

“That was perfect. Yeah, here, come look. Down the yellow, down the yellow, perfect. Your legs were pretty quiet, but we’re not really worried about legs right now. Look how much you dropped it underneath. Hit one more with a quieter leg. But we’re just working on path. Can’t work on two things at once. Just work on one thing. Now your path is OK, so now try your legs.”

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There are a few different versions of the Lauren-as-golf-phenom origin story. Kevin’s a very good golfer in his own right, with about a five handicap honed over the course of a coaching career working for golf nuts like Mike Stoops, Herm Edwards and Chan Gailey. Lauren had always been a good athlete, standing out in basketball as a 6-year-old, then playing as the only girl in the flag football league when the Patullos lived in Texas. When Kevin landed a job as the wide receivers coach for the Colts, they moved into a golf community outside Indianapolis. Lauren went to golf camp that summer as a way to make friends, and the instructors politely suggested she might be a natural.

The inciting incident in Lauren’s memory was going to an LPGA event nearby, where Mariajo Uribe gifted Lauren her golf bag.

Either way, Lauren and Kevin agree her game really jumped during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when they had nothing better to do than spend the day on the golf course together. She enrolled in a few tournaments once things began to open up and performed well enough that Kevin and his wife, Nichole, realized that golf was about to become the thing they organized their lives around. So ingrained was that understanding that when Nick Sirianni brought Patullo with him on the flight from Indianapolis to Philadelphia after he was hired as the Eagles’ head coach in February 2021, Nichole called to say she had already found a house on a golf course.

(Bo Wulf / The Athletic)

After Lauren cycles through her irons, Kevin unwraps the plastic from the other wrinkle in today’s outing, a brand new 7-wood that should help compensate for a growing gap in her bag. “All of a sudden,” as Lauren says, she started hitting her 5-wood 240 yards this summer, which left nothing she could hit between about 200 and 230 yards. The new club will help fill that hole. After a few swings with the new toy and some thunderous launches from her driver, the Patullos head to the tee.

The first hole at Laurel Creek is a dogleg left over water that evokes the 18th hole at Pebble Beach and offers a classic risk-reward. Cover the deepest part of the pond and you’ll have a second shot of 100 yards or so into the green. Play it safe to the middle of the fairway, and it’s more like 150. Kevin pounds a majestic drive high into the air, straight ahead on the conservative line and through the fairway, leaving him with about 130 yards in. Lauren’s tee shot looks like it might border on too aggressive until her powerful draw ekes over the water into the rough about 90 yards from the hole. She settles for a tap-in par and Dad three-putts for bogey.

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Usually there’s some kind of carrot involved when the two of them play. Win the head-to-head match and she might earn a new polo she’s been eyeing. But Kevin is only jumping in to play a few holes today because he’s here to coach. Also, his shoulder is a little banged up from sleeping on a pull-out couch two weeks ago so Lauren could sleep well on the hotel bed — a little too on the nose as far as football coach injuries go.

Over the course of nine holes, a few things become clear. One, which should have already been obvious, is how natural Patullo is as a golf coach. As they approach almost every shot, he asks Lauren to think through how the lie or the wind or the stance is likely to affect how the ball will come out. They love the tournaments when he’s able to caddy, but those are few and far between. When it matters, she’ll be on her own.

The most excited Coach Patullo gets all afternoon is when Lauren finds her ball in the bunker on the par-four fourth hole.

“Oh, you’re in a rake line!” he says before they talk things over. “It’s sitting down. So what kind of edge do you need on the club? Do you wanna open it? Shut it? Think about it. … Test it with your feet. And then where do you wanna miss on this hill?”

Lauren tries to close the club face a bit and hit the ball square, but it comes out hot and skitters into the rough past the back edge of the green.

“This is good,” Patullo says. “This has never happened before. Put it back there. It’s hard as a rock, so play it more like a pitch shot than you would an actual bunker shot.”

Try No. 2 is much better.

“See? Look at that. You’re taking a divot now. Does that make sense? You gotta remember that one, ’cause that’s never happened.”

As natural as Patullo is as a coach, the same holds true when he flips the switch to proud dad. The two of them are so similar in disposition and competitiveness that the family jokingly refers to Lauren as “Kevina.” Everything going on here feels very much about following Lauren’s passion, not pushing her toward his. And while Kevin and Lauren would be close without golf, everyone acknowledges that golf has made them closer, given them a shared language.

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Just listen to the back and forth as Kevin tells the story of how she qualified for the World Championships by winning a New Jersey state tournament last fall during the Eagles’ bye week, despite her chipping in for nine to lose the lead with four holes to go.

“We had two or three birdies, got into a playoff and then birdied the first playoff hole.”

“Yes, yes, now I remember that one. I hit my driver really far …”

“You crushed it. In the rain.”

“In the rain. And then I hit my, is this the one with the hybrid?”

“The hybrid on the green, over the water.”

“Hit my hybrid, over the water …”

“She said, ‘I’m going for it.’ I said, ‘Here you go.'”

“‘I’m going for it.'” Then I’m watching it, ‘Come on, come on, come on. Yes!'”

“She walked it down the fairway.”

“And then he showed me a video afterward of Tiger doing that.”

“It was the President’s Cup.”

“I love that one.”

“It was pretty cool.”

(Courtesy of the Patullo family)

If there is a problem Patullo is navigating with Lauren these days, it’s trying to figure out when to be what. There are so many parallels between the way he works with Lauren and the way he works with stars like Hurts and Brown. Quizzing her on how the ball is likely to come out of a rake line is no different than testing Hurts on what he’s supposed to do when play X is called and the defensive coverage is Y. But Patullo never has to worry about also being Hurts’ father.

“He’s so good at being a coach and he’s a great dad too,” Nichole says, “but when you jell the two together, when do you take on that coaching role and when do you switch it up? And so he’s learning how to read her. … Does she want your advice on something or does she just want you to listen, to be able to vent?”

Once football season starts again, he won’t get to be as much of either.

“Right away when you meet Lauren, she is just like, not shy, not timid,” says Jason Kelce, himself the father of three young daughters. “She has this outgoing personality. It’s infectious. She’s such a genuine joy to be around.”

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Nichole chuckles when she explains having been blessed with two extroverts for children, with Lauren’s younger brother Logan cut from the same cloth. But the Pattulos’ lifestyle has also made social bravery a necessity. In her 15 years, Lauren has lived in Kansas City, Mo.; Buffalo, N.Y.; Nashville, Tenn.; Northern New Jersey; College Station, Texas; Indianapolis and now outside Philadelphia.

“Whether she was born this way or just because of moving so much, she has been able to go into any room, be around any grown-up, little kid, kids her age, and adapt to any environment she’s put into,” Nichole says. “She’s just kind of like, ‘I’m Lauren and I’m here. Oh, you’re a professional athlete? Cool. I’m going to speak to you and carry a conversation and find something to talk to you about.'”

Few are as smitten with Lauren as Mike Quick, the former Pro Bowl wide receiver who has been the Eagles’ radio analyst for over 25 years and is among the more golf-obsessed people around the team.

“I love that kid,” he says one day laughing. “Here’s what I love about her: When she walks on the golf course, she thinks she’s the best. She’s got the swag. And she already has the mindset, I believe, of a professional.”

If there is a distinction between golf automatons and athletes who golf, Lauren is very much the latter. Her swing is so powerful that it often leads her front foot into a small jump, à la Lexi Thompson, her first favorite golfer (they both carry ladybug trinkets in their golf bag). Somehow, starting to play golf at 10 makes Lauren something of a late bloomer on the junior golf circuit. Her outsized enthusiasm occasionally contrasts with the stereotypically staid golf course atmosphere.

Lauren’s Instagram is full of videos from tournaments of unleashing a club twirl after a monster tee shot or fist-pumping a made putt. When asked for her favorite part of playing golf, she answers as if she was media trained by “No Laying Up.”

“My favorite part of playing?” she says. “Being juiced and pumped up when I hit a good shot. And then making a long putt in front of everybody. Just, like, making good shots and then giving the juice that like no one has. Everybody I watch is like (shoulders slumped) and then I’m like, ‘Yeah!'”

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She’s wired to embrace the moment. In town with the rest of the family for Dad’s work during the Waste Management Phoenix Open in February, Lauren followed Ryan Fitzpatrick, who played for Patullo in Buffalo, during the Wednesday pro-am. On the famous stadium-seating par-three 16th, Fitzpatrick invited her to hit a shot. Using someone else’s clubs, she smoothly striped the ball to within 15 feet in front of tens of thousands of onlookers.

Nurture-wise, it’s easy to see how the privilege of being the daughter of an NFL coach has served her well. Perhaps her swagger is imbued by spending so much time around professional athletes. Last year, after she advanced through a qualifying round of the Drive, Chip and Putt, she surprised Patullo at practice to share the good news and ended up breaking down the team huddle. All the time, players like Brown, Kelce and Hurts share messages of encouragement for her journey.

Her goals are lofty. With Lauren’s freshman year in high school on the horizon, the Patullos know the demands of Dad’s job mean she won’t be able to play in every elite tournament she’s qualified for. Logan’s not old enough to stay home alone. Plus, nobody wants to miss another Eagles playoff run. Maybe, in the long run, that will mean fewer opportunities to compete against the other top Division I hopefuls. Or maybe it will attract the programs that view her as having untapped upside. And while right now she’s still a 15-year-old kid who also loves drawing and playing basketball and journaling and reading everything from dystopian fiction to “The Summer I Turned Pretty” (on audiobook with Mom during a recent road trip), no one in the family seems to shy away from what might be at the end of the rainbow.

“She has all the ability in the world to be on the LPGA Tour,” Patullo says. “That’s what she wants. And I think a lot of that comes from being around professional athletes. That’s what she sees as fun.

“And that’s where all the players, when they talk to her, they always joke, like, ‘She’s one of us. She’s screwed up.’ It’s kind of fun.”

Time for the bad news. After that opening-round 71, Lauren showed up for the second day of competition at Pinehurst primed to play in the final group and prove herself against the older competition. But some days you just don’t have it, and after six straight pars to open the round, she shot two-over on the front nine, suffered an uncharacteristic eight on the 10th hole and finished with an 81 that took her out of contention to win. A 76 in Round 3 left her in a tie for 38th out of 116 golfers in the field.

In Philadelphia, Kevin was hurting from a distance. The text messages were dire, and it killed him not to be there.

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NFL coaches are paid well to do something they love. But the lifestyle and schedule that comes with the job have a trickle-down effect on family life. For at least half the year, Nichole is something of a single parent, although the support system among the families of other Eagles coaches helps. All those late nights during the fall are why Patullo feels like the summer break is his opportunity to squeeze a year of parenting into six weeks.

Patullo and Sirianni talk often about the deleterious effects of the profession on their ability to simply be there as parents. Sirianni’s oldest son is younger than Lauren but looks like he might be a pretty good baseball player. Sirianni is going to miss a lot of games, just like Patullo is going to miss some of Lauren’s big tournaments and plenty of Logan’s football games. Though Lauren works with a different golf coach during football season, she still sends Dad videos from her practice on the range. It’s just that he might not respond with feedback until she’s already gone home. He compensates by drawing renditions of her favorite childhood cartoons onto her golf balls, just like she used to stick ladybug stickers on his work binders. Little reminders of love in absentia.

At the Eagles’ facility, Patullo is office neighbors with Tracy Rocker, the defensive line coach whose son Kumar was a two-time first-round pick in the MLB Draft after a standout career at Vanderbilt. Rocker likes to emphasize the importance of making sure the game is still fun for Lauren. He also understands the specific helplessness of having to parent from a distance.

“Him and I talk about it all the time,” Patullo says. “It’s hard. You’re trying to help them but you don’t really know what’s going on.”

Since he entered coaching as a graduate assistant at South Florida in 2003, Patullo has never been employed by the same team or university for more than three consecutive seasons. Good and bad, the profession is transient. As he enters his third year with the Eagles, another playoff run would likely vault him into consideration for a bigger job elsewhere, be it full-time offensive coordinator or head coach. The clock is ticking. As if navigating high school isn’t hard enough.

(Bo Wulf / The Athletic)

Back in North Carolina, Lauren was crushed. After that first round, she thought she could taste victory. She wanted to prove she could be the best. The feelings sounded all too familiar to Patullo, who thought immediately of the reaction of his players in the locker room following the loss in Super Bowl LVII. Over the phone, he tried to convey that similarity to Lauren.

Sirianni laughed the other day when Patullo explained how much of the team’s core messaging is ingrained in Lauren, all the way down to the Dawg Mentality towel on her golf bag. But now was not the time.

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“Dad,” Lauren snapped over the phone. “I don’t want to hear about the Super Bowl right now!”

Everyone’s still learning.

(Illustration: Sean Reilly / The Athletic; photos courtesy of the Patullo family)

“The Football 100,” the definitive ranking of the NFL’s best 100 players of all time, goes on sale this fall. Preorder it here.

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