GAINESVILLE, Fla. — An after-practice session with reporters keeps assistant coach Jay Bateman at Florida’s indoor practice facility past 7 p.m. The sports information staff puts out a call for a golf cart to ferry him back to his stadium office, but Bateman prefers to get in more steps. “No worries, I’ll walk.”

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On the stroll, there’s chit-chat about his years at West Point, where defenses composed of undersized overachievers demanded that every position be schematically sound. About a coaching career that saw him climb from Division III to the Southern Conference to the MAC and most recently the ACC. And about fatherhood: His wife and two children remain in North Carolina, finishing out the school year before the family relocates in June. During the interim, Bateman is digging into 17-hour days getting to know his new football family, the Gators inside linebackers.

And they’re getting to know him.

Sixth-year senior Ventrell Miller joked about initially misjudging his new position coach, the 5-foot-9 dude with the middle-aged paunch. “He’s going to be mad at me,” Miller said, “but he’s not the best-looking guy.”

Considering that Miller’s previous mentors in Gainesville were former major-college linebackers — Randy Shannon won a national title at Miami, and Christian Robinson started for Georgia — it’s no surprise the eye test wasn’t as kind to Bateman, who played non-scholarship football at tiny Division III Randolph-Macon College in Virginia.

But through their high-level discussions about mike linebacker responsibilities, coverages and alignments, Miller and “Coach B” quickly established a rapport. One that has room for good-natured needling.

“He knows what he’s talking about,” Miller said. “He has definitely brought a lot of swagger to the room.”

Swagger comes from confidence and command, which Bateman radiates during spring practice. “THAT AIN’T IT! THAT AIN’T IT!” he barked after two linebackers gave a half-hearted collision in a drill meant to sharpen their technique for shedding blocks. “No brother-in-law stuff out here. No treaties,” Bateman said. “You need to make each other better!”

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He gave Diwun Black the nickname “Celebration” for picking off a scrimmage pass and then whoofing so long afterward that he was a few seconds late arriving to the next drill station.

There’s pace to keep, expectations to enforce, a culture to grow, because swagger without underpinning is merely an empty word. With a week to go before the Orange and Blue spring game, Bateman appreciates the mutual buy-in.

“I walk off the practice field and just say, ‘Wow, these guys are grinding!’ They are attacking the process, and that’s what has impressed me the most.”

For the first time in 16 seasons, Bateman is not a coordinator. His three-year stint calling the defenses for Mack Brown at North Carolina ended with the Duke’s Mayo Bowl loss in which South Carolina piled up 543 yards.

Bateman’s first year in Chapel Hill showed promise, as his unit improved from 93rd to 50th in yards allowed per play. But the Tar Heels regressed the last two seasons, to 74th and 105th. The trend in scoring defense showed the same trajectory — from 44th (23.7 points allowed) to 64th (29.4) to 105th (32.1). The on-field production slipped even though Bateman and the Tar Heels made serious strides in defensive recruiting. He played a pivotal role in signing five-stars Keeshawn Silver and Travis Shaw, plus top-200 prospects Ja’Qurious Conley, Desmond Evans, Jahvaree Ritzie, Kedrick Bingley-Jones, RaRa Dillworth and Malaki Hamrick.

Proven coaches tend to find good landing spots, and Bateman, 48, was out of work for fewer than 10 days when the Florida opportunity materialized. Defensive coordinator Patrick Toney facilitated the connection — having grown familiar with Bateman when the two discussed concepts over Zoom calls during the pandemic — and head coach Billy Napier approved the move.

“This is one of the top handful of programs in all of college football,” Bateman said. “After I talked to Coach Napier the first time, I was really fired up.”

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It helps to have advocates such as Army head coach Jeff Monken, who remains fired up about Bateman’s work as coordinator from 2014 through 2018, which forged a historic turnaround at the academy.

“He did an unbelievable job for us here,” Monken told The Athletic. “In the 12 years I’ve been a head coach, there’s nobody I leaned on more than Jay Bateman.”

During that span, the Black Knights started 6-18 amid a ground-up rebuild so daunting that Bateman said, “It was the worst team in the history of college football. We lost to Yale.”

They also lost to Fordham. But then came three consecutive winning seasons, capped by a 10-3 record in 2017 and an 11-2 finish in 2018. That year Army pitched a second-half shutout against Kyler Murray at Oklahoma before losing 28-21 in overtime. Bateman became a Broyles Award finalist, and the Knights made the postseason AP poll for only the second time since 1958.

Even three years after Bateman departed, his impact lingers heavily on the Army defense — same scheme, same terminology and several holdover players he signed. The narrow pool of recruits capable and willing to enroll at the service academies forces coaches to be equal parts Knute Rockne and Hercule Poirot.

“Jay saw the little things in players that got missed or ignored by other programs,” Monken said. “He has a knack for figuring out if a guy is a good fit. He’s one of the best recruiters I ever worked with, and if you can recruit here, you can recruit anywhere.”

Bateman contends there’s a relational aspect to recruiting that’s important whether a player is considering West Point, Elon, Ball State or the SEC.

“It’s about believing in a kid, and the really cool thing at Army is a lot of times it’s believing in a kid that nobody else believed in,” he said. “Here at Florida, you’ve got to get the kid to believe that you believe in him more than everybody else, because everybody else in the world wants the kids you’re recruiting.”

At North Carolina, he worked for a septuagenarian who broke into college coaching in 1974. Bateman’s new boss at Florida wasn’t born until 1979.

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Napier’s bandwidth looks impressive so far, the way he calmly processes daily decisions that range from trivial to gigantic. One minute it’s enacting a plan to improve athletic housing and the next he’s conveying that players’ back flaps should be covered by their jerseys at practice because that’s the rule for games.

“It might seem like a pebble or it might seem like a boulder, but if he identifies it as a problem, he attacks it,” Bateman said. “I think he is a stud. He’s super detailed. He has his hands in everything we do, and knows everything.

“I don’t think there’s anybody else like him.”

There’s a direct link to Nick Saban’s philosophy that a head coach should spend time coaching the coaches, and, especially during spring ball, Napier believes no detail is insignificant. Like telling Bateman as they watch practice cut-ups that a linebacker should be aligned one step over.

“Yeah, he challenges us,” Bateman said. “He challenges everybody in the organization every day.”

Challenges that are being passed down to the Gators inside linebackers, a group where two former top-75 recruits — junior Derek Wingo and redshirt freshman Scooby Williams — are trying to break through. There’s also the senior Black, a freakish athlete who was the top-ranked junior college recruit in the Class of 2021, and incoming four-star freshman Shemar James.

Out front, however, remain Miller and fifth-year senior Amari Burney, the duo that has combined for 83 appearances and 32 starts. Miller is back for an extra season after tearing his biceps in a Week 2 win at USF last September.

Regardless of where the depth chart stands currently, Bateman has a spring priority for the entire unit — cutting down on the missed tackles that plagued the defense in previous seasons.

“When I got here and looked at all the plays that they had played in their career, that was something that jumped out at me,” he said. “If you play linebacker in college football nowadays, you have to be an elite tackler. The great thing is we actually practice in such a way that we’re able to work on that correction, which is unique.”

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It’s part of setting the pace and raising expectations, so that come fall, the swagger will be real.

(Top photo: Isabella Marley / University of Florida Athletics)

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