EVANSTON-Northwestern will have new players at several positions during spring practice this year. That’s typical.

But what will be unusual about this spring practice that opens on Tuesday is that the Wildcats will also, for the first time in seven years, be breaking in some new coaches on the sideline.

There are three new faces on head coach Pat Fitzgerald’s staff this spring. Lou Ayeni is the new running backs coach and recruiting coordinator, Tim McGarigle is the new linebackers coach and Jeff Genyk is in the newly created position of special teams coordinator. In addition, former running backs coach Matt MacPherson is now the defensive backs coach and associate head coach.

Gone are longtime defensive backs coach Jerry Brown, who retired after 25 years with the Wildcats, and linebackers coach Randy Bates, who is now the defensive coordinator at Pittsburgh after 12 years in Evanston.

In all, four of the 10 coaches on Fitzgerald’s staff are in a new position this spring (the NCAA allowed each program a 10th assistant this year). You may need a roster to figure out who’s who.

All those moves represent a seismic shift for a staff that had been completely intact since 2011, the longest such streak in the nation.

One thing that will make the adjustment easier is that all three new coaches have strong ties to the program. Ayeni and McGarigle both played at Northwestern and were graduate assistants under Fitzgerald. Genyk was an assistant on Gary Barnett’s staff in the 1990s, when Fitzgerald played for the Wildcats.

“Lot of familiarity with them as people and how they coach and how they recruit,” said Fitzgerald during a conversation with media on the eve of spring practice. “Now (we are) just teaching them how we do things here.”

Of course, the new coaches could teach the holdover coaches a thing or two, as well.

“Anytime you have change, you have an opportunity to change whatever it is you’re doing so just scrubbing everything top to bottom that you can,” said Fitzgerald. “New faces, new ideas, so it’s kind of a collaboration between analyzing everything that we’re doing and how we can do it better, and also talking to them about some things that they’ve done at other places that they liked and could carry over.”

Many Northwestern fans have long advocated changes to Fitzgerald’s staff. Many thought that the staff had gotten stale over time and needed an influx of new strategies or tactics.

However, Fitzgerald minimized just how many new ideas come from new coaches. He says that, in general, assistant coaches learn more about what they don’t want to do at their next stop, rather than what they want to do.

“You’d be shocked at how much guys say – and I’m not talking about these three at all, because they loved their previous places – but when you talk to guys when you go to clinics, you always say, ‘What’s the best thing that you do?’ ‘Nothing.’ ‘If you were to be a head coach, what would you take with you?’ ‘Very little,’” said Fitzgerald, who completed his 12th season as NU’s coach.

“When I was a GA, you learn a lot more about what you wouldn’t do than what you would do. I think that’s probably any profession… You usually get the best highlights of what they enjoyed at their previous stops, so that’s productive because all three (of the new coaches) loved where they were at.”

Ayeni, who played running back and safety at Northwestern from 1999 to 2003 and then was a GA with the Wildcats from 2008-09, comes to Evanston after four years at Iowa State, where he was the associate head coach and running game coordinator for the last two years. He also coached at Toledo.

McGarigle, who still holds the NCAA record for career tackles with 545, was a linebacker at Northwestern from 2001-05 and a GA in 2011. He was a defensive quality control coach for the Green Bay Packers last season and before that spent one year at Illinois and four at Western Michigan as a linebackers coach.

Genyk coached linebackers, running backs, defensive backs and special teams at Northwestern from 1994-2003 and then came back as a quality control coach for one season in 2015. He was a head coach at Eastern Michigan for five years before assistant coaching stops at Cal, Nevada, Wisconsin and Vanderbilt.

Ayeni and McGarigle are both in their 30s, which could help relate to the teenagers they recruit. Another benefit is making the staff a little younger.

Was Fitzgerald’s goal to lower the age of the staff? “We couldn’t get any older!” he shot back.

“We were the oldest staff in the Big Ten last year. So from my first year being the youngest staff to last year being the oldest staff, it’s impossible to become any older. (But) no. Just trying to bring in the right fit.”