LOTHIAN, Md. — Ben Jones Lane is private and dirt, and as it tumbles further into rural Anne Arundel County, Md., it leaves the strip malls of neighboring Prince George’s County — home to the Washington Commanders — behind. Washington, D.C., just more than a half an hour by car, falls further back still.One stifling afternoon earlier this month, Daronte Jones pulled his 2020 Porsche 911 onto the bumps and the gravel. He has been making this drive his whole life. He slowed down to look at the street sign.“Ben Jones was my grandfather’s uncle,” Daronte Jones said, fully at a stop. “Or … great uncle? No, uncle. His uncle.”The Jones clan is both unwieldy and tight. Daronte Jones lived with his mother Darlene — the second-oldest of Calvert and Inez Jones’s seven children — on the Jones’ tobacco farm until he was in third grade. Aunts, uncles and cousins lived in houses strewn across 100 acres.“I hated farm life,” he said. Still, he knows it shaped him.Jones is a football coach. The life of a football coach is, by nature, itinerant. He is 47. He has slept under his desk and in his car. He has coached in Maryland (Bowie State) and Montreal (Alouettes). He has coached in the Pac-12 (UCLA), the Big Ten (Wisconsin) and the Mountain West (Hawaii). He has coached at four stops in Louisiana alone (Nicholls State, a pair of high schools and LSU with the big boys). He has coached NFL teams by sea (Dolphins) and by land (Bengals, Vikings).In a career that spans 26 years, he has moved 14 times. His permanent mailing address through it all: the little house of Calvert and Inez Jones on Ben Jones Lane, tucked away in rural Maryland.“For the longest time, I would move, and I would never unpack because I was always planning for the next job,” Jones said, standing in the yard in front of his grandparents’ house. “You never really felt like you were settled. You got boxes everywhere, and then when you do unpack, now you’re packing up again.“It just never felt like you’re home anywhere.”Jones took a few strides. Some of Calvert Jones’ ducks wandered through the yard, past the pigeon cages, not far from where the basketball court once sat, a few waddles from where Calvert used to keep his pigs, around the corner from Inez’s manicured walkway to the front steps, lined with flowers.Daronte Jones’ 14th move took him from Minneapolis, where he was the defensive backs coach of the Minnesota Vikings, to suburban Washington, where he is now the defensive coordinator of the Commanders. His new home field, Northwest Stadium, is around the corner from the elementary and middle schools where he first played football. He and his wife moved to McLean, Va., a short drive to the Commanders’ training facility in Ashburn.It took more than a quarter of a century. But now, when Calvert Jones cooks for the extended family and Inez welcomes them on Sunday afternoons — when the cars are lined up and down Ben Jones Lane — Daronte Jones can join his cousins and aunts and uncles and his mom. After all the time away, he’s back home.“Here,” he said, “we unpacked.”Minicamp takeaways: Commanders have built their foundationNicki JhabvalaAs the Commanders prepare for a training camp that opens Wednesday with first-time coordinators on both sides of the ball — David Blough takes over for Kliff Kingsbury on offense, Jones for the fired Joe Whitt Jr. on defense — head coach Dan Quinn was asked what jumped out about Jones in his first few months on the job.“Just the attention to detail,” Quinn said.“Details kind of separate you from being average and being really good,” said Ken Norton Jr., the Commanders’ veteran linebackers coach who is working with Jones for the first time. “And he knows his details. He understands that we need to understand what the details are of each and every position and each and every coverage.”For Jones, that comes from a lifetime in coaching, from the countless mentors and peers who have provided lessons along the way. But it also comes from all that time spent on Ben Jones Lane, where Calvert Jones put young Daronte to work. Calvert is now 86, a carpenter by trade. That deck off his house? Daronte has sweat equity in it, working by Calvert’s side.The list of chores was endless and all over the map. Daronte toiled in the tobacco fields, since plowed under. Calvert raised beagles — maybe 40 at a time — to help him hunt rabbits. Daronte not only had to help build the dog houses, but was tasked with dragging a pet rabbit through the woods, lacing the trail with its scent, so the beagle puppies could learn to track it down and flush it out.All those dogs, they had metal dishes in front of their kennels. Daronte’s task: Fill them with water. Simple enough.“I didn’t clean out the water pan,” Daronte said.Calvert Jones had standards.“He’s like, ‘You see this green stuff from the trees? You gotta get that out of there. They can’t drink that,’” Daronte said. “I’m like, ‘Yeah they can. They’re dogs.’”Calvert dumped the water out of a bowl. He reached up to an overhanging tree branch, ripped off some leaves and used them as a rag to clean out the bowl. He then filled it with water, proper for his beloved beagles.“For me, when I was young, it was like, it doesn’t really matter — you know what I mean?” Jones said. “But what he really taught me then: Everything matters.”Daronte Jones stands in front of the apartment buildings where he once lived near the Washington Commanders’ home stadium. (Barry Svrluga / The Athletic)Over the phone, Brian Flores, the well-respected defensive coordinator of the Vikings, ticked off the virtues and talents of Daronte Jones, his former defensive backs coach. He’s creative, not afraid to test the limits, has a great way of relating to players — all the stuff you’d expect a boss to say when extolling the virtues of an understudy who advanced.Then he landed on a greater truth.“We call him the Renaissance Man,” Flores said.The Renaissance Man?“I mean, he’s the best-dressed guy in the building,” Flores said. “He’s got the best bags and luggage. He’s the most traveled. He has been all over the world.”As Jones drove that Porsche 911 through the back roads of Maryland, wearing a white linen shirt and black shorts, he was freshly back from his first real visit to Japan. He took in the crowds at Shibuya Crossing in the heart of Tokyo. He carefully selected his seat on the bullet train to Osaka so he’d be positioned for the best view of Mount Fuji. Alas, it was clouded over.Another time. Because there’s always another trip. Jones tries to leave the country twice a year.“I love seeing people at their best, in their own surroundings,” he said. “It just opens up so many different experiences. You know, sometimes when we’re here, we can be absorbed by — you can call it the rat race.”