There was no real game plan for the young Parker Hawks when Todd Davis decided to throw himself into coaching his kids’ youth-league basketball team a few years back.

They had no real philosophies. No book of strategy. His greatest task was simply to get his group to focus. And this was a task, because these were 5- and 6-year-olds who blew around like dandelion seeds.

This is where Davis, a Super Bowl winner and defensive anchor with the Denver Broncos, had his coaching trial-by-fire. It didn’t come on high school grass. It didn’t come on college turf. It came, first, in dingy school gymnasiums in Parker, where his Hawks played in a league that mandated players wear wristbands that determined which member of the opposing team they’d guard.

Approximately 80% of his time, Davis recalled to The Denver Post on Thursday, was spent getting his team to ward off back-cuts.

Tommy, get your wristband!

Jimmy, he’s cutting to the basket!

“It’s very different, dealing with young 5- and 6-year-olds,” Davis said, “but I grew to love it.”

A few short years after helming those Hawks, Davis is rejoining the Broncos in a quality-control role on the defensive staff, and only time will tell which role proves more difficult. It’s the former Denver linebacker’s first official coaching role in football — at any level.

But after joining the Broncos for 2024’s training camp under the NFL’s Bill Walsh Diversity Coaching Fellowship, Davis reached back out to the staff following a slew of coaching changes, including the firing of inside linebackers coach Greg Manusky in late January. He was told a quality-control role might be available, Davis remembered.

He went in and interviewed with general manager George Paton and head coach Sean Payton, who coached Davis briefly as a rookie with New Orleans in 2014. Now he will work under defensive coordinator Vance Joseph, who started Davis in 2017 and ’18 when he was Denver’s head coach.

“I don’t think there’s a better place I would want to be,” Davis said, “or another place I would want to be.”

It’s a unique path to an NFL staff. After the end of his NFL career in 2020, Davis went into real estate. For the past two years, he’s served as a host on the local DNVR Broncos Podcast. He, in fact, never thought of going into coaching during his playing career, where he amassed 63 starts and two seasons of 100-plus tackles with the Broncos.

But nothing about Davis’ path in football, dating back to his earliest days, has been conventional. He played at Paraclete High, tucked in Lancaster, Calif., a private school that’s produced exactly two NFL players: former Cowboys safety Darian Thompson and Davis. He went undrafted out of Sacramento State and was waived by the Saints during his rookie year before the Broncos plucked him off the waiver wire.

For all those reasons, ultimately, former trainer Augustine Agyei pitched an idea to Davis toward the end of his playing career: come work with his team at Landow Performance to mentor linebackers for NFL draft prep. He worked with Landow for three years after his retirement and showed an ability to break down drills as a “student of the game,” Agyei recalled.

“I don’t think that’s surprised me at all,” Agyei said Thursday when asked about Davis landing on an NFL staff. “Because for me, when I think of — just looking at his path, in order to be undrafted and take that path up there, you have to do all the little things right in order to get noticed.”

He’ll get more notice, now, on a Denver defensive staff that’s elevated former quality control analyst Isaac Shewmaker to a linebackers role after Manusky and former outside linebackers coach Michael Wilhoite were fired this offseason. Davis will likely work in part with the back end of the defense and the LBs in Denver, he told The Post on Thursday before the Broncos’ staff was officially announced. It’s a role he has some familiarity with after helping CU’s linebackers during spring football in 2024.

Davis was happy in real estate. But he missed a locker room. He missed competition. There’s “nothing like it,” he said. So he found himself mentoring the Hawks and targeting the fellowship with the Broncos, and a desire was born to give back to younger athletes.

“I wasn’t the most talented player in the world,” Davis reflected. “But I think I just worked hard and was given some great tools by my coaches.

“So, I look at kids all the time who are more athletic, faster, bigger, stronger than me,” he continued. “If I can just give you the tools I was given, I know I can help you to be your best.”