How Dave Ragone changed Dean Pees’ recruiting tactics when he was a college coach

And so, a nervous, teenage Ragone walked into Pees’ office and told him no. For Pees, it wasn’t necessarily a shock to the system, but he was taken aback.

Here sat a Cleveland kid who just told him he loved his visit, loved the staff and loved what Pees was doing with the program.

All good things, right? Well, yes, up until the point Ragone said that love wasn’t enough and he was heading to Louisville.

“This would have been a coup for us to get this guy out of Cleveland,” Pees recalled. “… This guy loved it here. He was a high-profile guy. He liked his visit. He liked the school. He liked the staff and he still didn’t choose us. What’s that tell me?”

It told Pees that reputations sometimes carry an unwanted weight in recruiting.

When Pees asked Ragone the simple question as to why he chose Louisville, Pees said Ragone’s answer stemmed from Kent State’s reputation at the time. They weren’t a winning program, and hadn’t been for a while. Case in point: The year before Pees took over as the head coach, Kent State had a three-win season in 1997. That was the most wins for Kent State since 1988.

So, when Pees began steering the program, everyone knew the recovery process was going to be slow. Pees needed a program-changer, and he hoped it would be a well-known Cleveland kid from his own state. He’d hoped it would be Ragone, but it wasn’t because – as Pees said – Ragone knew too much about Kent State.

He’d read the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He saw the normally negative commentary about the program. And when he walked down the hall of his high school and kids would ask him where he was going to college and Ragone responded with either Kent State or Louisville, the first response was always that of furrowed brow and an exasperated question of, “Kent?!”

Because of this revelation, Pees changed his recruiting tactics.

“We were an Ohio school and tried to recruit nothing but Ohio, tried to recruit a lot of Ohio kids, which we still did. But we’re fighting Toledo, Miami of Ohio,…