New University of Akron football coach Terry Bowden wasn’t sure of the number. He only knows that he’s trying to rectify another Zips’ shutout of sorts.
As he embarks on rebuilding a program that went 2-22 under former coach Rob Ianello, one of Bowden’s first challenges is to get Northeast Ohio players to consider UA again.
“We’re going to find out what went wrong,” Bowden said during a 40-minute interview in his office last week. “In Summit, Stark, Portage and Medina [counties] we’ve seen 20 guys have official visits to Kent and not one of them has a visit to Akron. We’ll find out if that was Akron not offering them or them not wanting to visit. But that’s got to change.
“It could be 18 [players], it could be 25. The fact is, they’re not visiting here and from what we’re hearing from the schools they weren’t asked. We’ve got to go ask a little bit more, either for forgiveness or to give us a chance. We’re going to ask for whatever we need to ask for.”
A New York native, Ianello made a name for himself as the recruiting coordinator at Notre Dame, Wisconsin and Arizona. But his low-key personality did not impress area athletes or coaches.
The Dec. 22 hiring of the high-energy Bowden has changed that. In a span of just a few minutes last Thursday, two young men stopped by the football office inquiring about walk-on tryouts, which are scheduled for 6:30 a.m. Feb. 15. That hadn’t happened in two years, the secretary said.
To help make UA a destination for recruits again, Bowden has divided 63 high schools in the aforementioned four counties among his nine full-time assistants. Each will have seven schools apiece that will be his year-round responsibility.
“We can’t recruit players 12 months, but you can recruit coaches 12 months,” Bowden said. “Our kids will go to the same schools as their kids, the same churches. I expect our coaches to become personal friends and neighbors with every one of those 63 schools.
“If we know the coaches and the assistant coaches, then we might know who the ninth- and 10th-graders are, those players down the road.”
Bowden is not going to ignore Cleveland or the rest of Ohio. But as he follows a model used at Florida State and at Ohio State by former coach Jim Tressel, Bowden wants to start with the four counties closest to UA.
Bowden was also eager to accept an invitation to speak at the 15th annual Ohio High School Football Coaches Association clinic Feb. 2-4 in Columbus. Bowden said the keynote speaker will be new Ohio State coach Urban Meyer, but he and UA defensive coordinator Chuck Amato will also be part of the program. Amato is a former coach at North Carolina State who spent 21 years as an assistant at Florida State under Bowden’s father, Bobby.
“We’re not the best coaches in the state, but we’re the new, interesting hires after Urban,” Terry Bowden said.
“We’ll take every one of our coaches and spend the night,” Bowden said of the coaches’ clinic. “They go out and do bud-boy things that Friday night and we want to be with ’em. Have a beer with ’em, have a good time with ’em and show we’re going to be a presence.”
Former UA and Auburn University President William Muse, director of the Dayton-based National Issues Forums Institute, remains a close friend of Bowden’s.
“Terry is a very good recruiter, very good with alumni groups and a very innovative coach,” Muse, who now lives in Cincinnati, said by phone last week. “I’ve suffered with the Zips the last few years, putting money into a new stadium, you’d like to put some great teams on the field and draw the fans in and develop a fan base. That’s hard to do when you’re not winning. I was very emotional about Terry coming. Terry is really the right combination of talents for Akron.
“Terry knows the business, knows how to do it. It’s just a matter of time until they get the talent on the field and begin to show results.”
The Zips have six oral commitments for signing day Feb. 1, all of whom enrolled in January. But Bowden realizes the Class of 2012 might not be fully filled. He seems ready to make that concession and dive in Feb. 2 to recruit the next class of players who will be with him for four or five years.
The Zips haven’t had a winning season since 2005, when they went 7-6 and lost to Memphis in the Motor City Bowl under former coach J.D. Brookhart. So Bowden knows what lies ahead. Before he went to Auburn, he built programs at Salem (W.Va.) and Samford (Ala.).
“You have to create a vision in your players, in the fans,” he said. “I’d like the people to get excited and that excitement to help us. You don’t have to go very far from Akron to touch a lot of very good football players.”
The effervescent Bowden, 55, who spent five years working as ABC’s New York studio college football analyst, would seem to be the perfect salesman to tout that vision. But Bowden doesn’t want to be thought of only in that light.
“I don’t think you have to be labeled as a salesman. You like to be thought of as an X-and-O technical football coach, which I believe because I call plays, I’m involved with football from the very ground level,” Bowden said after being introduced at halftime of a men’s basketball game Dec. 29. “Because my father was a coach, I went in the back of the car and listened to him speak. I took public-address classes in high school, I went to law school and to moot court. There were a lot of things I tried to do to help myself get in position where I could sell a program.
“The good recruiter, the good head coach has got a little bit of salesman in him.”
Marla Ridenour can be reached at mridenour@thebeaconjournal.com. Read her blog at http://marla.ohio.com/. Follow her on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/MarlaRidenour. Follow ABJ sports on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/sports.abj.
