MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Veteran Mountaineer Sports Network analyst Dwight Wallace sat in my office the other day and told old recruiting stories from when he coached in Colorado.

He recalled the time he had a great home visit with Anthony Munoz and how difficult it was to get him away from USC, but he was unable to do so.

He said there have been countless times when he has made a huge effort to recruit a new player, only to watch as guys like John McKay, Woody Hayes or Bear Bryant, with one phone call, sign the man he had worked hard to recruit.

The late Bobby Bowden, who had great recruiting success at West Virginia and later at Florida State, once said of recruiting at WVU, “As soon as you cross that (state) line, you’re next. You’re not No. 1.”

Don Nehlen knew this immediately when he took over in 1980, so he quickly adjusted his approach and looked for hidden talents or players he felt could develop into great football players.

Unlike horseshoe throwing or hand grenades, coming second in recruitment won’t do you any good.

“Our 1988 team played for the national championship and we never had a single kid that was on any of the top 50 recruiting lists,” Nehlen once recalled. “Our 1993 team was probably on those lists, maybe Jake Kelchner, who came out of Notre Dame.”

“Coaches have to believe in what they see,” Nehlen said. “They have to believe in their own evaluation system. Hell, we played pretty good football at West Virginia and got a lot of kids into the pro league, and that was because we dug up a lot of kids that a lot of people didn’t want.”

Rich Rodriguez has also often taken this path.

“We have guys who aren’t stars but who have been pretty productive and have developed their games great,” he once said. “Pat White wasn’t a five-star recruit. We fought (to sign him), but nobody wanted him as a quarterback, and there are a lot of guys out there right now who would love to have Pat White as a quarterback.”

But sometimes it can be worth taking a certain risk, especially if you trust your instincts.

Recently, the celebrated redshirt freshman linebacker Josiah Trotterone of the most sought after players Neal Brown ever signed, mentioned his recruitment to West Virginia.

The Philadelphia resident was a nationally ranked prospect whose father, Jeremiah, was a four-time Pro Bowl player for the Philadelphia Eagles and whose older brother, Jeremiah Jr., was an established linebacker at Clemson.

Josiah received daily calls from Ohio State, Oregon, Notre Dame, Penn State, South Carolina and of course Clemson, to name a few.

And Jeff Koonz from West Virginia.

“The crazy thing is that West Virginia came along much later, after I had already been to a lot of these big schools, and I never thought I would end up here until Coach Koonz reached out to me and started texting me pretty regularly,” Trotter recalled.

Koonz, who has been on the hunt for players lately, admitted yesterday that sometimes the reward outweighs the risk of wasting a lot of time on a highly sought-after player who has no connection to WVU or the state of West Virginia.

Going after players like that requires a lot of stamina, strong instincts and self-confidence.

“Josiah was a kid that had a couple of different things going on,” Koonz explained yesterday. “First, some people were a little intimidated because of his dad and his brother and what is he going to become? (Josiah is) an excellent football player who played in a great, nationally recognized program at a very young age and played in national games.

“It was one of those deals where we had a connection with him early on,” Koonz recalled. “I called and he answered. One phone call turned into two phone calls and there was some continuity.”

“I think there may have been other discrepancies, for whatever reason, and some people probably thought he was going to Clemson, or some people thought he was going somewhere?” he said. “I didn’t hear about it, and he didn’t hear about it, and it just kind of worked out with the relationship that was built there. When he came to campus, which is to the benefit of our guys and players, West Virginia State and Morgantown, he came here and fell in love with the place.”

“He kept asking,” Trotter noted. “I visited and fell in love with the whole thing, the scheme, the coaches, the area and how the fans treated the team and what the WVU logo really means to the people of West Virginia. I really enjoyed seeing how Karl Joseph and (recently retired) Tavon Austin impacted this team and this state, and I want to do that too and really bring that back to West Virginia.”

Authenticity and genuineness are important in recruitment and begin with Neal Brown All of his assistant coaches and staff always showed these qualities when dealing with young talent.

“You know when they need or like you as a recruit, and you want to go where they need you, not just where they like you – or even want you,” Trotter explained. “They didn’t just like me, they needed me and wanted me. That was something that set them apart from everyone else.”

“I think that speaks to Coach Brown,” Koonz said. “You’re not going to win every recruiting battle, and you have to use your resources very wisely and cast the net very wide, but at the end of the day, it’s really, really hard to recruit 40 people. So you have to find the people that you have a connection with, and you have to find the people that check all the boxes, and yeah, you have to give it your all.”

He continued.

“You have to be willing to say, ‘Hey man, if we don’t get this right…’ and that’s part of recruiting. To be honest, that goes for several people in the room because we really narrow it down and we’ve done a really good job of trusting our evaluations in front of those people.

“Some guys are really hard to get and some aren’t, but at the end of the day they all met our criteria and they were all priorities in the recruiting process,” he said.

That includes some nationally recruited talent with no ties to West Virginia who are open-minded enough to hear about the great opportunities here at WVU, where they play in a power conference with a rabid fan base that loves to support winning football teams.

These are certainly great selling points, but it also requires a lot of thought and effort to attract players like Josiah Trotter, Wyatt Milum, Rodney Gallagher III and others here with many other options.

“I am extremely proud and happy to have them all here because a lot of work has gone into each and every one of them,” Koonz concluded.

No on-field activities are planned for today.

The Mountaineers will resume training on Friday and then play their second closed training game of the fall training camp on Saturday at Milan Puskar Stadium.