For Mark Stoops, Saturday is a homecoming away from home.
His hometown school, the Youngstown State Penguins, come to Kroger Field to play Stoops’ Kentucky Wildcats at noon on the SEC Network.
“I’m really proud that they’re coming in and I’m looking forward to it,” the UK head football coach said Monday. “I know how tough they are, what type of program (they are) and the history they have. They’re not going to be intimidated. That’s all good and there’s a connection there but at the end of the day, they’re coming in to beat us and play well. We have a job to do.”
There’s more to it than that, of course. Stoops was born July 9, 1967, in Youngstown. His father, Ron Sr., was the longtime defensive coordinator at Cardinal Mooney High School, where his brothers Bob, Mike and Ron Jr. also played before following their father into coaching. Ron Stoops Jr. coached special teams at Youngstown State before retiring in 2019.
Mark left to play his college football at Iowa. He spent three years as an athletics director and defensive backs coach at Nordonia High School in Macedonia, an hour from Youngstown, before launching his full-time college coaching career which led him to be Kentucky’s head coach in 2013.
Stoops may have left Youngstown, but Youngstown has not left Stoops. It doesn’t work that way, not with the Rust Belt town of 60,000 that sits 74 miles east of Cleveland.
“Growing up in Youngstown has much to do with the identity of myself and anybody that comes from there,” Stoops said Monday. “It’s a very unique place, great pride coming from that area, and a toughness, it’s the Rust Belt, blue-collar, steel-mill town, very fortunate to grow up there. It was a fantastic place.”
Saturday is not just a reunion for Mark and Mike Stoops. Associate head coach Vince Marrow and assistant coach Frank Buffano both played at Cardinal Mooney, as did director of player development Courtney Love. Buffano coached at Youngstown State.
“I think it’s the culture, where we come from,” said Marrow on Tuesday. “Our parents worked very hard. That’s why we are very similar to the people in Kentucky. I relate to a lot of people in Eastern Kentucky because it’s hard work. Like me and Mark, we didn’t grow up with a lot, but we never knew. If we were poor, we didn’t know that. I just think the strain and guys doing their work and going the extra mile really produced good coaches from out of there.”
Stoops’ Kentucky teams have personified that Youngstown mindset — tough, hard-nosed, physical.
“I wish people got to know his father,” Marrow said of Ron Stoops Sr., who passed away during a game in 1988. “The reason why them boys are who they are is because of their dad. He was a very no-nonsense guy, but he cared about people. I like to tell the story about me coming from the inner city and coming to Cardinal Mooney, being an African-American, I had just lost my dad. He replaced that void with me at school.”
“Football was extremely important, sports were important and competitive,” Mark Stoops said. “It was just a great place to grow up, and I still have many close friends to this day.”
How many of those friends will be at Kroger Field on Saturday? In the postgame press conference after Kentucky’s 26-16 win at then-No. 12 Florida last Saturday, Stoops joked that the Youngstown presence might be more than his boss Mitch Barnhart could handle.
“It started out with maybe 20 of my friends were coming,” Marrow said Tuesday. “Now it’s 40. Now it’s up to 60. . . . Between all three of us, we’ll probably have 200-300 people. It’s going to be good.”
“You know, I think everybody left me alone last week so I’m like, ‘Oh it’s not so bad,’” Stoops said Monday. “I just talked to (associate athletics director) Marc Hill and I’m like, ‘Hey, I need some help here.’ Between all of the Youngstown people, my brother Mike, Frank Buffano, Courtney Love, Vince Marrow, I mean there’ll be hundreds.”
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