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University of Minnesota Athletics
The Jonesboro Gophers
6/1/2016 12:00:00 AM | Football
June 1, 2016
When Gopher football coaches visited Jonesboro, Ga., three years ago, they arrived hoping to persuade a young running back to join them more than 1,000 miles away at the University of Minnesota. What they found instead on that trip was they were the ones being persuaded, their prospect urging them to look at his long-time friend and teammate. The unsolicited pitch was persistent and, eventually, the salesmen were sold.
That 2013 trip to Jonesboro, a town of about 5,000 located just a short drive down Interstate 75 from Atlanta, was one of several intended to build a relationship with Rodney Smith and his family. Coming off an injury-shortened junior season, Smith rebounded to have a monstrous senior year at Mundy's Mill High School, rushing for more than 2,200 yards at an average of more than eight yards-per-carry. A back with the talent of a power conference player, Smith found himself holding scholarship offers from mostly mid-major schools like East Carolina and Southern Mississippi when Minnesota came to visit.
"If he wouldn't have got hurt his junior year, he would have been an SEC-recruited back," said Gopher wide receiver coach Brian Anderson, who was coaching Minnesota's running backs while he was recruiting Smith. "[Bigger] schools started coming in on him late his senior year because he had rushed for ... some crazy number, but I just stayed on him. He trusted the process with me and us."
That process led to Smith committing to play for Anderson and the Gophers. It also led to Smith flipping the process around and asking the Minnesota coaches to trust him as he continued to sell them on his teammate.
"Once we offered [Smith], I went back for a practice during our bye week and he kept telling me about Jonathan and I was like, `Eh, I don't know if we're looking for a linebacker,'" recalled Anderson. Smith certainly wasn't the first high school player to push the skills of a teammate on college recruiters and, like many similar situations before, this seemed like an unlikely sale. Minnesota had not shown any interest in recruiting his teammate to that point and, as Anderson told Smith then, it wasn't a position of need.
That linebacker was Jonathan Celestin.
