With football in a nebulous position and the recruiting process in a relative holding pattern, we at Golden Bear Report are looking to do interviews wherever we can. This week, we got Cal special teams coordinator Charlie Ragle on the phone for a lengthy conversation about his journey from a small town in New Mexico to knowing almost everybody around high school football in the state of Arizona. The second part of that conversation is below, a transcript of our Q&A that has been partially edited.

Previous Installments: Justin Wilcox, Part One | Justin Wilcox, Part Two | Charlie Ragle, Part One

TT: How much did that year at Arizona State help to build the connections you have in the Phoenix/Tempe/Scottsdale area today?

CR: I think it was huge, I always used to laugh, because when I went to take the job at Arizona State, everybody was fired up. It was like, one of the fraternity is getting his shot, so I had a lot of people really helping me and cheering for me.

Then we got fired and I went to Chaparral, we started coaching and people hated me after that (laughs). So I laugh about that, but like I said, the things that I learned there and the mindset, it showed me what you need to do to be great, so I ran with that. After six months, it sounds stupid to say this, I was feeling sorry (for myself), I had one of the best high school jobs in the state, and I was feeling sorry for myself for getting fired from ASU.

I had a realization that if I was ever going to get back to the college level, I was going to be judged on the job I did at Chaparral, period, point blank, so I better quit feeling sorry for myself and get my ass to work. I had a vision when I went there of what I thought it could be, I had made a mental list and a physical list when I was there (in 2005) that it could be a job I could come back and potentially take on as a head coach, because you had the resources, it was a great location, monetarily you were going to get the backing of the parents, and you could pretty much do and get what you needed to be successful. We went in the first year, with all private money we raised and financed some of it as well, we put a million dollar turf (field) down, we were the second school in Phoenix to do it. Ours was privately financed, I sat in five different living rooms with five sets of parents to guarantee the loan if our booster club didn’t finance and raise the money every year, those parents would have to take the brunt of the loan and pay it, divided by five. You talk about recruiting, well recruiting kids is a whole hell of a lot easier than selling five sets of parents on about a seven-hundred thousand dollar loan (laughs).

I realized at that point that I was doing something that was different than your average high school job. I was fortunate to have a lot of good guys on my staff, some big time business guys as well, with the ability to build top-notch facilities and things of that nature, and then we had some good kids. We got some more good kids who wanted to play there. That all combined over a five year period, when you have a lot of talent around your campus, you’re going to attract a lot of coaches to come through. That’s probably where I built my wealth of connections in those five years. There probably wasn’t a head coach of a big time program that didn’t come through my campus. To have that opportunity and to make those connections was pretty powerful, and honestly that’s what got me to Arizona in a sense.

Michigan, Rich (Rodriguez), signed two kids from Chaparral. Never in a million years did I think Rich was going to get fired from Michigan and come to Arizona and I’m going to work for him. We decided in 2008, we played in the state championship that year, that was our second season there, and we got pummeled. We decided to go to more of a spread offense, and we decided what better place to go learn than at Michigan. I took my whole staff, we went up there and spent three days, got the run of the place, watched a lot of film, talked a lot with those guys, then came back and implemented it.

What’s funny about that, is at the same time we come back, Bob Gregory, who I had met when I had met Justin at Oregon in 2000, this is spring of 2009, he’s the defensive coordinator at Cal, he actually comes and sits in our office, spends one night with me and our defensive coordinator. He had just come back from the Jets and the Steelers, they were going to a 3-4 look on defense, and he probably spent five hours with us going over it and showing us how they were going to install it. We decided to run more of an odd front and go to a 3-4 defense, so we were spread and a 3-4 defense over the next three years, and we win three state championships, I think we lost two games in three years. All of those things, those connections, and having those things happen for you is kind of sudden.

I take a call from Greg Byrne (then the athletic director of Arizona) in November of 2011, a couple of days after he fired Mike Stoops. He says ‘Charlie, I’m reaching out to some of the programs here in the state that produce big time talent, and I was curious why we can’t keep the best players home here in Arizona.’ I had a bevy of opinions, but you’re going to keep a lot of that guarded and you want to say the right thing, I didn’t know Greg at the time. It comes back, we get to talking, and all of sudden he’s telling a story, I tell him that I worked for Dirk, it’s only been a few years but I’d been a GA. It’s kind of unique, I’d been on both sides of it (the HS and college sides in the state of Arizona) and had a pretty interesting look at it. He was like ‘oh, you worked for Dirk, well my mom’s student taught for Dirk’s dad.’ (Byrne) was also an assistant AD at Oregon, there were some (common) there.

So he lets his guard down and we get to talking, we’re just talking about head coaches. I say, ‘I liked Mike (Stoops) a lot, but you take a guy like Rich Rodriguez, when he came on my campus,’ and I shared with him a story about Rich. I had no ulterior motive, I was just being straight with Greg about what he was trying to get accomplished. He stops me dead in my tracks on that conversation and asks me two-three minutes worth of questions about Rich Rodriguez. I finished the conversation, hang up, call my wife, and mind you, this is two days after he had fired Mike. I say to my wife, ‘Rich Rodriguez is going to be the next head coach at Arizona.’ I tell her what happened, she says ‘you need to call Rich,’ and knowing what my ultimate goal was, I said ‘I don’t want to be that guy.’

Two weeks go, and I’m kinda tracking this, but what I do is call Taylor Lewan (one of his former Chaparral players and current Tennessee Titan), who was an all-American tackle at Michigan at this point, gonna be a top draft pick. His dad is living up there, his dad is running with all the movers and shakers at Michigan, and I ask him, ‘Dave, what do you hear?’ Rich was still doing TV, but he was still living in Michigan, (I ask) ‘what are you hearing about this?’ He goes ‘I’ll get back to you,’ he calls me back the next day and says ‘there might be some truth to that.’ Dave’s calling me every day, every other day keeping me updated through this whole process. He calls me the night before, or what he thought was the night before Rich was going to get announced as the head coach (at Arizona), he says, ‘you need to call him Charlie.’ Two hours later, it comes out on Twitter that Rich is the head coach of Arizona. I called him and left him a message, Rich calls me back. One thing leads to another, couple weeks later, I’m down there to interview and I get the job. All of those connections and ties led to that point right there, where I got a phone call from Greg Byrne, it’s really how I got back into college football coaching.

TT: Going with the moving back to the college game, do you remember who the first recruit you landed at U of A was?

CR: It kinda started in 2012 with those guys. I leave and go to Arizona and Davonte Neal is a hot prospect. It doesn’t go the way we want, he ends up signing with Notre Dame (Neal eventually transferred back home to Arizona). We did sign Dylan Cozens, Dylan, I still think to this day, would’ve been a fantastic football player. He played his last year at Chaparral for me and his only year of high school football. He transferred from another school to Chaparral to play baseball, I talk him into playing football, his dad’s a former Bronco, and he’s got the pedigree. 6’6”, 230, probably a legit 4.6-4.7 (40), just a freak. I just said, ‘hey listen, I’ll work around your baseball schedule, if you can do what I think you can do, you’ll have over a dozen power 5, BCS offers, I promise you.’ His dad says he’s going to play football for you and he does, and by the time he’s done with the season he ends up with about 18 offers.

What’s funny about this is that Justin’s at UW and is recruiting him at this point. I take the job after the season at Arizona, and that was probably the first big recruit, even though it was my kid, to get that secured was a big deal. Then (Cozens) goes out and mops up his senior year of baseball, hits a walk-off to win either the semi-finals or the state championship, gets picked with the first pick of the second round of the MLB draft. He says, ‘coach, they’re going to pay me over a million in signing,’ I’m like, ‘go take the money.’ He actually made his major league debut here against the Giants a couple years ago. He’s been between (AAA and the majors since). As funny as it sounds for a kid you had in high school, you never know how those things are going to work out in the recruiting world, but that was the first one where you (exhale), take a deep breath (and think about what would’ve been). Even though he didn’t play, and it was a big celebration to get him signed, that was the first one I remember and it was like ‘I’m doing my part.’

TT: You’ve been a special teams coordinator for the last seven years of your coaching career, why special teams for you?

CR: To be honest, my background was in defense and I spent my early coaching years learning and coaching defense, then when I got to Arizona State, I ended up on the offensive side of the ball. You only had one GA (on each side of the ball), so you worked with the biggest unit, which was the offensive line. That was the best thing for me, coming from offense in college (Ragle played running back) where we were an option based offense. I learned the protections and those schemes, understood blitz pickups and pass protections. That was really beneficial for me to spend that year on the offensive line as a GA and to be in the room with those guys.

Second, from there when I went to Chaparral, I had some really capable coaches and we were doing things, we were running the program, trying to build facilities and raise money. I had two capable coordinators, but I still wanted to coach. I knew special teams were a way to touch the majority of your team, I had done a lot work with that at Arizona State, I had played a lot of special teams in college, it fits my mentality. When I went to Arizona, that first year I was off the field, and I had asked Jeff Casteel (the Arizona DC at the time), hey I’d like to sit in on your linebacker meetings and learn the defense from the defensive coordinator. I love Jeff, but he told me to go fly a kite. He’s like, ‘no offense Charlie, but I don’t know you and a year from now you could be working at one of our opponents,’ and that’s just who Jeff was. I appreciated the honesty and I went to Calvin (Magee), who was the offensive coordinator, he was like ‘my door is open, come on in.’ I spent that time with him.

All of a sudden, you talk about divine intervention or whatever you want to say, at the end of that season Spencer Leftwich, who was by trade an OL coach, leaves to take another job, and he was our tight ends coach. Now I’ve been studying the offensive side of the ball with those guys at Arizona, I had worked as a GA with the OL (at ASU), so I understood the run blocking schemes, and Rich knew I had a special teams background. That first year at Arizona they pieced (the special teams responsibility) out (to multiple coaches), and Rich said ‘I want one guy to do this job and own it.’ So through that, he told me ‘we’re gonna name you the special teams and tight ends coach.’ December 15th, 2012 man, that’s when he offered me the job, I’ll never forget it.

That was a major deal, still is, that’s how I ended up as the tight ends/special teams coach. I still have an affinity for defense, that’s probably something that fits my personality, but I always knew, coaching special teams, if you could recruit and you were a good special teams coach, you would always have a job, because it’s not something a lot of people want to do. It doesn’t get the glitz and the glam, and even when you talk about ‘we’re going to use our best players’ the reality is that the situations don’t always allow for that. Injuries, depth become factors and for us at Cal while we try to build depth, there’s probably only a small set of teams around the country that have those 1s and 2s that can play with everybody in the country. As a special teams coordinator, you’ve got to get innovative and creative, because you’re not always going to have the best players out on the field. It’s not a job for the weak, nor the timid, and you’d better have thick skin because people are going to say a lot of things about you from time to time. It’s just like coaching period, but I knew that it was something that if you did it and you did it well, you could continue to stay employed in the business.

TT: You talked about meeting Justin in 2000, how did the process go of getting re-hooked up to come to Berkeley in 2017?

CR: He reached out to me in 2017 right after signing day and asked if I would be interested, I said I would. We knew each other, and we had several mutual friends, (Marcel) Yates, who I had been working with at Arizona, Scott Huff, who I mentioned earlier, so we had mutual connections and he reached out to me.

My whole career had been at Arizona, we had just come off a 3-9 season at U of A and it was time for me, I needed the change. I think when you become a high school coach and you go to a local university, it’s one of those deals where (while) I ran a good program and had good players, people don’t know what they don’t know. I wanted to break out of that mold, to come here to California and put my imprint on what I want to do. While we’re not nearly where I want to be, from a special teams standpoint, that was the way I wanted to go.

Justin reached out after signing day, then we made contact about it, then a couple days later I was here at Cal.

TT: How was the adjustment between Pac-12 schools at that point?

CR: Well it was probably harder than I first realized, that I’m leaving something so familiar and known, 17 years of relationships in the state, relationships, family, everything I’d known for almost longer than I’d been in the state of New Mexico as a kid growing up. It had really become home for me because of what I told you about my hometown, Arizona was home, it is home. My mom lives there, my mother-in-law lives there, my brothers live there, it’s home for me. Leaving there was different, it was the first time I had done it, I have two kids and a wife, and moving to Northern California was a bit of, I don’t want to say culture shock, but it was a change.

You obviously know of the magnitude of what Cal is as an academic institution, but I don’t think I really could appreciate that until I got here. Every place has an identity, and you see the traditions that have developed here, the people and the passion for Cal football and you start to become intertwined with that. You ingrain yourself with the people, and it’s been a blessing. The time here has been unbelievable, my family has loved it and it’s really been better than I could describe, something that I’m a hundred times thankful for that I did.