Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
When South Dakota State was looking for a basketball coach in 1996, the search committee seemed intent on hiring anyone but Scott Nagy — even though he’d had a three-year stint as an assistant there earlier in his career.
He was just 28 then and working on the SIU-Edwardsville staff. He applied but wasn’t optimistic about his chances.
“The athletic director called and said he’d be in town and wanted to have dinner with me and (wife) Jamie,” Nagy said.
“I thought he’d hired someone already. I didn’t know. This was before the Internet and cell phones. Jamie and I drove to meet him, and I thought he was going to tell me why he couldn’t hire me. But he offered us the job right there.”
The stunned Nagy accepted. But he was right to have had low expectations.
“I wasn’t even their first choice. They offered it to someone else, and he didn’t take it. They weren’t crazy about the other (candidates), so they came around to me,” he said.
