Story of Ron Baker’s near-visit to Kansas growing with impending matchup

OMAHA – Ron Baker was going to play basketball at Kansas.

At least for a day. Then, maybe, if that day went well, for at least another day, or even a few years.

In 2011, before Baker decided on where to play basketball in college after leading Scott City to a Class 3A championship, his father, Neil, set up a pickup game for Baker to play with KU players in Lawrence.

Finally, Baker was getting his foot in the door at a powerhouse program after being heavily recruited, to that point, by the likes of Division I South Dakota State and Division II Fort Hays State.

Baker never walked through that door.

“I wasn’t in basketball shape; I hadn’t touched a basketball in two months,” he said. “I honestly didn’t want to go down there and embarrass myself.”

Baker and his father visited Wichita State instead.

“After that visit to Wichita State, I just decided that was the place for me and my family to pursue my future,” he said.

The rest, of course, is history, but only because Baker made it so.

He is WSU’s leading scorer, a 6-foot-4 junior guard coming off a 15-point performance that helped the Shockers beat Indiana in the second round of the NCAA Tournament and advance to a third-round game with Kansas at the CenturyLink Center on Sunday.

Baker defied the expectations of the coaches who didn’t recruit him, such as KU coach Bill Self. The Jayhawks may have had a chance at him if Baker had shown up in Lawrence that day in 2011, but his failure to appear might have been the final event in KU’s already-sealed fate.

Self can only express regret now that he didn’t see what WSU coach Gregg Marshall and then-assistant coach Chris Jans saw in Baker.

“I would say that there’s a lot of people that made a mistake on Ron, and we would certainly be one of them that made a mistake,” Self said. “We were not aware of him in the way I wish we would have been aware of him.”

The story of Baker skipping the Lawrence pickup game is gaining legendary status for its simplicity – he spurned a day at KU for a career with the Shockers, who were far more involved in recruiting Baker than KU or almost any other Division I school.

But the path to WSU wasn’t quite that simple. Marshall was intrigued by Baker during a summer camp in 2010, but he wasn’t ready to commit to a pursuit of Baker until about nine months later, when Baker was on his way to a spot on the Wichita Eagle’s All-State team and a state championship.

“I went and saw him, and five minutes into the (championship) game, I told my father-in-law, who was with me at the time, that we were going to have to try to find a way to get him into the program,” Marshall said.

WSU explored several of those ways, including placing Baker at a junior college or a prep school. Baker and his family settled on walking on for a season without a scholarship, taking advantage of the rule that allows NCAA athletes five seasons to play four.

“Which will yet to be determined whether we will have him for five years,” Marshall said of Baker, a potential NBA prospect.

Those circumstances led Baker to become a Shocker, and it’s difficult to tell if he’s completely left behind the emotions of his lack of recruitment by Kansas. Baker paused Saturday when asked if he wished Self had realized his “mistake” prior to actually making it.

“I’m a Kansas kid, so obviously playing in-state was important to me,” Baker said. “But as you can see now, I’m pretty happy with what decision I made (four) years ago. That’s not something I really look back on a whole lot.”

Self might, though, knowing he was perhaps one pickup game away from Baker emerging on his recruiting radar.

“I’m not as familiar with the legend as maybe some others are,” Self said. “But I sure wish we would have had an opportunity to study and see him more than what we did.”

This story was originally published March 21, 2015 at 4:43 PM with the headline "Story of Ron Baker’s near-visit to Kansas growing with impending matchup."