Jaren Kanak's Almost Impossible Journey to Oklahoma was 'Quite an Adventure'
The backstory of Jaren Kanak finding his way to Oklahoma seems almost impossible.
“Honestly,” Kanak’s mom told SI Sooners, “it was quite an adventure. Quite a journey.”
Everyone knows Kanak — a star linebacker and sprinter in high school from Hays, KS — originally committed to Clemson when Brent Venables was the Tigers’ defensive coordinator.
Jaren Kanak
Jaren Kanak via Twitter
And everyone knows that when Venables got the head coaching job at Oklahoma, he encouraged Kanak to stick with his commitment to Clemson and Dabo Swinney.
And everyone knows that Kanak eventually decommitted from Clemson and quietly enrolled at OU before Venables even extended him an official scholarship offer.
But the lines that connect those dots have remained largely unclear: how did Kanak choose Clemson? Why did he and Venables build such a strong personal connection? Why did Kanak feel almost trapped by his pledge to Clemson? Why didn’t Venables just offer him a scholarship?
Venables, Lisa Kanak-McGrath and Hays High School coach Tony Crough filled in the blanks last week.
Finding Clemson
Because of COVID, Venables said, Kanak was unable to visit Clemson before last June. Most major college prospects are recruited for a year or more and have visited campus a handful of times.
In Kanak’s case, that relationship never got a chance to grow.
“We talk about having a village mentality, so you can meet so many people from the village,” Venables said. “And what you want hopefully to sell is that when you come on campus, that you hear the message and recruiting on the phone and what have you, but you want to be able to have them feel the message.
“He just was not able to be exposed to that.”
Kanak visited Clemson once, at a camp, on June 1 after the campus re-opened.
“We had visitors from everywhere,” Venables said. “And so his time and his family's time was really with me as well then. So all the phone calls and Zooms and everything else, for the most part, it was just me.”
Crough had visited Clemson the year before and figured his budding young star would be a good fit culturally and athletically. So he connected Venables and Kanak in the recruiting process. But Venables said he was resolute to not offer Kanak a scholarship at Clemson until he knew the kid was the real deal — off the field as well as on.
“I wanted him to have some skin in the game and see if he was serious about his opportunity,” Venables said. “He had this hat — he had a Clemson hat when he was a kid, and he showed me these pictures. I'm like, ‘Why are you interested in Clemson? Come on.’ You know? ‘I want a real reason. Like, give me a reason to get excited. I'm going to go all the way to Hays, Kansas, and spend — I don't want to ‘practice’ recruiting. It's hard enough as it is. And so, give me a reason. You just chasing offers? You just think it'd be cool to tell your buddies you got offered by Clemson?’ ”
Venables, sounding wholly unconvinced, even said he made Kanak and his family pay their own way on the trip to Clemson “So his family had some skin in the game.” Kanak had lots of other top-shelf college football offers, including Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Michigan and Oklahoma. And they all paid his way for campus visits.
“ ‘Everywhere else is willing to pay for you to come on campus,’ ” Venables said, “ ‘but you’ve got to pay for your own airfare if you really want us.’ And it worked. Somehow, some way, they liked it enough to come on out and see us. So really, we offered him when he came out.”
Kanak committed two months later, on July 30.
“He just felt in his heart like he wanted to go play for Brent Venables and that's what he’d decided to do,” Kanak-McGrath said. “At that point, you know, Clemson was the whole package.”
Change of Plan
On the morning of Nov. 28, Lincoln Riley walked out on Oklahoma. On Nov. 30, Venables and Swinney flew to Kansas for an in-home visit with Kanak and his family.
On that one day in between, Venables visited with OU athletic director Joe Castiglione about the vacant job in Norman.
Kanak is smart. He knew what questions to ask.
“Certainly the news was out there that I might have spoken to ‘em,” Venables said, “and we told them, ‘Yep, that happened. And you know, I might take it if they offer it.’ You know? ‘But I'm here to — I still work at Clemson and I believe in Clemson.’ And I told him, even after I got the job, ‘There's nothing changed. Clemson's amazing. The people there are genuine. Everything is as real as it could ever be. And it's not like all of a sudden, now things are different because I'm not there. I didn't make Clemson Clemson.’ ”
Kanak didn’t know what to do, his mom said.
“When we caught wind that Brent might be taking the head coaching job at OU,” said Kanak-McGrath, “it just really, really deflated Jaren, because here he had created this relationship and this level of trust, quite honestly.”
Kanak couldn’t help but see Clemson in a different light. The bond he had built with Venables (more on that later) went beyond the usual coach-player relationship. Kanak had visited Oklahoma, remember, and loved it. Had the Sooners in his top three, in fact.
So when Dec. 5 came around and Venables flew from Clemson to Norman with Castiglione and OU president Joe Harroz and was greeted by thousands at Max Westheimer Airport, Kanak figured Oklahoma was the place for him.
Not so fast, Venables said.
“When I took the job, he was uneasy,” Venables said. “I tried to reassure him that Clemson was the great place that he fell in love with. I don’t think he felt comfortable at the end of the day and expressed that to coach Swinney. I told him I didn’t have a spot for him. I told him if he was going to de-commit, he needed to do things the right way.”
“We respected that,” said Kanak-McGrath, “we 100 percent did. I mean, it's just another one of those things that we love about him. But at the end of the day, we just weren't satisfied with that answer because we knew — as a mom, my husband knew as a dad — we knew deep down that's not what Jaren wanted to do.”
Said Crough, “Venables was doing a good job of staying true to coach Swinney and Clemson and trying to really be a man of his word and … I guess trying to not influence Jaren to want to come down to Norman. But then Jaren had a strong pull to want to do that. So it was just kind of a — it's kind of a different situation.”
“I think he just was like, ‘Man, I really would like an opportunity,’ “ Venables said. “I said, ‘Look, I can't do that. You got to go to Clemson.’ I said, ‘If it's not Clemson, then it's somewhere else. But it's not going to be Oklahoma. I don't have a spot for you. I can't do that.’ Just, again, the people there are too good to me — coach Swinney in particular.”
It was an almost awkward time. Kanak was committed to Clemson, but really, he was committed to Venables. Venables encouraged him to call Swinney. He did, and they worked it out as a family. Eventually, Swinney gave his blessing.
“It just weighed on him and he continued to pray about it and mull it over,” Kanak-McGrath said, “pros and cons and all the things and he just finally said ‘I just don't feel right about this anymore.’ meaning Clemson.
“And he kind of felt that maybe Coach V didn't want him to come, didn't want him to play for him (at OU) — and then kind of find out that wasn't the situation at all. It was still just Coach V trying to be a man of his word and integrity and not poach the commits, per se.”
National Signing Day was coming fast, Dec. 15, and to have a prospect decommit right before signing day is both a bad PR hit for the football program as well as a bit of a crater in the recruiting class. Kanak made his decision, told Swinney, then didn’t sign in the early signing period. Still without an official offer from OU, Kanak silently enrolled to start the spring semester in Norman — it was reported his name was in the OU database one Dec. 21 — and then he officially decommitted on Dec. 23.
“There was just that that waiting period, that limbo,” said Kanak-McGrath, “You know, we just we need to wait for the right time. We need to wait for all the, you know, pieces to fall into place.”
“Long story short,” Venables said, “Momma got involved. … But in his heart, he didn't want to even go and try it out (at Clemson). That's what I told him. I said, ‘Man, just go for the semester. You're going to love it. You'll get over me in a minute. Trust me.’ So, I think that they visited with coach Swinney and after some time to just think it through, I think (Swinney) was willing, as long as they didn't decommit prior to signing day and raise a ruckus with all that, just kept things quiet, just not to sign. And then if he wanted, he'd give his blessing to be recruited by us (at OU).
“So that's in a nutshell — pretty dramatic nutshell, but there's really no drama. It's just a young man and his family trying to find the best place for him.”
Bonds of Tragedy
Venables grew up in Salina, KS, about 90 minutes straight east of Hays on I-70. The bond between a couple of linebackers from the Kansas prairie was predetermined.
But then they got to know each other.
Venables’ fighter pilot dad left he and his mom and brothers at a young age. Just walked out. Venables’ mother, Nancy, worked several jobs to keep the boys upright, but also had several husbands — some of whom were abusive. It was a childhood of strife and frequent despair, of love hardened through pain and anguish. But it steeled Venables against life’s lesser obstacles and salted him with the grit of resolve and will power and purpose.
Kanak also lost his dad at a young age.
“Jaren was 4,” Kanak-McGrath said. “And we were involved in a car accident, and his dad, unfortunately, did not survive the accident. Yeah, Jaren was four and I was eight months pregnant. He passed away in July of 2008.”
Jason Kanak was 31.
She said she met Scott McGrath, a recent widower, in a support group, and the families’ lives took a turn for the best.
“Long story short, we ended up getting married,” she said. “He lived in Hays, and so my kids and I moved back to Hays. He had two kids and I had two kids. So we blended a family of four kids. And then Scott and I ended up having a daughter together, so we have five kids altogether, blended family, both our first spouses passed away — within a month of each other. So yeah, so it's a real interesting story.”
So interesting that Kanak-McGrath wrote a book about it a few years ago, called “The Journey Between Us.”
July 30 was the day Kanak chose to originally commit to Clemson. His reason for picking that date is both heartbreaking and uplifting.
Kanak wrote on Twitter that day that he wanted to take a day the family had long known for loss and turn it into something positive.
“Yeah, it's kind of crazy how it all played out,” Crough said. “You know, obviously their family histories and the stuff that they both went through as children and young men. And then both being from Kansas, I mean, just just a lot of things — both being really good football players in the state of Kansas — just a lot of things that matched up.”
Crough said he “kept telling (Venables) there was something special about” Kanak, and “these are kind of things that went on with him in his life, who he is and what he believes in.”
The superficial bonds of playing the same position and growing up in Kansas were neat little conversation pieces. But the real brick and mortar in this relationship was laid on sorrow and grief. From those wounds blossomed a deep and lasting relationship.
“We just got really close. That's all I can say,” Venables said. “I mean, I don't have any other way to explain it.
“He and I got really attached — and you really shouldn't do that. You ought to commit to a school, a university and a place. But, you know, this is a people business too. And so you got to look at it both ways. Sometimes we don't like that. We just had a bunch of guys that left (Oklahoma) and go played for someone else, somewhere else. And a lot of people are emotionally attached. You know, that's the cool thing about college athletics, is the passion, the intensity, the love for the university is very real. That's a great thing, but it also can be a tough thing when it comes to some of the things that have been going on here as of late with the transfer portal and coaches leaving and things like that. It's just the byproduct of it.”
Jaren Kanak
Jaren Kanak via Twitter
Now that they see each other virtually every day, Venables and Kanak can fully grow their coach-player relationship.
Before they both shifted to Oklahoma, it was a more long-distance relationship, and there were interesting quirks.
“They would actually call each other in the morning and try to wake the other one up to see who was working out, because he was working out the earliest,” Crough said. “It was crazy. We're sitting there and it's 4 in the morning and we've got 6:30 weights, and Jaren’s already been up working out and he shows up to weights and I’m like, ‘What are you doing?’ He's like, ‘Oh, trying to beat coach Venables, so I had to get up before him’ — and he's an hour earlier (in the Eastern Time Zone)! It was wild. It was kind of like they ... instantly had a connection.”
When Kanak announced his commitment to OU on Jan. 5, his secret had been out for more than two weeks. But he still wanted to do things the right way — like Venables had, like Swinney had.
To Venables, it was everything.
“I was there at Clemson for 10 years,” he said. “I wanted make sure that I left it better than when I got there. And so part of that is just doing what's right. You know? Just do what's right. And sometimes it doesn't necessarily serve you well, selfishly speaking. But if you just do what's right, and don't bite the hand that feeds you — it doesn't mean you're immune to making mistakes or poor decisions along the way, but ... that was my thing I was trying to do.”
“He is thrilled,” Kanak’s mom said. “And we are thrilled for him. It could not have worked out any better. Honestly, it was quite an adventure and quite a journey. But we're so thrilled for him. He feels confident that this is now God's plan for him and he is where he was meant to be. And that was playing for an organization that Brent Venables is part of the coaching staff, for sure.”
