POLAND – It has been a while since the Stoops brothers all have been back in Youngstown together.

The four brothers, who made an appearance at The Lake Club in Poland on Monday to help raise money for the United Way, were sitting next to each other in the Mahoning Valley for the first time in a few years.

The four college football coaches and Cardinal Mooney graduates – Ron Jr., Bob, Mike and Mark – talked and joked with the media together for the first time in about three years, according to their estimation.

It has been much longer since the whole family was together though.

October will mark 28 years since Ron Stoops Sr. died. The father of the now-famous Stoops brothers passed away in October of 1988. The defensive coordinator at Cardinal Mooney, Ron Sr. was coaching against his son, Ron Jr., a coordinator at Boardman, when he felt chest pains. Ron Sr. watched the Cardinals win a triple overtime game before leaving in an ambulance. He died on the way to the hospital at age 54.

“I think about him all the time, usually before games and after games, and I’m quite confident he’s up there looking down on us,” Ron Jr. said. “And I’m sure he’s proud of what we’re doing – not only on the field but off the field.”

There’s plenty to be proud of, considering the Stoops’ success.

Bob is the head coach at Oklahoma, where he’s returned the Sooners into a perennial powerhouse that contends for a national title on a yearly basis. Mike, formerly a head coach at Arizona, is now Bob’s defensive coordinator. Mark is in his third year as head coach at Kentucky, and Ron Jr., the eldest, is co-defensive coordinator at Youngstown State.

It’s easy to see where their knowledge of the game started.

“It’s interesting, when we were just young boys sitting around the table, I remember watching film and (dad) would put that 16-millimeter projector on the table and go through every play and diagram it,” said Mike, the second youngest of the brothers.

“Even me as a head coach (at Arizona from 2003-11) and as a ‘D’ coordinator, I do the exact same thing. I go through every play, just so I have the sequential order I know. Even when I get all the data that’s available, it’s still writing it and learning how to decipher what’s happening. It’s something I learned, and I didn’t even know it, when I was probably 7 or 8 years old. He’s been a huge impact on all of us.”

Family loyalty seems to be a value he taught.

The foursome doesn’t let pride or ego get in the way of their coaching tactics. They said they discuss strategies and games on a regular basis, regardless of who’s coaching where. Why not tap into an endless lineage of knowledge when it’s only a phone call away?

They admit they don’t enjoy facing one another on opposite sidelines. They would rather help each other win than see one of them lose. Being part of each other’s success is part of what makes their relationships that much stronger.

“It was relatively easy for me,” said Mark, the youngest, of starting his career. “I had to work for everything I had and all that – nobody is going to give you anything in this business – but I certainly had some good people to look up to, starting with my father and then of course these three guys.”

While the Stoops have mostly scattered to different parts of the country, their mother, Dee, remains in the Youngstown area along with Ron Jr. The area remains special, for a number of reasons, which is why they made the trip to raise money for the United Way.

Bob also holds an annual charity bocce social at Cassese’s MVR in downtown Youngstown. They don’t forget where their journey began, and anyone who watched Mooney in the 1970s and ’80s also understands how it happened.

Ron Sr. and former Mooney coach Don Bucci grew up together, and when Bucci took over the Cardinals in 1966, Ron Sr. immediately became the defensive coordinator, helping lead the Cardinals to four state titles and one runner-up finish. It was a post he held until that rainy Oct. 7 night in 1988. He may have passed that day, but there was much that lived on.

“That’s the one common denominator when you look at all of us, the talented people that we grew up with, but probably no one is as talented as he was or had a bigger impact on all of us,” Mike said. “Him not being here is difficult, but like these guys say, he’s watching and blessed us all. He was here long enough to make a great impact on us in so many different ways.”

The Stoops legacy is arguably the most well-known in college football, led by Bob’s success with the Sooners, who won a national title in 2000 and were in last year’s College Football Playoff. Bob, who still hasn’t shut the door on coaching in the NFL – “You never say never,” he said – hopes people realize he and his brothers are just carrying a torch given to them as kids. Their job is to hoist it the way Ron Sr. would have wanted.

“I believe he’s got the best seat in the house,” Bob said. “He’s looking down and seeing it all and experiencing it all. We’re blessed as a family for all that’s happened, not just on the football field, more with how we are with our families.”