LA CROSSE — Mike Dee was just 29 years old when he met a fork in his professional road and had to choose a path.
He had completed six seasons as the Aquinas High School baseball coach and taken the Blugolds to six WISAA state tournaments. Aquinas won four of them — the last four — and the perception of losses becoming bigger failures than wins becoming success was creeping in.
“It became more of a relief that we won the last couple of years,” Dee said of a run that started in 1982, ended in 1987 and included 100 victories. “I didn’t like that part of it.
“I knew I wanted to coach at a certain level to develop players as players and people, but I knew that would have to come at the Division I level.”
Six years removed from having no aspirations of being a coach, Dee was ready to pursue the next step of his chosen career. He targeted University of Minnesota coach John Anderson in a very unconventional manner.
“I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse,” Dee said.
That offer was to work in an unpaid role as a volunteer coach for one year. Dee, who had married his wife Annie about nine months prior, worked overnight as a security guard and with players during the day after Anderson accepted.
“I thought he was crazy,” said Jack Gurholt, a friend who was Dee’s teammate at UW-La Crosse and with the La Crosse Old Styles and was one of his assistant coaches at Aquinas. “Absolutely crazy. But he needed to be at the next level.”
It was a necessary and successful step that continued a coaching path that lasted until last month.
While most of that career took place as head coach at the University of Illinois-Chicago — he was there from 1999-2021 — after just over a decade with the Golden Gophers, Dee seemed especially happy to be able to conclude things in the same spot he started 44 years prior.
The Blugolds (18-6) lost a 5-4 decision to Wisconsin Dells in a WIAA Division 2 sectional semifinal on June 9, and Dee had decided that game would be his last. After winning those 100 games during his first stint with Aquinas, Dee closed out his coaching days with a four-year run that produced a 91-17 record and three state tournaments that included one championship and one runner-up finish.
“People like to say that kids are different today,” said Dee, who spent the spring of 2022 as previous coach Scott Bagniefski’s assistant before Bagniefski retired after 22 seasons. “They have certainly grown up differently, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
“I really enjoyed working with the kids — all of them.”
Dee’s first experience with Aquinas came when his family moved to the area after his junior season at Lisle Benet Academy in Illinois. He spent his final season as a Blugold before playing one season at UW-Whitewater and finishing at UW-La Crosse.
His dad was in the insurance business and had spent some time at Fort McCoy when he was in the U.S. Army. Dee said his parents considered Rochester as another landing spot but chose La Crosse.
He met Gurholt just a couple of years later, and the two of them played big roles in helping the Indians — that was the nickname for the local university back then — to the NAIA World Series in 1979.
Dee batted .378 during his college career and finished with 11 home runs, 11 triples and 67 runs driven in.
“As a player, he was very Pete Rose-like,” said Gurholt, who pitched a couple of seasons for Wisconsin Rapids while in the Minnesota Twins minor-league system. “He was very hard-nosed. He played the game hard, and for his size, he got a lot out of his ability.”
Dee followed his college participation by signing with the Milwaukee Brewers. He spent spring training with the team in 1980 but never played in its system.
A couple of seasons later, he accepted the job to coach at Aquinas.
“I was 23 years old, and when offered, I said yes,” said Dee, who hadn’t considered coaching before. “I don’t even know why I said yes.”
Before the first practice was completed, he understood why.
“I think it was the teaching aspect of it,” he said. “The challenge of trying to break down complexities of skill development. How do you teach and engage players both as a player and as a person.
“That resonated with me, and I’ve enjoyed it this whole time.”
Games, Dee said, quickly became a bit of a nuisance. His heart was in the practice time and that development aspect of the game. Games are essentially the test of how skills learned in practice have been mastered.
“He was young at the time, but he was already a fantastic coach,” said Bagniefski, who played for Dee in the 1980s. “He was very inspirational to me as a player and in helping me get into coaching.
“I think his dedication in making personal connections with all players is what was most important to him.”
Bagniefski’s coaching career at Aquinas includes six state tournaments, two championships and three runner-up finishes.
Dee’s impact in the sport outside the Coulee Region began with that offer to Anderson in Minnesota.
That volunteer stint turned into 11 seasons as Anderson’s pitching coach, and his staff had the best or second-best ERA in the Big Ten Conference for seven of his final nine years. Minnesota won four conference championships and qualified for the NCAA Division I postseason seven times while Dee was there.
Eventually, Dee received a call from Illinois-Chicago athletic director Jim Schmidt to discuss an opening for head coach of his baseball program. Schmidt, a Central graduate, had to call Dee multiple times to sell him on the move.
“It was a terrible job to be honest,” Dee said. “I told him no three times.
“I talked to him over the period of two or three weeks and explained what kind of investment needed to be made. I wanted the chance to be successful.”
Schmidt accepted the challenge of helping Dee set up the kind of program he wanted, and Dee embraced the chance to move closer to where he grew up. But the Flames had endured five straight losing seasons and recorded just four winning records from 1975-1998. Illinois-Chicago was 11-25 overall and 3-15 in the Midwestern Collegiate Conference the season prior to Dee’s arrival.
His first team was 18-30 overall and 6-12 in the conference. Being hired in August and being severely limited in recruiting opportunities played into an improved performance over the previous season and resulted in Dee being named the conference coach of the year.
The Flames won the MWCC the next season — their first championship since winning their division in 1990 — and eventually moved to the Horizon League, where Dee had one losing season, won 11 titles and was named coach of the year 10 times.
“It was a great experience,” Dee said. “Building that really from scratch was tremendously challenging and gratifying.”
A key to the quick success was the recruiting of Curtis Granderson, an outfielder who eventually played 16 seasons with seven Major League Baseball teams.
Granderson recorded 1,800 hits and hit 344 home runs during his career. He had a two-year stretch of 2011 and 2012 that included 84 home runs and 225 runs driven in with the New York Yankees and was a three-time All-Star.
Forty of Dee’s players at UIC moved on to play professionally, and six were selected in the 2017 draft.
“(Dee) would invite me down to UIC to watch how practices were run,” Bagniefski said. “Got to go down there and see Curtis Granderson when he was there, so that was something to see.”
Dee’s 23 seasons resulted in 680 victories, 531 losses and two ties for a winning percentage of .561. That kind of success, of course, took a lot of work.
“It’s a relentless lifestyle,” he said. “It’s so much different than high school because you are literally living in it every single day. You recruit nationally, and that takes an enormous amount of time, especially back then.
“You might get a vacation for a couple of days, but it’s still on your mind, and then you are right back in it.”
The regular communication with his alma mater was something that always stood out to those at the school. Bagniefski said he always either saw Dee when the Blugolds played postseason games or talked to him afterward about what happened.
“Mike was always there and offering advice,” Bagniefski said. “He always had input and was a go-to person for me.”
The chance to return to Aquinas after his IUC career to become athletic director and to help Bagniefski coach the baseball team was too tempting to decline.
When Bagniefski retired, Dee built his coaching staff almost exclusively with former players or teammates. Gurholt, who helped Dee at the end of his run with Aquinas in the 80s, was on board for a return after a long local coaching career of his own as an assistant at La Crescent-Hokah and Viterbo.
“When (Bagniefski) left, I thought, ‘Oh, no, he’s gonna want to take it over,'” Gurholt said with a chuckle.
The past four seasons with the Blugolds, Dee said, were as enjoyable as any he has had. What appeared to be a one- or two-year run as the head of the program stretched to four, and Dee has said once that he had more fun than he anticipated having with the team.
“It’s been great for me because La Crosse is such a great town with a lot of great people,” said Dee, who has become a regular presenter at baseball clinics — including the National Baseball Convention three times — all over the country. “I’ve always loved the place, and to have the opportunity to come back and finish where I started is such a unique thing.
“I have really loved dealing with the high school athletes and with Aquinas in general because it is a very special place with a culture that I love.”
