If someone ever picked up the phone.
"I gave him the numbers he had to hit each week," Mitch says. "After school, after practice, phone calls and emails. I was coaching him on what to say, how to say it, how to have an engaging conversation. And call after call after call, nobody's there. Nobody answered. He'd call the front desk. Back in those days, X wasn't the thing, and coaches actually responded via email and or text. If you could get them. A lot of unanswered phone calls, and at one point we got in the car."
Pounding the pavement turned into the yellow brick road. At Kansas State's junior day, Snyder offered the first scholarship. That's when Mitch got the sense that he would become more taken with the man he helped raise than the player.
"Dalton wanted to commit that day. And I told him, this thing just started. Offers are really starting to roll in. Let's wait. He was a junior, and he knew where he wanted to play," Mitch Risner says.
"I tried to help him understand. Don't play for the coaches. Don't play for the system. Those guys change. You want to play for the town and the culture. And Kansas is a lot like Wiggins. Everybody's going to the game. Small-town culture, and he just loved it.
He wanted to play for those fans in that town."
During his four seasons at Manhattan, Mitch noticed whenever his son walked through the athletic center, the support staff, people like the cooks and the janitors, would light up when they saw him.
"No matter who it was, trainers, the guy who threw out the garbage, he'd always say hello," Mitch says.
The Bengals seem to have been fated to be the logical place that hugged his son back after three years of looking for a home. Mitch now lives in Norman, Okla., about ten minutes from Bengals head coach Zac Taylor's boyhood neighborhood. About a month after Dalton signed in Cincinnati, Mitch blindly ran into Sherwood Taylor, and now one of his pickleball partners is Zac Taylor's father.
It was quite a ride back to Norman. The best part of the news conference, Mitch says, was the opening question. Which Dalton chose not to answer.
"Before taking any question, he basically said let me tell you how I'm feeling right now. And he just talked about gratitude … Slow down for a minute, stop and pause, reflect and say, Hey, mind you. Just so excited to be here, and here's why, and then give your own voice.
"And I was proud that he had the maturity to just state where he's coming from right now today, and be vulnerable enough to express his emotions. I thought that was a pretty mature move."
It's been that kind of a drive. On this particular drive home, Mitch Risner thought about that tiny Toyota of years ago. They almost didn't rent it.
"We kept the car," says Mitch amid the flashbacks on the prairie. "We said, 'Let's go make this a journey, and this is going to be part of the story."