Ronnie Outen

Ronnie is the Director of Basketball at the Wiregrass Ranch Sports Campus of Pasco County. Prior to this, he was an overseas professional basketball player, playing for teams in Italy, Sweden, Lebanon, and Malta.

Outen was a two-time Junior College All-American who transferred to and played for Division I-A West Virginia University in Morgantown. After graduating from WVU, he started his professional basketball career in Malta in 1993, where he led the league in scoring. The next year, he signed a two-year contract to play in Montepastore, Italy, and in 1996, played for the Newcastle Lions in England, and followed that by playing for the Yakima Sun kings in the Continental Basketball Assn. (CBA) before being released and finishing out the 1997 season with Champville in the country of Lebanon. Ronnie continued his career in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1998, where he won a Swedish league championship and played the final three years of his career back in Lebanon, where he led the league in scoring one season and won a Lebanese league title with Kharaba Zouk.

He retired from competitive basketball in 2002 and moved to Florida, where he spent several years as a stay-at-home dad before becoming a Realtor with Buyer Resource Realty in 2005 and with Hoffman and Hoffman Realty in Tampa. Ronnie became a substitute teacher in Hillsborough County Schools in 2006, where he began coaching in the New Tampa area, first at Liberty Middle School and then as an assistant coach at Freedom High. He then was offered a full-time position at Bartels K-8 School, where he became the head basketball coach in 2010. He continued teaching at both Barrels and then at Wharton High until 2013, when he moved to Boston to further his son’s hockey career. While in Boston, Ronnie mentored several young men in the suburb of Worcester and became a personal basketball trainer until he returned to the Tampa Bay area, when he began working at Advent Health Center Ice. Ronnie is excited to join the team at the Wiregrass Ranch Sports Campus of Pasco County as Director of Basketball and to continue to help young athletes grow as people and basketball players.