I remember the day I decided I wanted to become a coach. It was the spring of 1979 and I was the JV baseball coach at my high school alma mater, Waterford (MI) Our Lady of Lakes. We were a small Catholic High School in Detroit's most northern suburbs. As is typical in Michigan, we probably had about three weeks of pre-season practice prior to our first games, and most of those practices were indoors on a basketball court. Our first game was a home game, though I don't remember the opponent.
What I do remember about that first game was that we were behind 3-2 in the bottom of the 7th inning and were fortunate enough to get our leadoff batter on base. I do remember sacrifice bunting him over to second, and then later in the inning, with the score tied and only one out, we squeezed the winning run home. Our players (they were almost entirely 9th graders) went crazy, and at that moment, I knew that I wanted to have a career in coaching. I had chills!!
At that time I was 20 years old and working on the assembly line at GM Truck and Coach in Pontiac. I had been to college for two years (one year at Olivet College and a year at Oakland Community College). I had one year of college football experience and two years of college baseball, but I was not a very good student during those first two years of college. The year at GM allowed me to educate myself for the first time in my life and it also gave me an opportunity to try my hand at helping coach the football team at OLL and my first real coaching position on that JV baseball team.
I decided to go back to college to become a teacher and thus be able to coach. I left my job at GM, though my foreman encouraged me to take an educational leave and come back the next summer. I wanted no part of that, though I likely would have made a great living and had been retired by now had I chosen to stay in the factory!!
To skip ahead and make a long story short, I finished my degree at Siena Heights College in Adrian, Michigan, played my last two years of college baseball, became an assistant coach for the college women's basketball team, and even ran on the cross country team in the fall of 1981. I went on to student-teaching and coaching high school football, basketball, and baseball in Westchester County, NY for two years, then in Lansing, MI for a year, and then became a high school teacher and coach back at my old high school again.
After two years I applied for the head baseball coach position at Siena Heights University and got the job in the summer of 1987. I was young, but enthusiastic and ambitious, with a wife and a son. I still had so much to learn about the game of baseball, but those early years I was mentored well by my boss, Fred Smith, the AD at Siena, and also by the late Hank Burbridge, the legendary baseball coach at Spring Arbor University. Additionally, my first graduate assistant coach was a good friend of mine and former teammate, Gary Gill, who has a great baseball mind. I learned a lot from him, as he coached the infielders and outfielders and I coached the pitchers and catchers.
I quickly learned how to recruit. Recruiting at that time was all about hard work and communication, going to see high school and summer games, tournaments on the weekends, and having kids and their parents visit campus. I was able to sell kids on a demanding game schedule against many nationally ranked and Division I teams for sixteen seasons. I still haven't seen any teams who played the kind of ambitious schedule that we played in every season at Siena Heights.
As I learned daily how to be a better coach, whether increasing my knowledge of the game or improving my ability to communicate with my players, I must say that some years I was a better coach than others. We had very competitive teams for so many years into the 1990s and early 2000s. We had guys getting drafted and others getting signed as undrafted free agents during the 90s. I also had a daughter arrive in 1989 and both of my kids became fixtures with me on campus and on the road beating the bushes for recruits.
My separation and divorce in late 1995-early 1996 took its toll on me and often on my ability to coach for a handful of years. In looking back, I know that I allowed my emotions to have a negative effect on my professional life. It wasn't just the divorce, but it was also in the changes in my life due to the divorce that I allowed to interfere with my competence. We were still fielding competitive teams, but I would be lying if I said that I kept getting better as a coach each year. Sure, I was still improving my knowledge of the game, but I allowed my life outside of baseball, and the emotions attached to that, to distract me more than I would like to admit. Looking back, that is part of life, and I learned a lot about myself during that time, even though some days were cloudy with doubt some depression.
To spring forward to 2011, I have been coaching part-time since the 2005 season, having taken the 2004 season off after resigning from Siena. I am a much more competent coach than I have ever been for so many reasons, among them the fact that I (for better or worse) have not allowed my coaching to be affected by other things in my life. My kids are grown now as well, and parenting is probably the one thing I think I have done consistently well since day one.
I don't have to recruit anymore, though I always did enjoy it. Now I get to work with my pitchers at Adrian College every day, do lessons with kids whenever I get a chance, and enjoy working in the public schools with children with various challenges. I love everything I do and I am better at most of the parts of my life than I have ever been.
I have practice in about an hour, and am looking forward to it, as well as an entire weekend full of baseball in January. There is really nothing I would change. My past has brought me to where I am today, and there is no place else I would rather be. I have two fantastic kids, and I have great friends who I coach with every day, as well as great friends whom I coached with at Siena Heights, so many former players whom I consider as friends,and with a healthy body and a positive attitude, I am grateful for the path that God has led me on!!
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