New Muldrow coach hoping to turn things around for Bulldogs on the diamond
When Matt Brady was hired as the new Muldrow Bulldogs baseball coach at Monday night’s Muldrow Public Schools Board of Education meeting, he was extremely excited.
“I am stoked,” Brady said. “It’s a great opportunity. That’s the biggest thing. You hate one coach having to leave, but that brings opportunity to the next guy. I actually applied for the job beforehand. Coach (John) Rozell got it. Coach Rozell was great, but things just didn’t work out with him. In applying for it, I felt like if it ever came open, I wouldn’t re-apply for it, but I would try to at least throw my name in the hat. I love baseball, and I want to be around it.
Rozell resigned last week after the Bulldogs went through a 6-24 season this spring.
Since Brady was already part of the Muldrow coaching staff, being an assistant coach in both football and boys basketball, he knew most, if not all, of the players of the diamond.
“I know most of the kids anyway, coaching the other two sports (football and basketball) with them,” he said. “A lot of the football kids play baseball. I feel that they’ve gotten to know me this year. Just being at Muldrow, getting to know the kids has been great.”
However, by taking the baseball coaching job, it means he will have to give up his boys basketball assistant coaching duties due to both basketball and baseball overlapping in February and March.
“I have told the basketball coaches (Terry Collins and Luke Folkerts) that I absolutely think the world of those two, and I would never have ever left if I would not have had the opportunity to become the baseball coach,” Brady said. “I talked to both of them, and I told them, ‘This is a hard conversation.’ I would have never thought in a million years the baseball coach would have left after one year. I’ve told the basketball and football coaches if it wasn’t for this (becoming baseball coach), I would still be in football and basketball.”
Brady did get to have a small taste of what he will be doing as he stepped in as substitute coach when Rozell received a two-game suspension early this past season.
“I think that got me better prepared to know some of the (baseball) kids because everybody is coming back except (Lincoln University signee Jonah) Claborn,” Brady said. “That in itself is big as well. There were several things I thought they could improve on, not to say that previous coaches didn’t do good, but there’s things I would do differently.”
Brady said what he hopes to be able to do with the program.
“To me, one of the most important things that I would say is the camaraderie with the kids,” he said. “Obviously, kids need structure, but they need support. They need me to be a role model for them. As a coach, I feel like we’re put in spots where being a role model for the kids is huge. They need to see me at band concerts and different school events. I feel that building the program, getting the kids to want to be a part of it, is the big thing. We want to be competitive. We have a chance to be competitive. We’re very young. We have a lot of sophomores and freshmen who are competing for starting spots. We have the building blocks for the future. My hope is for Muldrow baseball that we can be competitive. Class 4A is very tough.”
Brady also said that just picking the brains of other baseball coaches, he’s gotten some “nuggets of wisdom” to help instill into his Bulldogs baseball players.
“Talking to different coaches throughout the year, if I could tell this group one thing, what would I tell them like for my pitchers. One of the coaches said look at the statistics — 63 percent of first-pitch strikes gets a guy out. That’s an interesting statistic. Things like that I’ve tried to pick up over time.”
Brady won’t have to wait very long to begin to put his stamp on the Muldrow baseball program because summer baseball will begin near the end of this month or at the start of June. However, the new coach said he will work around the other summer sports programs for football and basketball.
“With the summer schedule, I told them we’ll work around football (Summer Pride) and basketball,” Brady said. “Everybody is playing multiple sports, and you get the high school kids who are having to work. The biggest thing I told them was we may have to take some cuts (batting practice) and field ground balls by ourselves. I want to make more about accommodating kids because their summer schedule is so wild. I think they felt that works out better for them. I talked to both groups, the junior high and high school teams (on Wednesday). I said that I’m one of those if you tell me you’re doing something, that better be what you’re doing. If you tell me you’re going here or you’re working, and that’s what you’re doing, and you have to miss practice for that reason, that’s a part of life. If you tell me you’re working and you’re at McDonald’s eating, then you’re not being truthful. I know we’ll run into those issues, and I wanted to express that point to them. I know we’re not going to get to practice (as a full team) because some of them are in football and basketball. It may pull you away from those sports.”
