(Photo Credit: James P. McCoy/Buffalo News)
by Justin Joseph
Not every athlete gets the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to coach the sport that they love at the next-level. Kyle Brennan, 25, got his chance on February 1st , when he was hired by a professional baseball team, in the Houston Astros system, to become a Minor League Player Development Coach at the Advanced-A level.
“I was obviously ecstatic,” Brennan said regarding his initial reaction to the job offer. ”I texted my family first and then afterwards Tom Downey [who] is the Phillies scout I knew for years. He has been pulling for me to get into pro baseball for a while now,” Brennan said.
Brennan began to really get serious about baseball in high school, where he played for Ward Melville. In high school, Brennan served as a captain for one season and threw out 10 of 14 base stealers while blocking 94 percent of pitches in the dirt as the team’s catcher in his senior season of 2012. However, Brennan did not always have his sights set on becoming a baseball coach early on.
“I went to college as a mechanical engineering student and after three semesters I switched to exercise science … at the time I was thinking of actually becoming a physical therapist.” Brennan said. So what could have led him to the path of becoming a coach for a minor league team?
“One of my teammates in Buffalo, where I played, he was the hitting coach for the high-A team this past year, and I reached out to him to ask him about a couple things completely separate from the Astros, and he basically asked do you want to work with us,” Brennan said. “He knew the background I already had with baseball and coaching, so then I interviewed a couple of times with some [people] of the organization. It was kind of out of the blue in a sense.”
Then on the first day of February, Brennan got a call from Pete Putila the Assistant General Manager and head of the player development for the Astros confirming he got the job and is to report to Palm Beach on Feb. 20.
The only coaching experience that Brennan had was after graduating college when he went to coach the youth as a means to give back to his community. He liked the sport of baseball and wanted to teach kids how to better their game and lives through coaching.
“I liked it and I knew I was good at it, but I didn’t see myself doing it as a career, but over the late spring and summer I decided coaching and developing catchers on the field and in the weight room is more of my passion and strong suit, so I went full-go with coaching,” Brennan said. “I don’t have the slightest regret,” Brennan maintains towards his decision.
Even though Brennan has no experience coaching professional athletes, he takes a lot of what he learned growing up, with him into his new job. “ We had four captains my senior year [in high school] and I was the most reserved and least talkative of the bunch, but I had the most respect out of all the players because I led by example and I cared about my teammates more than myself,” Brennan said. “The biggest thing I learned from high school baseball was Lou Petrucci, our head coach who I ended up coaching with last year, his sheer passion for the game and love for his players and [his] ability to lead his players stick out to me the most.
“Growing up with a stable and extremely supportive family was good,” Brennan said. “The fact that my parents and a lot of people who raised me in the baseball world were like that benefited me a lot.”
While this opportunity may seem like a blessing to many including Brennan, he does not take it for granted, and knows that he still has a lot of work to do on the next level. “My long-term goals are to completely change the way that catchers train for the position with training, conditioning and stretching for the position, and make a marketable stamp on the industry in that sense,” Brennan said. “My goals this year are to immerse myself and learn as much as I can, and establish relationships first, way before I try to teach them anything. A relationship with a player and a coach is way more important than the other stuff.”
In regards to whether he will one day want to coach in the big leagues, Brennan says “That would be awesome but that is not why I signed up, it is more to progress the game and the way that we prepare for it.”
Brennan will get his chance very soon, as he leaves for Long Island to begin his next chapter on Sunday February 16 with his new job.
