By Jim Stout
MaxPreps.com
His first Major League hit came off Toronto’s Dave Stieb in his first career at bat. His first home run was hit off the Yankees’ Melido Perez.
He went on to produce four seasons of 20 or more home runs – including three in a row during one career-defining stretch – and drove in over 100 runs in back-to-back seasons in 1998 and 1999.
How then did former New York Mets and Philadelphia Phillies first baseman Rico Brogna not only wind up as high school football coach, but agree to take on a second-year varsity team in Connecticut that went 0-10 last season and scored just four touchdowns?
“Football has always been my favorite sport, my first love,” Brogna says without hesitation.
“Even while I was playing baseball, I was starting to study playbooks. I never lost the passion for football that I developed while growing up and playing in high school. I was thinking about coaching football while I was still playing baseball.”
Needless to say, the 38-year-old Brogna will have a lot of thinking to do about football this fall, undoubtedly at times during sleepless nights. In taking over the second-year Varsity program at Nonnewaug High in Woodbury, Conn., Brogna will lead a team that was outscored by 399-36 during its debut season in 2007 and finished the campaign with fewer than 30 active players on the roster.
Here’s the good news: there is no place to go but up. And the upward swing has already begun.
Brogna, who by day works as the Arizona Diamondbacks’ professional scout and talent evaluator in the Northeast, ran his first spring practice with his new team last June, and was encouraged by what he saw, starting with the increase in roster numbers.
Thanks to Nonnewaug’s move out of the formidable South-West Conference and into the more manageable Pequot Conference, Brogna expects the Chiefs to have a better chance on a game to game basis to compete on equal footing with their opponents.
Then there is the Brogna factor itself,
While most people know him as a baseball player who amassed nearly 3000 Major League at bats and 800 hits before his career was cut short by injuries and spinal arthritis, Brogna was first and foremost a football guy growing up in Connecticut. His father, Joe, was a long time coach at the Taft School in Watertown. As a senior quarterback at Watertown High in 1987, Rico Brogna was named the state’s Gatorade Player of the Year, and gained third-team All-American honors.
Then when the Detroit Tigers selected him in the first round (26th overall) of the 1988 amateur draft, Brogna faced an agonizing choice. It wasn’t whether to sign professionally as a high school senior or move onto a career in college baseball. It was whether to sign with the Tigers for $100,000 – which was good signing money at the time – or accept a scholarship to be the quarterback at Clemson University.
“It was a very difficult decision,” Brogna recalled.
“Football was my love. I drew a lot of the attention I got in baseball because of my football background. Clemson was a Top 10 team at the time and had even been No. 1 at least once. They needed a quarterback and I didn’t even think of myself as a first-round draft pick in baseball. I already had my dorm at Clemson and my playbook.”
Brogna eventually accepted the offer from the Tigers and made his Major League debut for Detroit four years later, at age 22. But he kept the football playbook. The absence of football only made the heart grow fonder.
“I moved through the Tigers’ system pretty quickly but I didn’t know it was going to happen that way,” he said.
“I always wondered from the start what I would do if I didn’t make it to the big leagues so I continued to study football and think about a career in coaching football while I was playing minor league baseball. Because the minor league season ends early (around Sept. 1) I was able to come home and help my dad coach football and learn from him. I figured I could always get into high school coaching if I didn’t make it in baseball.”
His passion for coaching didn’t stop at football. Even after becoming a productive Major League hitter and exceptional defensive first baseman with the Mets and Phillies, Brogna returned to the Watertown area during the winter and coached boys’ basketball, first taking on the Watertown High freshman team, and later moving up to the junior varsity.
Due to injuries, however, and the infliction of Ankylosing Spondylitis, a severe form of spinal arthritis, Brogna had to spend more and more time during the baseball off-season on conditioning and fighting his physical maladies. It was a battle with his body he couldn’t win.
Initially he had to give up coaching basketball during the off season to concentrate on conditioning. He was then forced to retire from baseball at age 31 after being limited to 81 games with the Phillies and Red Sox in 2000 and to just 72 games with the Atlanta Braves in 2001.
In reality, though, Brogna was only beginning the rest of his life in coaching football.
He immediately accepted the head football coaching job at Kennedy High in Waterbury in the fall of 2001 and held that position for two seasons. He continued to learn and develop as a football coach while working at the Salisbury School in Connecticut and later for veteran head coach Frank Hauser at Division III Wesleyan University.
At the same time, Brogna began forging a career as a baseball scout, first joining the staff of the Colorado Rockies, then moving to Arizona when his Colorado boss, Jerry DiPoto, took a job with the Diamondbacks.
Coincidentally, the Diamondbacks director of amateur scouting in the Northeast, Matt Merullo, was a football standout at Fairfield Prep in Connecticut before becoming a catcher at the University of North Carolina and playing six Major League seasons with the White Sox, Twins and Indians.
“Writing up (scouting) reports can be a laborious chore for some guys,” said Merullo, whose son, Nick, quarterbacked Hand High of Madison, Conn., to a state football final as a sophomore last season.
“Rico loves it. He’s as thorough and as detailed a report writer as there is. He’s really into it. I can see why he loves football. He has a way of describing things, of painting a picture in his reports or in conference calls that’s unique. It’s like he’s really into the X’s and O’s of scouting.”
Brogna will now make the seamless transition to the X’s and O’s of the football field.
“The Diamondbacks were fantastic when I told them I had the opportunity to be a head football coach again,” he said.
“They’ve allowed me to customize my scouting schedule so that I can work around any conflicts that there might be with football. But because much of my scouting position involves evaluating players that might be involved in trades and because the trading deadline is well passed once football begins, there won’t be a lot of conflicts during the heart of the football season.”
There will be a lot of work, however. The detail and the all-encompassing demands of coaching football are what continue to draw Brogna to the sport.
“Ever since I started coaching football again, I’ve become addicted,” he said. “You just never stop learning. There are so many things to do and to learn but it’s never tedious for me. I love the details, the notebooks, the video, the game preparation and the statistics. I’m in this for the long haul.”
It isn’t just talk, either. Brogna was one of the first coaches in the county to post his 2008 roster on MaxPreps, entering his Nonnewaug team data in early July.
His commitment and dedication hasn’t been lost on his new players. In Brogna, Nonnewaug knows it’s getting a proven winner in football, not just a former Major League first baseman.
“My first reaction when I found out that Coach Brogna was going to be coaching for us at Nonnewaug was an excited one,” said junior wide receiver Zak Dominello.
“After just ending a disappointing season, I felt that this was our chance to start fresh with a new coach and a new conference. The fact that Coach Brogna had played professional baseball did not affect my opinion of him, except that it made me feel more confident in the future of our team.
“We’ve found Coach Brogna to be a very effective coach and are made to feel more confident by his football background,” Dominello added. “The fact that he was once a top (college) recruit greatly improved the team’s morale and increased the confidence that our team can win games and play to our full potential.”
Nonnewaug will open its second season of varsity football on Sept 13 at home against Weston, the lone SWC team it retained for its 2008 schedule. The Chiefs will run the veer option offense under Brogna, while keeping their playbook simple, their blocking rules straight-forward and their focus on basic techniques.
Every combination of 11 players that Brogna assigns to the field will have to contribute.
“He understands that to be a great team everyone has to work together and that you cannot rely only on one player to win games,” Dominello said.
“His confidence in our team shows and motivates us to work as hard as we can to become a winning football team. I feel that Coach Brogna possesses the important qualities that Nonnewaug football needs to become a competitive team.”
Jim Stout is the MaxPreps.com Media Manager for the Eastern United States, as well as writer and photographer. He may be reached at 845-367-2864 or at jstout@maxpreps.com
