Sunday Morning Chat: Belen Jesuit’s Jerry Albert

Today, HSBN Senior Writer Rick Duteau sits down with Belen Jesuit Manager Jerry Albert, who shares his background in baseball, his path to Belen Jesuit and his respect for the game of baseball.

Rick: We’re going to start off with a nice easy one, give readers a little background into your coaching career.

Coach Albert: Well, I started coaching at my high school in New York. I attended Archbishop Molloy High School, which is very comparable to St. Thomas Aquinas down here. Actually it was an all boys school back then; they went co-ed about ten years ago. I had gone to Molloy, graduated there and went to Queens College after that. I went back and started teaching and coaching at my high school with my high school coach. So that was a true blessing. And with the way that everything worked out you could see that God really, you know, you see many times that when you look back where God had his hands on your life and he steers in a certain direction that’s just fantastic. So I started at Molloy, part-time for the first year out of college, full-time the year after that. I was there for nine or ten years total. I wound up becoming the jv coach about three or four years into my career there. In New York everything is different. In New York, jv was like, your jv schedule mirrored your varsity, including the playoffs.

Rick: Yeah, I think you just play the jv games first a lot of times, right?

Coach Albert: With baseball you flip. If varsity was away, you were home, but with the same schools, in the same league. So you had the same schedule basically as the varsity and it was very, very intense as far as the playoffs and standings. So it was great. We were there for seven years, I did the jv. We were in the city championship five times and we won four of them. So that was really big. Up there, the city championship for jv was played on a college field. You would get five, six hundred people at the game. It was a big thing. That was a lot of fun. And at the same time that I was there I was teaching PE, I was Coach Curran’s jv baseball coach and I became the Athletic Director about five years into the career. They asked me to be the Athletic Director. I had a great job. I became the Athletic Director, coaching the jv, working with Coach Curran, who was my high school coach and great friend and mentor. I had a great situation. A great school. Then my wife and I started thinking about where we were going to raise the family. Her family moved down here right after we got married. We started taking trips down, seeing things. Started realizing that it was more affordable to live down here at the time than it was in New York. We kind of got the bug that maybe we would look into some options down here. It was a big move for us, but we made it. My first year down here actually it didn’t quite develop as we had planned. I actually wound up working with Joe Weber over at Columbus. My former Principal at Molloy was the Principal at Columbus. He had moved down here.

Rick: Small world!

Coach Albert: Yeah, things didn’t quite pan you the way we planned so, Brother Angelo said, “Hey, Jer, we’ve got a spot that just opened up at our place. You come here, you do whatever you want until you get yourself exactly what you’re looking for. So I taught Morality and Ethics over at Columbus and I helped out with their varsity program for my first year down here. And then I got to know a lot of people. Joe was fantastic. I’m very grateful to him the way he was so open with me, as far as coming in and helping out with the program and introducing me to a lot of people in the Miami area. I kind of scouted some things around and I saw a new school opening up, called Coral Springs Charter. So, I worked for that position and I got the AD and baseball position there and I stayed there for twelve years. It was a great thing; it was a lot of fun. Watching the program grow and hiring coaches and bringing in all the coaches for all different sports and seeing it grow right before your eyes. It was very gratifying.

Rick: It seemed like you were synonymous with that after awhile. With Charter and Jerry Albert, I think because you helped to build that program…

Coach Albert: We not only built a program, we built a school. I hired so many people there that became administrators. The current principal there is a guy I hired for cross country. The Athletic Director there now is a guy that I brought in for football. The Dean of Students is a guy I brought in for basketball. We were able to bring in people, and that was a lot of fun. We were not only bringing in people, but we were helping people. Guys that were in different points in their careers they needed a job and if something matched up for them and they were able to do it. I had some really great people we were able to bring in there and build a nice school. The school is in good shape now. It’s good academically. It’s good athletically. That was great.

Rick: Just like you said, you see those points in your life where God makes it’s mark. I’m sure a lot of people probably look at those hirings, those moments as that same thing.

Coach Albert: That was a lot of fun. The best part about being a AD was being able to put people in positions. You know how hard you worked for your position, to get to where you’re at. To see people realize their dream of being a head football coach or a head basketball coach. Somebody who is coming out of the college ranks and is scouting around now in the high school. Somebody who just came out of college looking for their first job. Being able to place people into positions to help them is always nice. Not only there, but then when we had them there, sometimes guys would move. I had a number of guys that were with me in baseball that got head jobs, from working with me as an assistant. And that was a lot of fun. To me, being around Coach Curran all those years, Jack Curran, he’s a national legend in the high school level. He passed away last year and it was a big loss for all of us. He was 82 at the time. He died the night they named the Pope. He was a great, great, great friend. A great person. A great mentor. You learn from him by watching. He wouldn’t tell you how to do stuff; you just watch how he did it. In his whole life he always connected people. Anytime graduates would come back to Molloy and they’d look for a job, he always picked up the phone and called somebody he knew around the country. He always seemed to know somebody in every field where he could help connect people. And you watch and you realize that’s what life’s all about, really. We’re put in positions to help each other. You get the opportunity to do that for yourself and try and do it just like you saw him do it. He helped you out a little bit or you saw how he helped other people and then you try and do that for other people. You’re kinda paying it forward. You just realize that that’s what it’s about. Putting people in position to realize their dreams, it’s a great thing. It’s why we’re here, to help each other.

Back to the coaching thing, I started to think more and more as my kids got older how I wanted them in the Catholic schools again. That was important to me. I just love the Catholic school environment. Having been at Molloy and having gone there as a student and worked there for ten years, you can’t duplicate that in a public arena, when you’re able to put your faith out there and have that be what you build everything off. That was important to me. That creates a certain type of environment that I wanted my kids in. So obviously, now that I have four kids and the rates of tuition have gone up so much. I’m not making ten times what my father made when he put me through Molloy but the tuition is ten, fifteen times what it used to be when we were in school. It got to the point where really, it had been on my mind and in my heart for a number of years leading up to me moving over here. Actually I moved all four of them prior to this offer coming, I moved all four of them to Catholic schools.

Rick: The same one, or different ones?

Coach Albert: Well sort of, they were registered at McCarthy, my older two at the time. Carolina was going into her sophomore year and Gerard was going into his freshman year. The twins were going into fifth grade. We made the move and Maria, my wife, turned to me and said, “How in the world are we going to do this?” I said, “He’ll take care of it.” God takes care, he’ll figure this out. We’ve got to make the jump because we know it’s what we want to do as a family and something will come up to make it happen.

Rick: And it did.

Coach Albert: We had a certain amount of money that we knew we could allocate to tuition and then this offer came up, which was beautiful. I had known the people here for a few years and I kinda kept in touch with them over the years. And then a position opened up and at that time Father Lewy had called and asked if I were interested in it. We definitely explored it. Once I got on this campus, I knew I was leaving a great job and great people, but once I got on the campus and started getting a feel for it and I just knew it was right for my son. At that time Gerard was going into ninth grade. I knew being here, taking the tour around, meeting the people. I knew what we were looking for we kinda had found. It was a great thing and it exceeded expectations, to tell you the truth.

Rick: That brings us right into the next question. A couple of years ago you decided to make the move from Coral Springs Charter to Belen. Only a few coaches have gone from Broward to Miami to coach. How was that transition for you?

Coach Albert: Well it was definitely challenging because all of my contacts were in Broward. I’m not a native Florida guy. The contacts I had made mostly were in Broward. I had a good network of people in Broward. So coming down here the challenge was going to be, how do we fill this place with coaches? Definitely a challenge. It’s funny, my wife actually gave me an idea. She said, “Why don’t you go talk to that old timer down there, Red Berry, he’s been there forever. And you know him because you’ve talked to him before. He seems to be a big guy in the Miami community.” I said “Oh, you’re right!” Such a brilliant idea! So I called up Red when I came down here, and I had a couple of friends, I have Laz Llanes who is now the scouting guy for the Marlins, and Rollie Pino was a real good friend of mine. Now he’s an international guy with the Red Sox. But those guys told me they would help me staff the place. And of course Joe Weber, I kind of picked his brain a little bit. But when I went over and talked to Red Berry, that wound up being the most fruitful conversation. We went out to lunch and he had some guys in mind. He actually was in the process of selling his facility. And told me, “I’ve got two guys for you if you can hold on. I’ve got two great guys for you.” One of them was Ivan Montane, he’s still with me. The other one was Chris Highly who was with us for a couple of years and now he’s doing so many things on the outside with his fire department job that he couldn’t commit to us anymore. But that got the ball rolling with those two guys and we were able to build off of that. Andy Blanco had been here already and he stayed on, but he was the only one that we kept out of all of the assistants that they had had at the time. Then we started to fill it up with some guys we had. Friends that I knew would be loyal. I had Angel Arobolea come down and then George Prejeco, who’s still with us. And then we built it also from within. Ed Fraga, we convinced him to come back down here. So the challenge was in the staffing, to answer that question.

It was not a challenge at all dealing with the kids or the families, that was a piece of cake because I knew that the community down here was passionate about baseball and I knew what they were expecting. I think if you just come in and run a professional program and treat the kids with respect and work real hard at getting them set for the future in schools and everything’s fine. The reception I got here from the community was fantastic. They had been through a bunch of turnover over the years for various reasons, one thing or another. Sometimes things out of their control. Illnesses in various families, different things that were taking place with the different coaches here. So I put myself in their position, when I came down. I said, “Guys, these seniors have had four head coaches in four years; that’s tough.” And we had some very high-level kids. We just came in and do what we do in a respectful manner and treat the kids with a lot of respect. We didn’t come in with guns blazing. I just kind of observed. I watched for the first year what we had. We had a great group of kids to work with that first year. And I watched how the program operated. And then each year we kind of tinkered with it a little bit with different things we had in mind and how we do it. But the Broward to Dade thing was mostly, the biggest challenge was mostly getting them in the community down here and finding good coaches. And I think we’ve done that. We’ve had some people really come out here. Right now we have a guy, Kevin Howard, he’s joined us. He was a UM legend. He just got done playing pro ball. He’s with us this year. Eric San Pedro is another UM guy who just got done playing pro ball, and he’s been helping us out on a part-time basis. But we’ve been able to network and network and network and get better and better people year over year and build off that. It’s been a great thing.

Rick: Obviously each county has a certain style of play that they are used to. What would you say are the main differences between baseball in Miami and baseball in Broward?

Coach Albert: [laughing] I laugh, in Miami “Bunt” is a four letter word. You don’t see that many people doing it. It took them about two years to get it into their heads that they were going to learn how to bunt. That was a big thing. There’s great passion down here. There’s a great enthusiasm down here for baseball. But there’s great passion and enthusiasm in Broward too. There’s some great baseball in both counties. Across the board I think the talent level was very, very even. I think everybody is just pretty much passionate about the game and goes at it real hard, night in and night out.

Rick: With all the time baseball coaches spend away from their families there is always something that has to be done to keep everyone happy. Give us an example of the most romantic thing you’ve ever done for your wife.

Coach Albert: [laughing] That’s a good one. Holy cow. Well, we try and… I know how hard it is on her. She’s known me since college and she’s great and she’s seen the whole progression. How you go from being a college guy and now all of a sudden you’re out in the world trying to find a job doing what you love doing. So she’s seen that whole progression and different things and how we looked into jobs down in Miami. Making the move from New York down here. She gets it, which is fantastic. And that’s the key right there. The wife has to really get it. And Maria gets it, she understands the whole thing. So she’s fantastic. I could not do this without her being as supportive as she is. It’s amazing. So we always try and… I always try and keep that in the forefront of my mind. Like it’s not one particularly romantic thing, we’re always taking time out to spend time with each other and it’s hard with four kids. In the last two weeks alone we went to the Andrea Bocelli concert up at the BB&T and this past weekend we were able to swing tickets for Laura Pausini down here at the James L. Knight. Those were two real nice nights. But we always try and do stuff like that. Sometimes it happens by surprise. Like this particular weekend the kids just happened to be all over the place but we were able to get out and go to a nice dinner. I try and do that frequently because you know that she bears the brunt of the sacrifice when it comes to power hour it’s here at the school. We take trips, we try and take trips, little weekends and excursions once a year across the ally and go to Naples. But it’s more of a day-to day thing. I make sure that when I’m home, I’m home. I’m not doing my score book. I’m not doing my stats. I’m not taking phone calls from people. When I’m home, I’m home. It’s hard because your mind is racing. We come home and sometimes it’s just one of those exciting wins.

Rick: Yeah you can’t get the game out of you.

Coach Albert: And it’s brilliant, but you’ve got to sit there and make sure you realize, you’re home now and it’s time to make your wife your priority and your kids your priority. And that’s important. On a day-to-day basis I pay special attention to that. We do, we try and get out a lot. Even if we just get out for a short little meal somewhere or go out for dessert and have a cup of coffee and talk. And when we talk, I try and listen rather than talk. I want to know what’s going on with her life. Different things she has in mind for the house and family and things like that. That was kind of a mundane answer.

Rick: No, that’s a great answer! I feel that you really pay your wife great tribute and I’ve never seen the two of you together but I know that you have that type of a relationship…

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