Longtime Robbinsville head coach Brettell resigns
ROBBINSVILLE » One of the most prominent and longest-lasting coaches in the 12-year history of Robbinsville High School athletics is calling it a career.
Tom Brettell, who served as head coach and always-classy ambassador for the Ravens baseball program since its second season, stepped down recently in order to devote more time to his young family. He and wife Jackie are expecting their fourth child the day before Thanksgiving, adding to a litter that includes 5-year-old Ava, 4-year-old Ryan and 2-year-old Callie.
“I’ll have four that are five and under,” Brettell said. “In order to do it right in coaching, you’ve gotta put all kind of time in. It’s crazy. I was able to do it for eight or nine years, but it’s time. I’m gonna miss it but I need time with my family.”
Brettell sounded exactly like his good friend Kevin Kerins, who resigned as Mercer County Community College coach several weeks ago.
“He and I have been talking about it back and forth,” Brettell said. “He didn’t want to pull the trigger and it’s bittersweet for me, so we’ve been kind of going through it at the same time. It was nice to have somebody to talk to about it.
“I had been thinking about it the last couple of years. I made my decision before the season started. I didn’t tell anybody but Curt (Wyers). I just went about it and went from there.”
Wyers is currently searching for the Ravens next coach.
Unfortunately for Brettell, his last season was his worst, as the Ravens finished 7-16 and did not make the state tournament for the only time in his 11 years at the helm.
“I don’t know what happened,” he said. “We lost a lot of close games; eight or nine one-run games. We lost a couple walk-offs where we had the lead. It was one of those seasons, things just did not go our way and it was contagious.”
Despite the sour ending, Brettell gave no thought to changing his mind in order to go out on a higher note. Besides, he has enough pleasant things to look back on.
After playing for Jimmy Maher at Hamilton West, the 1996 grad attended The College of New Jersey and returned to his alma mater to teach in 2000. He coached under Maher for five years and considered that time as solid groundwork for his head coaching career.
“Besides my dad, I learned a lot about the game and how to manage it from Jimmy, Johnny Costantino, Mike Giambelluca,” Brettell said. “Those guys had a lot of influence on me as to how to run a program. Obviously Jimmy’s track record speaks for itself. There’s nobody more competitive than him . ... We’ll just leave it at that. Some of my favorite times being a manager was being on the other side just watching him. But he was a huge influence. He not only coached players, he coached coaches.”
Brettell served as an assistant to Dr. Sandy Overton during Robbinsville’s first season of varsity baseball in 2007, when the Ravens had no senior class. He took over the following year and promptly led the second-year program to the Central Jersey Group II title and NJSIAA Group II championship game before falling to Lyndhurst.
“We were in uncharted waters,” Brettell said. “I felt like Dan Marino (who lost the Super Bowl his second season and never returned). We had an unbelievable set of seniors my first year that took to what we were trying to do. We coupled that with some good young talent, freshman kids who went on and played college.”
Although Robbinsville has not returned to the state finals, it won the Mercer County Tournament in 2011, two more sectional titles in 2010 and ’14, and four CVC Patriot Division crowns. Brettell leaves with nearly 180 wins, but he feels his time was about more than numbers.
“The proudest thing I feel is every single one of our players went on to college whether it was to play or not,” he said. “We were really blessed with some intelligent, smart, good people. I like to think that’s kind of what we tried to do, what the philosophy was. If you took care of family and classroom, it became second hand on the baseball field that you would treat your teammates the right way, and if you do that you could move.”
It’s now time to move on for the young father, who admitted to feeling some serious emotions when he peeled off his Ravens uniform in the final weeks. He recalled “stupid things,” like dragging the field, getting on the bus for road games. He cherished the memories of the players, of course, and of working with assistant coaches such as his brother Scott, Matt Mayo, Jordan McCready, Jeff Fisher and Sean Flynn, among others.
“You put in a lot of time together out there,” Brettell said. “I had some great coaches, and some of your best friends come from spending so much time with guys like them. I thought about all that stuff. It was a great run, I’m going to miss it.”
And he’s going to be missed.