Hamrick to coach Eagles’ baseball
NICEVILLE — The opening wasn’t even a full day old when Cory Hamrick received a phone call notifying him of the coaching vacancy at Niceville High School.
Brad Phillips, a man Hamrick called “a friend,” had suddenly resigned as Niceville’s baseball coach to accept an assistant coaching job at Troy University. In doing so, Phillips’ departure signaled an abrupt end to a two-year run that saw an Eagles program already known for excellence win 42 games, capture one district championship and qualify for the playoffs each season.
But Hamrick initially had no intention of returning to high school coaching.
Or so he thought.
After further research and a conversation with Phillips, Hamrick warmed to the idea and Wednesday he signed on as the new head baseball coach. Still settling into his new office at the school on Thursday, where he will also teach history, Hamrick wasted little time in stating his goals for the program he now inherits.
“Goal No. 1 is to pick up where (Phillips) left off,” Hamrick said. “We’ve got a strong group of seniors and a strong group of up-and-comers. We expect to win every day. It’s not just win a district title, it’s move on to the state level.
“I fully expect us to be in the final four in the coming years, if not year one,” Hamrick added.
Niceville Principal Dr. Linda Smith, who expressed relief in filling the coaching vacancy with a full-time teacher, called Hamrick “an outstanding young person” whom she expects to have a positive impact both on the field and in the classroom.
“It’s always better if we can find someone who can do both,” Smith said. “He has teaching experience at the high school level and he had done a great job in coaching.”
Hamrick, who has spent the past eight years coaching a traveling 17-year-old baseball team called the Alabama Bombers, first got into coaching shortly after the conclusion of his playing days at Birmingham-Southern when he took a job at Wilkinson County High School just outside of Macon, Ga.
Next, he spent two years as an assistant coach at Northwest Shoals (Ala.) Community College and later one year as an assistant at Tennessee Tech in 2007 before turning his attention more toward his travel team.
Allthewhile,Hamricktriedto instill the same sense of respect for the game in his players that was first handed down to him as a player. According to Hamrick, playing under former Panthers coach Brian Shoop, who has since moved on to UAB and is one of many coaching disciples of college coaching legend Ron Polk, the lessons learned during those formative years at Birmingham-Southern remain with him today.
“I was very blessed to have the guys that coached me,” Hamrick said. “It was about playing the game the way it’s supposed to be played. It’s one speed only with the upmost respect for the game.”
As a player, Hamrick was on Birmingham-Southern’s 2001 club that won a school-record 55 games on its way to an NAIA national championship.
Despite coming from outside the Niceville community, Hamrick said he is quite familiar with the tradition and expectation level that surrounds the Eagles program. Truth be told, those two aspects were chiefly behind his decision to accept the job in the first place.
“I wasn’t looking to move into a high school position, but if it’s the right situation, who am I not to pursue?” Hamrick said. “The program and the academics of Niceville High School were so attractive. It doesn’t just start with baseball; it’s up and down the ladder here. It’s every sport, boys and girls, (Niceville) athletics is so solid and the supporting cast is bar none the best I’ve ever seen.”
