Former Diamondbacks Pitcher Leads Little School to Big-League Victory
For the first time in almost 20 years, the Seligman, AZ boys basketball team won the Arizona State Championship in the 1A Division. Seligman won the championship with a big-league-pitcher-turned-coach found on the Internet.
Prescott, AZ (PRWEB) June 19, 2006 -- With all of his big-league experience, Brian Matzenbacher, a pitcher for the World Series champion Arizona Diamondbacks from 1999 to 2003, was having trouble making the transition from pitching baseballs to pitching himself as a coach.
In July of 2005 he posted his resume on Coach Dan Payne’s http://www.TazSport.com website, which Payne started to match coaches with coaching jobs. It was there that Seligman Athletic Director Joanne Curley found Matzenbacher's resume that summer.
“It’s like opening a book,” she said of the site, explaining that she was able to enter coaching criteria in the TazSport resume search, and receive a list of candidates who had the qualifications she’d specified.
When Curley found Matzenbacher’s posting, she apparently saw the potential because she offered him an interview. She called him on a Wednesday, interviewed him that Friday and hired him on the spot. Within a couple of weeks, he started working as a kindergarten-through-12th-grade P.E. teacher and the basketball and baseball coach.
“They’d been waiting for this for four years,” he said of the basketball team, which consisted of 10 seniors and a handful of juniors and sophomores. “Everyone had told me about how good they were.”
Clell Babers, a senior and the team’s first-string shooting guard, said winning the state championship was “a dream come true.”
His teammate Vince Alvarado, a senior and the team’s first-string point guard, said that while the team members had been to the semi-finals during the past two years, they hadn’t won – and it was about time.
“We should have won the past two years,” he said.
Both boys said Matzenbacher did a great job coaching.
For Curley, the process she’d engaged in through TazSport had paid off. Locals were skeptical when she hired a coaching rookie who wasn’t from Arizona. And though she’d posted the job opening on several web sites, it was with Tazsport.com that she hit pay dirt.
“The ultimate goal was to win the championship,” she said. And they did.
“My vision was doing what we’re doing here today,” Payne said. And he has.
For more information on this story, go to http://www.tazsport.com/taz_news.php
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