George Monica, Bishop Blanchet’s 34-year head baseball coach, passed major milestone this season with his 500th victory
SEATTLEBy Kevin Birnbaum
For George Monica, there are more important things in life than baseball, but that doesn’t mean the game is “just a game.”
“I think athletics are very, very important,” said Bishop Blanchet High School’s head coach, who this spring became just the third active coach in the state with 500 career wins with a 7-1 victory over Ingraham on March 25.
Monica, who played football and ran track at Blanchet and graduated from the school in 1967, returned to the school as a history and physical education teacher in 1978. He’s been the head baseball coach for 34 years.
“I very much enjoyed my time (as a student) at Blanchet, and I came back with the idea that I’d like to try and do as good a job as my teachers and coaches had done for me,” he said.
Monica’s coaching philosophy has been to outwork everyone else and have fun doing it.
“If it’s not fun, I don’t think it’s worth doing,” he said.
Building characterHis teams have had great success on the field, earning a slew of Metro League titles, state tournament appearances and the class 3A state championship in 1996. Blanchet’s baseball team hasn’t had a losing season since 1981.
But wins and losses aren’t the primary concern for Monica, who was also Blanchet’s head football coach from 1988–2008, and the athletic director from 1988–2009.
“We say something to our kids all the time, and that is: Whatever the record was this year, that’s not really the measure of what we did. The measure of how we did we’re going to find out about when those kids are adults, and what kind of fathers are they, what kind of husbands are they, what kind of people in their community are they?”
Monica, a member of St. Mark Parish in Shoreline, wants his program to foster not just great players but “great men.” He believes athletics have an important role to play in building character.
“First of all you work for something, and I think that’s very important,” he said. “You fail and you succeed, and I think your ability to handle both success and failure will be very critical components to your success as an adult.”
Learning to overcome adversity is particularly important, he said.
“I think that oftentimes the difference between a successful person and a person who doesn’t achieve what they might have is their ability to overcome the obstacles in life and to take that hit, get back up off the mat, so to speak, and try again.”
‘He cared about us’Monica’s words and example have had an impact on the thousands of players he’s coached over the years.
“When you’re a high school kid, you don’t exactly have that perspective, but every year that passes you start understanding more and more what he was trying to teach,” said Matt Miller, who played third base for Monica from 1997–2000 and was his assistant coach from 2004–2012.
“He always was preaching the big picture to us,” said Alex Barashkoff, who played for Monica from 1983–84 and was his assistant coach from 1985–93. “He said, ‘I want to make you better dads, I want to make you better husbands.’”
Monica always “led by example, and everything he said, he did himself, and everybody wanted to play for him,” Barashkoff added.
Miller reflected on the two sides of Monica’s coaching persona.
“He was tough, he’s an ex-Marine, he’s hard on you, but you knew when you really needed somebody he’d be there in a heartbeat,” he said. “He wanted to get the best out of us, he pushed us, he challenged us, but as an overarching theme, gosh, he cared about us quite a bit.”
Monica said his 500th win was “a great milestone for our program,” but was quick to redirect the credit to his assistant coaches and players.
“In all of those games, I never threw a pitch or swung a bat, so it’s not me, it’s the kids that really made that happen,” he said.
“Whatever the record was this year, that’s not really the measure of what we did. The measure of how we did we’re going to find out about when those kids are adults.”
June 5, 2013