Johnson reflects on time as Mustangs’ manager
NICK INGRAM/ST. JOSEPH MUSTANGS
St. Joseph Mustangs manager Matt Johnson, right, is about to shake hands with Brady Anderson after he hit a home run during a game earlier this season at Phil Welch Stadium in St. Joseph
The final game of the season in the Missouri-Iowa-Kansas-Nebraska League was held July 31.
Regardless of the outcome, Matt Johnson was going to manage his final game for the St. Joseph Mustangs.
A nine-year run at the helm for the former Northwest Missouri State University assistant baseball coach was set to end after he announced he would step down following the conclusion of the 2017 season.
The news came on July 26, prior to the start of the MINK League North winner-take-all game that sent a team to the MINK Championship Series.
The Mustangs won, but then lost to Ozark in Game 1 one of the best-of-three series. St. Joseph won 4-1 to force a decisive game. St. Joseph rolled in the final game, 13-2, to give the team its fifth MINK title in a seven-year span.
“It was extremely amazing,” Johnson said. “I don’t think I’d had a feeling like that. It was my last game to put the uniform on and not many get to finish with a win, let alone a championship. Especially that group of guys and fans there, it makes it extremely special.”
Weeks later, Johnson sat down with the Daily Forum to talk about the success of the summer collegiate baseball team as well as his journey from Maryville to St. Joseph to Kansas City.
His work isn’t done just yet for the Mustangs, though his days on the field are over. While owner Dan Gerson is in the process of hiring a new manager, Johnson is working on signing players for the 2018 season. Some of that group will be players from the championship team, while others will be siblings from past teams.
He said it won’t really hit him that his days of wearing the white-red-and-black are over until spring rolls around.
Johnson’s journey to becoming the first manager of the Mustangs started in North Dakota.
He played at Valley City State University, a NAIA school in Valley City, North Dakota. An All-American catcher, he started a five-year pro journey with stops at the Fargo-Moorhead RedHawks in Fargo, North Dakota; the Allentown (Pennsylvania) Ambassadors; the Washington (Pennsylvania) Wildthings; the Rockford (Illinois) Riverhawks, the Bisbee-Douglas Cooper Kings in Bisbee, Arizona and Douglas Arizona; and closed out his pro career by pitching and catching for the St. Joseph Blacksnakes.
He arrived in town in 2002 thanks to his connections at Valley City State.
The head coach at the time was Cory Anderson, who happened to have been college roommates with Darin Loe, the Northwest head coach. When Anderson heard Loe needed a graduate assistant, Johnson came to town. After working with the program, he landed a full-time position until he resigned in 2010.
He worked with the hitters, the catchers, pitchers and served as a bench coach under Loe in his tenure at Northwest.
“I really had my hand in almost everything,” Johnson said. “That was one of the greatest opportunities Northwest gave me.”
He learned a lot just watching Loe, who played professional baseball with the Seattle Mariners in the early 1990s.
“Just the ability to manage a team and from the underlying aspects of it, not just the coaching,” Johnson said of Loe. “The relationships with the administration. How he handled travel and the budget. One of the greatest things he did was he allowed me to be me and when I was successful, he encouraged me. When I failed, he was there to guide me in the right direction. He let me be me and that isn’t an easy thing to do as a head coach.”
Johnson, who taught health and physical education at the university for 10 years, got wind of a new baseball team coming to St. Joseph for the summer of 2009.
“I only interviewed one guy,” Gerson said. “I knew after interviewing him he was the guy for the job. We thought the same way. We wanted a team that competed hard every day and played the game the right way. The winning would take care of itself if we did everything the right way. Matt had an unbelievable run for nine years and five championships is a remarkable thing. The MINK is a tough league and every year we knew we’d have a good team and that is a luxury that a lot don’t have.”
Only twice in Johnson’s nine years did the Mustangs fail to qualify for the postseason — the inaugural season in 2009 and in 2013. He guided St. Joseph to a pair of fourth-place showings in the National Baseball Congress World Series in 2010 and 2012 and the team had top-10 finishes in 2011, 2014 and 2015. He final record was 322-156.
“I know Matt made us know in a lot of places out of the Midwest,” Gerson said. “They know it’s a good place to send your players and your kids to play for the summer in St. Joe. Matt has a huge amount of credit due to him to put us at that level.”
Added Johnson, “I think the coolest thing is we started from scratch. Nothing was established. The opportunity with Dan to build it from the ground up is what made it more special. Not a lot of coaches get the opportunity to get a new program and see it through as long as I had and have success on top of that.”
Johnson juggled both being a college assistant coach and a summer head coach for two years — 2009 and 2010 — before stepping down from his position at Northwest. He got a job working for Fundraising University, which helps athletic programs and schools raise money.
The time away from his family — wife Brenda, a young son in Jase and a newborn daughter Brynlee — led to the change of focusing on the Mustangs.
“It got to be a lot,” he said. “I was gone quite a bit.”
Johnson and his family moved from Maryville to Kansas City in the spring of 2014 — after 12 years in town.
He will have more time for the family with the change, though now he will focus on watching his son play baseball and Brynlee on the softball diamond.
He would get to see bits and pieces of weekend tournaments, but he had to leave around noon to get to St. Joseph for his Mustangs duties. He would arrive at 1:30 p.m. typically and stay until midnight.
“The days go by really quick and I don’t want to miss out on too much of it,” Johnson said.
He paused to reflect for a moment on his tenure in St. Joseph.
“I couldn’t imagine it has taken me to the level it has,” he said. “The rewards I have gotten … I’ve been to players’ wedding and seeing them have their kids. It has gone above and beyond.”
