Miguel Menendez
Episode 304
25 NOV 2024
He has been the head baseball coach at Jesuit High School in Tampa since 2014. He had spent many years coaching at Key West High School who, as a player, he had led to a state title back in 1995. As a student-athlete at the collegiate level, he played for the University of Tampa, won an NCAA Division II national title in 1998, and was twice named All-Conference. At Jesuit he has led the baseball team to such highlights as state champions, District titles, and even being ranked No. 1 nationally by several national baseball media outlets. His faith story includes having grown apart from the church as a young adult and later finding his way back, which he talks about during this interview.
Notable guest quotes:
“We grew up going to church either Saturday night or Sunday mornings… I was an altar server growing up, for a time, in the Catholic church.”
“St Mary’s, the Academy of Holy Names here in Tampa, which my daughter graduated from, they started from the nuns in Key West in St Mary’s and came up here, so my dad and my daughter have that little connection of graduating from high school with the same kind of nuns and everything, so I think that’s a pretty unique connection as well.”
“I played a little bit of soccer when I was younger. I played a couple years of football, but it was mostly baseball. I was always a baseball guy, baseball junkie.”
“It’s easy to … lose sight of what your focus needs to be and should be. And for me, it was like baseball, baseball, baseball. And even more so than class and my faith, and just kind of lost my way during that time… and… it’s one of the things that I regret in my life.”
“I tell my kids all the time… I want you to appreciate your faith life for yourself and want to go do it for yourself because there’s going to come a point in time when I’m not there to make you go to church every Sunday.”
“You realize, there’s a greater purpose here and it can’t just be about baseball.”
“I love the game of baseball. It’s great. But I love the game of baseball for what it allows me to do now and the way that I’m able to help lead young men, to be proud of their faith life, to be good husbands, good community members, good fathers, that’s what I want.”
“Once you go back to God and you realize that all of a sudden that hole in your heart is gone, you’re like, ‘Man, why did I stray away’?”
“More importantly, just to be able to spend time and talk about their faith and we work a vacation Bible school in the morning… and then we can go around and they kind of send us out to different places to help elder people in the community to fix up their homes, do some yard work. We’ve done things in the cemetery to help clean up the cemetery for them. Whatever it is.”
“We don’t have to hide from our faith. We get to use our faith for the strength that it should give us.”
“If we come here and all we’re worried about is winning a baseball game then we’re failing these young men.”
Related link:
Jesuit baseball program webpage
