When Berkley cast a lure for a new athletic director, Matt Rawlik, the school’s head baseball coach, had to bite.
“It was something I started getting interested in maybe five or six years ago,” Rawlik said. “Talking to my wife a half-decade ago, we started thinking this is something I’d want to do at some point.
“I thought it would be later on in my career, but when the opportunity presented itself to take over the department at my alma mater, it was a chance I had to jump at.”
He will succeed Taylor Horn, who held the position since the beginning of the 2020-21 academic year.
“In the time I’ve worked alongside Mr. Rawlik, I’ve always been impressed with his leadership and initiative, both formally and informally within our school community,” Berkley High School principal Andy Meloche said in a statement issued last week. “He places a high emphasis on strong relationships, organization, communication and, most importantly, helping support our students to become their best selves. Mr. Rawlik has high expectations of himself and works hard to help elevate those around him to be successful.”
A wrestler and baseballer for Berkley, where he was a Class of 2004 graduate, Rawlik said that his initial interest in coaching was just to remain between the lines. “I think I started just to stay involved with the game,” he said. “I wasn’t good enough to keep playing (laughs). But it’s always been something I’ve intrinsically thought about doing. My dad coached me and my brothers in everything growing up, and part of it came from him and having good coaches who made a big impact on me.
“When you start coaching, you start helping kinds and see them work really hard and have success. That’s what makes it worth it, and it becomes almost addicting. You’re getting outcomes for other people, and it’s so rewarding.”
Later, student teaching at Troy Athens, Rawlik worked his way up from the freshman football staff all the way to defensive coordinator of varsity, and the time there allowed him to pick the brain of the school’s longtime athletic director, Bob Dowd.
“Bob and I would start having casual conversations about stuff,” Rawlik said. “”I’d also have conversations with Lori Stone, the AD (at Berkley) at the time, just about building a department, event management, how you put these pieces together to provide the best experience for kids. It’s something that was interesting to me, and it felt like a challenge I wanted to one day maybe take on.”
Rawlik would also become the Red Hawks wrestling coach close to the end of his time there, around the time when he was hired as the Bears’ head baseball coach in 2015. His focus turned solely to coaching baseball and football for several years, but when it became time to start a family, football had to go.
Focused solely on Berkley baseball, the program thrived off the field, winning the ABCA Team Academic Excellence Award multiple times. In his last two seasons with the Bears, they won their first district title since 2008 and were OAA Blue co-champions in 2023, then finished 18-17 this spring.
So how difficult is it for Rawlik having to leave behind coaching for the new duties?
“Ask me in April when baseball starts,” Rawlik said. “I’m sure this spring will be hard. We had 17 kids on this year’s roster and lost seven seniors, so I’ve got 10 kids coming back who I built relationships with, and who I share a love of baseball with. That’s where it’s going to be hard. I’m sure as years go on, it’ll get easier to be away from, but I had three freshmen up on varsity (this past season), so it’ll take a couple years. The other positive is, I’m still here. I’ll get to watch them compete. I’m still involved in their lives.”
Rawlik is looking forward to seeing plans move forward both for a fieldhouse that will serve as a practice facility for sports, and provide a space for other extracurricular activities, as well as designs for a softball field. “There’s a lot of things that were put in motion before I took the job that I’m going to be lucky enough to get my hands on and kind of shape and mold to provide the best we can for our student-athletes and for our community,” he said.
