Bragga Back in Familiar Place at Tennessee Tech

Image credit: Tennessee Tech coach Matt Bragga (Photo courtesy of Tennessee Tech Sports Information)

COOKEVILLE, Tenn. — Tennessee Tech coach Matt Bragga still has the original interview packet he used when he interviewed to be the program’s coach in November 2003. 

On the last page of the packet is an image of Omaha’s Rosenblatt Stadium, then the home of the College World Series, with the word “Believe” written above it. He promised the interview committee that if they hired him, it would take some time, but he would get Tennessee Tech to that stage. 

“No joke, two guys in the back corner, maybe I was the only one in the room that noticed it, were like ‘come on,’ ” Bragga said, pantomiming the way they quietly snickered. “So I left and I respected that. It wasn’t blatant, but it was there.”

Those people likely weren’t laughing anymore in 2018, when Bragga took the Golden Eagles to a super regional and came up one win short of making good on that promise from 2003. 

After the 2018 season, Bragga got an opportunity he couldn’t pass up to take what he describes as a top 25 job in college baseball at Rice. With that move, the assumption was that he would have to live with having been close to getting Tennessee Tech to Omaha, still a monumental achievement, but never quite doing it.

As fate would have it, however, four seasons later, Bragga is back in Cookeville, ready to kick-start those dreams for the program again, which is a turn of events he didn’t see coming. 

“Even when I was working with Butch (Thompson) at Auburn as the director of player development when this job came open, this was the last thing I expected,” Bragga said. “I didn’t expect this to happen. Coach (Steve) Smith had been here what? A year and a half? So I never would have dreamed that Tennessee Tech would come back open when it did.”

The bittersweet part of the story is that Bragga was in a position to return to Tennessee Tech because things didn’t go as anyone had hoped at Rice. 

There’s no getting around that those three seasons in Houston were tough. The team went 51-76-1, with the pandemic wiping out just about all of his second season at the helm and creating an interminably long recruiting dead period that kept Bragga and his staff from being able to get out and recruit to get things turned around. 

But Bragga feels like he’s a better coach this time around, not only for having gone through the struggle at Rice, but also for having now had some distance between his first time around in Cookeville and the present moment. 

“I think something that I look at coming back here now, I think I have to, I hate to use the word squeak, but I have to fight a little more for deficiencies,” Bragga said of learning to stand up more for his program’s needs. “I think being more communicative with administration is number one. As a matter of fact, I just had a meeting with my athletic director this morning on about five different topics, and I don’t know if four years ago I would have asked for that meeting.”

Bragga certainly has an advantage in that there really isn’t a learning curve for him. The administrators that he works most closely with at Tennessee Tech are all still around from his first stint as coach. 

He’s also intimately aware of both the selling points and the shortcomings of the program as he looks to sell his vision on getting the Golden Eagles to Omaha to a whole new generation of recruits. 

And although the roster is mostly different, obviously, from the last time he was in this dugout, there are five holdovers who played for him in 2018—righthander Tyler Sylvester, lefthander Daniel Holley, righthander Brock Myers, lefthander Connor Adams and outfielder Jason Hinchman, who will in all likelihood finish this season as TTU’s all-time home run leader but couldn’t get on the field much in 2018 because the lineup was stacked. 

There’s just not a whole lot that’s completely new for Bragga in this situation. 

“It’s really neat because when I have questions about something, I know exactly who to go to, whether it’s budget, what we need to do about this situation with the field, whatever it may be, all the people that were here when I left are literally still here,” Bragga said. “That makes it so nice because anytime you go somewhere new, you’ve got to learn everything. Well, (here) the learning curve is zero.”

Bragga’s return to Tennessee Tech seemed to send an initial jolt through the program and this team in particular. The Golden Eagles began the season 10-0 and in the 11th game lost to Auburn by a run. At that point, it was easy to assume that Bragga had successfully waved a magic wand over the program and that things would pick up more or less where 2018 left off. 

Since then, there have been highlights, such as a dramatic 3-2 midweek win against No. 1 Tennessee in a game played with wood bats, but things generally haven’t come as easily. 

The Golden Eagles are 20-14 overall and 4-5 in conference play, which means they’ve got some work ahead of them if they’re going to challenge the leaders in the OVC standings at roughly the midway point of the conference season. 

It’s a good reminder that rebuilding a program, especially at the mid-major level of college baseball, just takes some time and that the successes of 2018 (and 2017, when TTU beat Florida State in a regional) won’t just automatically be duplicated. 

No one knows that better than Bragga, because initial struggles are something he dealt with during his first stint in Cookeville. His first four teams didn’t even make the OVC Tournament and the first regional appearance didn’t come until year six. 

“My first go around here, I wish I could take it off my career record,” Bragga jokes about his first three seasons. “I got the job. That was November, so I got the job at a weird time then, too. 15-30, 13-42—got worse the second year—18-36. So .333 was our best winning percentage out of my first three years. You don’t last now. If that was today, I’m not sure Tennessee Tech holds on to me.”

Bragga didn’t think he’d be back at Tennessee Tech. He’s open about saying that he thought he’d finish his career at Rice. But now that he sits in his familiar office in the same clubhouse building where he spent 15 of the best years of his career, he’s content to be back with a program he loves and that loves him back, working on dreams he thought he had set aside for good.