GREEN BAY — It’s a new era for Preble football as Brad Boockmeier takes over his alma mater and tries to take one of the biggest schools in the state and turn it into a winning one.
“Getting to play here and play under some really really awesome coaches and phenomenal guys and now I'm in that coaching role, it’s really really cool,” he said.
Originally, Boockmeier, in his seventh year as a part of the Hornet coaching staff was supposed to be an assistant under Hall of Famer Mark Jonas, but Preble decided not to hire Jonas back in June. That's when Boockmeier got a call.
“They said, are you interested in being the interim head coach and I said, ‘yeah, let’s do it, giddy up’,” Boockmeier said.
Although Jonas was named the head coach in March, for the players, nothing really changed when the school made the switch.
“Boockmeier was always there for us,” said senior Ty Gerard. “He was always the main guy we would always go to for everything and he was running everything in the summer, so it really wasn’t that much of a difference to us, I don’t think.”
Boockmeier shined in his playing days with the Hornets. he ran for over 1,500 yards and had 19 rushing touchdowns in his senior season. As for his favorite moment from that time:
“My senior year, we won a tight game against a tough Bay Port squad, we had to go about 70 yards in the fourth quarter to take the lead and we were able to do that,” the 2012 grad said.
The Hornets were a winning program back then and Boockmeier looks to build back up the team to take down the Bay Ports of the world once again – but it won’t happen overnight. The team has won three games in the last three years.
“You can’t win a football game on July – what is it 24th, you can’t win a game, we don’t have a game tomorrow, right, but we can get better today and we can get tomorrow and then we can get better the next day and when we do that every single day, you start to get positive results and we can find out where they can be,” Boockmeier said.
He wants the identity of his squad to be the team nobody wants to play.
“It means that when a team comes to play you, they know that it’s going to be tough,” said the first-year head coach. “Even if you might have nobody big on the team, you might not be a very good team at all, but you’re going to go after them every single play and teams don’t want to go against that.”
It sounds like his team is already embracing that.
“I kind of like being the underdog. you know everyone underestimates us, but we’ll come show them on Fridays, Thursdays, you know,” said senior Braylon Schadt.
