When South Dakota State University baseball coach Dave Schrage asked former University of Illinois Springfield coach Brian Grunzke to join his staff, it wasn’t the first time.
Grunzke resigned last week to become an assistant coach at the NCAA Division I school. The 54-year-old began his duties Wednesday at South Dakota State.
“He asked me to come with him two or three other times and the timing wasn’t right,” Grunzke said. “It just wasn’t right for me to go with him. I guess this time it was.”
Schrage and Grunzke go way back. South Dakota State hired Schrage away from Notre Dame earlier this month.
Grunzke agonized about leaving a program he was hired to start in 2009. He was a Division I assistant at Northern Iowa and Arkansas-Little Rock before UIS.
“This is by far the toughest decision I had to make,” he said. “The head coach got the job on Aug. 8. I interviewed on Aug. 12. Five days later, I had to make a decision. It was a hard two weeks for me.”
Grunzke was featured in an August 25, 2011, article in The State Journal-Register.
Read the article online
