'A big loss for us': Longtime Green Bay East basketball coach Rick Rosinski steps down

GREEN BAY – The Green Bay East boys basketball team needs a new leader for the first time in two decades.

Rick Rosinski, easily the longest-tenured coach in program history, has stepped down after 20 seasons.

His resignation has nothing to do with the East administration, considering athletic director Steph Mathu has been very supportive of him. It had nothing to do with parents, who Rosinski said have been amazing. It certainly had nothing to do with coaching burnout for someone who loves the game and his school.

Instead, he was forced to step away to maintain 50-50 custody of his young son.

“I can’t jeopardize my son,” said Rosinski, who will remain a teacher at East. “He’s only 9, and that’s what it came down to. … I was just hoping that maybe something would change, but it didn’t.”

Mathu hopes to name a replacement as quickly as possible, although finding someone as dedicated as Rosinski will be difficult.

“It’s never been about wins and losses for him, it’s about affecting kids positively and giving them a chance to show what they can do,” Mathu said. “Yeah, it’s certainly a big loss for us.”

This wasn’t just any coaching job for Rosinski.

His entire life has been about the east side of Green Bay, where he grew up. He played football and basketball at East before graduating in 1987.

He was hired by the Red Devils in May 2002 after serving as the freshman coach under Kevin Phillips the year before and as a coach at Washington Middle School the previous six years.

East enjoyed both successful seasons and some rather lean ones under Rosinski.

The Red Devils won 15 games in his first campaign and went 19-4 in his second, getting within two wins of the WIAA state tournament.

There weren’t many winning records the next 17 years. Only three, to be exact. But like Mathu pointed out, it became much more than that for Rosinski and his staff.

There can be additional challenges coaching at a school like East that have nothing to do with X’s and O’s, and Rosinski often dealt with all of them.

“He would come up out of his own pocket to make sure the kids are eating and make sure everything is ready for when the season started,” said longtime East staff member Richard Sims, a former University of Wisconsin-Green Bay basketball star. “I was there for him because I saw how much he put into it. A lot of that stuff was done by himself. His assistants were very loyal as well. Jim Hayes was his righthand man.

“I could go on and on about the things he did. Cleaning the locker room. Sweeping the locker room after the football season. It was almost like a college program, except he was doing it himself.”

For a basketball team that started playing more than 100 years ago, nobody stuck around longer than Rosinski. He is the all-time winningest East coach with 190 victories and, yes, very likely the losingest coach with 259 defeats.

Leo Marti is the only other person to coach at East for 10 or more seasons, coaching 11 years from 1978 to 1988 before Steve Kestly took over and led the program to its first two state tournaments in 1993 and 1996.

Kestly held the record for most career wins with 113 during his eight seasons before Rosinski passed him in 2014.

“He kept the program alive, basically,” said Hayes, who was with Rosinski his entire tenure. “Most years, or a lot of years, we struggled record-wise. But his efforts and his determination always made us a competitive program, because of him we won games we should have lost.

“He was determined that he never was going to let East basketball die. He wasn’t going to let it be less than competitive. We did more with less, I think, over the years. It was because of Rick.”

What turned out to be Rosinski’s final season also was one of his best.

The 2021-22 team became only the third Red Devils squad to start a season 10-0.

But it went through a rough patch soon after, losing five of eight games, only to regroup and reach sectionals after a regional championship win at Milwaukee King on March 5.

It was all the things that occurred off the court that made that victory, the last of his tenure, so special.

The Red Devils were shut down for two weeks because of COVID-19. There was a car accident involving some of their best players. They lost one of their top players for the season. Worst of all, Hayes’ wife died in February.

It put to the test everything Hayes once told Rosinski, something Rosinski always has reminded himself to help stay grounded: Good or bad, it’s never as good as you think it is, and it’s never as bad.

But that locker room scene after the win against King was pretty darn good.

The most memorable moment of Rosinski and Hayes’ 20 seasons together just happened to be one of the final ones.

“Just because of what we went through as a team and how we were able to stick together,” Rosinski said. “It wasn’t just the coaches and the players. We had such a great group of parents. You couldn’t ask for a better group.”

There also was that time a year ago when former East basketball player Cornelius Steele texted Rosinski a split screen picture of former Georgetown coach John Thompson hugging star Allen Iverson when both were at the school, and another of them hugging after both retired years later.

The caption on the picture talked about a coach loving his players not as basketball players but as people.

Steele told Rosinski he loved him.

That perhaps represented best why Rosinski kept returning every year.

“When you get text messages from kids just saying, ‘Merry Christmas or have a good Thanksgiving,’ people don’t normally think of maybe the kids at East doing that stuff,” Rosinski said, fighting back tears. “It’s a pretty neat thing. You look at the relationships you built with a lot of these kids, and I’ll put money on it, we have more kids come back to our games, to alumni night, than a lot of other schools do."

The goal, as Hayes put it, was not just to develop kids as basketball players but to turn them into young adults. At the same time, they never gave up on players or teams. Even when they were struggling, Rosinski kept the focus on quality.

“It’s going to be huge shoes to fill,” Sims said. “Anybody that is not willing to put in that amount of effort and that amount of work is going to find out real quick that maybe this ain’t the place for you.

“I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it’s going to take a real special person to take over a program like this. … He did a great job at keeping it going. It seemed like the cards were stacked against Rosinski a lot of the times, but he always came out and made a way. It was his passion.”

This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Longtime Green Bay East basketball coach Rick Rosinski steps down