Q&A: New San Angelo Central baseball coach Stan Gideon discusses philosophy, expectations

Stan Gideon was named San Angelo Central’s new head baseball coach earlier this month after Patrick Penry left the program after 13 years.

Gideon started his coaching career in 1990 as an assistant at Austin Westlake high school and got his first head coaching opportunity at Granbury High School. He stayed in Granbury for five years before serving as head coach at several other 5A high schools around Texas, including San Antonio Alamo Heights High School, Northwest High School and Springtown High School.

Throughout his more than 30 years of coaching, Gideon led 21 teams to the playoffs, six teams to regional appearances and won a state title.

Gideon played college baseball at Angelina College before heading to East Texas Baptist University to continue playing baseball and earn his Bachelor of Science.

The Bobcat’s new head coach sat down with the Standard-Times to chat about his plans for the program.

What attracted you to this position when it opened?

Well, I have family that lives in San Angelo, and I’ve been visiting San Angelo for many years, so I was aware of Central athletics. The main thing that gave me some insight on how the city works and what the schools are about is the fact that my nieces and nephews went there so I know what San Angelo ISD is all about.

Being a baseball coach is what I’ve done the majority of my adult life. I’ve always been involved with baseball, and I just feel at home when I’m coaching the game. So even in the last couple of years when I was in athletic administration, I always worked very closely with our baseball coaches, and I was always around the ballpark. And I think on the inside, I always knew that I wanted to get back to coaching, but it had to be the right situation.

What is your coaching philosophy?

We like to put pressure on the defense and offensively we want to be very aggressive. We value batting average and on-base percentage and we think there’s more than one way to pressure the defense. So, we’re going to work hard to try to have a multi-faceted approach to offensive baseball.

From the defensive side of things, we want to be very consistent and minimize our mistakes. But on the pitching side of things, we want to be able to throw more than one pitch per strike. I want our guys to have confidence that we get to control our game where we don’t just have to react which will help us steer the game where we want it to go.

How can you take this from a team that was last in the district to a playoff contender?

I’ve taken over quite a few programs that weren’t exactly at the top of the standings, and my job is to take what we have and make it better. And I feel like the players are going to obviously be on board because everybody wants to climb in the standings.

But if we can have some goals, like having 10 hits and seven runs per game. We feel like if we can have 10 hits and or seven runs in the game, we’re going to do very well. And even though it’s a very tough district, like most districts in Texas are, the goal is to try and get above .500 and make the playoffs. And that will be a task to do that, but that will be what we are working toward every day, and we will strive to get there.

What challenges come with following a coach that has been with the program for 13 years and has an established culture?

Well, for me, it’s year one. In my first year I’m going to try to instill trust and confidence in the players, and we’re going to try to build and work together. As a team, we’re looking to the present and to the future. I have tremendous respect for the previous coaches and what they’ve done, but our focus now is going to be getting better every day and moving forward this year. And so that’s our approach and where our focus is now.

What type of team can fans and the community expect going forward?

We hope to be a pretty exciting offense as far as trying to score runs in many different ways. Bunting, hitting and of course everybody loves home runs, which we'll never turn those down. We’re not going to play select baseball, where it’s just set up so you can hit it further.

We’re going to try our best to pressure the defense in every possible way. I’ve always felt like in high school baseball more games are lost than won, meaning that the more pressure you put on the defense, the harder it is for the other team to make plays, especially if they’re not all the same type of plays. So, we’re going to strive hard to pressure that defense and hopefully put up some big numbers on our side.

This article originally appeared on San Angelo Standard-Times: Q&A: New San Angelo Central baseball coach Stan Gideon discusses philosophy, expectations