Steve Martinez needs to go a little further down Metropolitan Avenue now to meet his team.
The 11-year Grand Street baseball assistant coach and the headman for a season, had to remember to keep is foot on the gas peddle as he passed Grand Street Campus on his way to his new home at Christ the King in Queens.
“It is actually a short cut to go through Grand Street, the back roads,” Martinez said. “I’m always driving by it.”
Martinez, who also spent three years as the Wolves’ junior varsity head coach, left the Brooklyn school in February to become the head coach at his alma mater.
“I’ve always dreamed about one day taking over that program and trying to build it where I know it was when I left,” said the 1998 graduate.
He takes over for Greg Modica, who left after three seasons to be an assistant at St. Francis Prep. Martinez’s first practice with the Royals was actually at Grand Street, because of some bad weather on the fields at Queens’ Juniper Valley Park.
“That was awkward,” Martinez said of his inaugural practice. “The [Grand Street] varsity team waiting for me to finish my practice.”
The move back to Queens has been nothing of the sort however. His familiarity, along with his resume as a coach and a middle-school teacher, was among the reasons he was hired to try to breathe life back into the struggling program. He was really at ease walking in the building.
“Great combination,” said Christ the King athletic director Bob Mackey. “He’s got experience, he’s coached at a very high level and he’s a teacher and he is a parent. This just kind of feels really good.”
There were still mixed emotions when he first made the jump — he was leaving a familiar place at Grand Street, which he still passes every time he travels to his new job — but joy quickly overtook hesitation, and now, Martinez is happy to be home.
“I’m going back to my alma mater,” Martinez said. “It is going to be my program, the way I want it to be run.”
