TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Greg Byrne’s 6-foot-6 frame stands out in a crowd, especially among sparsely-attended Maryland baseball game. However, the Alabama athletic director managed to disguise himself while scouting his next baseball coach earlier this spring.
Donning a Boston Red Sox hat and ditching all of his Alabama gear, Byrne made an incognito trip to College Park, Maryland on May 12 to watch then Terrapins head coach Rob Vaughn as his team opened up a three-game set against Minnesota. Maryland dropped the game 10-7, but the game ended up serving as a win for Vaughn as he unknowingly made a solid first impression to his future boss.
“I was really impressed with just the culture in the dugout,” Byrne recalled Tuesday following Vaughn’s introduction as Alabama’s next baseball coach. “Then when I started doing all the other research as part of it, too, I was really blown away with how that culture in the dugout carried over to everything else I saw.”
During Vaughn’s introductory press conference Tuesday, Byrne revealed that he considered 27 college coaches before deciding on the former Maryland head coach as his to run his baseball program. Vaughn’s back-to-back Big Ten Coach of the Year awards played a part in the decision, as did the pair of regular-season conference titles he won the past two seasons. His 183-115 record over six seasons as the Terrapins’ head coach also carried some weight. However, when it came down to making hire, it was how Vaughn addressed his failures that stood out.
Byrne said he knew Vaughn would be a solid fit 5-10 minutes into their first interview. The selling point actually came as Vaughn discussed his first three seasons at Maryland where he led the Terrapins to a 63-64 record while failing to even sniff postseason success.
The 35-year-old head coach went through his former shortcoming one by one, listing out what he did wrong and how he leared from the experienced. That took a 51-year-old Byrne by surprise.
“To see someone at such an early age reflect and say, ‘Man, I need to get better at some ways,’ and then he talked about the steps he took to do that. It’s like, that’s really cool.”
Vaughn’s ability to learn from his mistakes speaks for itself. Over the past three seasons, he led the Terrapins to a 120-51 record, taking them to the NCAA Tournament each year while earning a pair of regular-season titles and a conference tournament title along the way.
"I was a young coach," Vaughn said. "I was 29 years old, I got handed the keys to the program [at Maryland], and I was still in a phase of figuring out who I was, and who I wanted to be as a coach, and how I wanted to do things. I'll be the first one to tell you I made a lot of mistakes. You're trying to figure out how to utilize talent, how do I handle responsibilities? And I didn't do a great job of that at the beginning because I didn't know how I fit."
The secret came in being himself.
Upon taking over as Maryland’s head coach in 2018, Vaughn set out to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor, John Szefc. After a year of stumbling to find his footing, he wen’t off script and started trusting his own instincts.
“I think you had to learn how to manage people, and be real with people, and be super authentic with people,” Vaughn said Tuesday. “I think early in my career, I wanted to protect the feelings of guys sometimes at the expense of telling the truth. Ultimately, if I'm really trying to help these young men be the best versions of who they can be, [I've] got to tell them the truth. Just growing, and learning to be honest, and cut through all the outside noise and tell the truth was something that was vital to what we were doing.”
That was the energy and honesty Bryne saw during his secret trip up north earlier this spring and a big reason why he’s confident he has the right man in charge of his baseball progam.
“When I talked to our current team, one of the things they said is they wanted someone who cared about them just as much as a person as they do as a baseball player,” Byrne said. “It became very apparent right away that’s Rob Vaughn.”
