Ep. 40 | Brian Green, Wichita State University

What You'll Learn in This Episode

Host Ross Hawley sits down with Brian Green, head baseball coach at Wichita State University, early in his second year leading the Shockers. Green grew up in Southern California, came up through stops at San Diego, UCLA, Kentucky, New Mexico State, and Washington State, and took over a program with seven College World Series appearances and a national championship in its past.

This one is mostly about leadership. Green talks about what actually builds a program, why loyalty and trust sit above skill for him, how he manages a staff without becoming the bottleneck, and the difference between a vision and a mission statement. He also gets specific for young players and their parents: say your goal out loud, get honest about the gap, and measure a game by the value you provided rather than the box score.

The highlights:

• What built a powerhouse in the middle of Kansas, and what any coach can copy from it
• Why his energy comes from the chase and from bringing programs back
• The camp station as a freshman that made him want to coach
• Loyalty and trust in the portal era: situational, not personal
• Being a girl dad, and why there is no ego at home
• The two biggest stressors of the head coaching seat, and how he unbottlenecks a staff
• Vision versus mission: playing baseball in Wichita in June, and inspiring a city
• Controllable distractions, and the blog post that leveled him at 30
• The best question a parent can ask after a game

The House That Gene Stephenson Built

Green describes walking into Eck Stadium with his family and taking in the history: Gene Stephenson, longtime pitching coach Brent Kemnitz, the mural of the team meeting the President at the White House, alumni like Joe Carter. Around the program the resume gets shortened to a single number, 714: seven trips to Omaha, one national championship, four runner-up finishes. Green says a good Wichita State is good for all of college baseball.

The rebuild he inherited is as much physical and communal as it is on the field. New lights, new seats, a new deck in right field, and a new lab all came from supporters who wanted the place restored, and Green is candid that coming in as a non-Shocker was made easier by alumni who were supportive rather than competitive with the new staff. Stephenson still watches from his box and waves a flag when the Shockers score.

Asked how a program like this ever grew in the middle of Kansas, Green points to the generation of coaches who figured out that the job was program building, not team building. Stephenson took the job in 1977 with no team and no field, predicted Omaha within a few years, built the field first and then the stadium, and got there in 1982.

For coaches at any level, Green boils the lesson down to three things that have nothing to do with lineup construction: fan experience, facilities, and community relations. Do those relentlessly, be relentless about fundamentals on the field, and be relentless about the expectation that winning is coming. That is the same order of operations he is running now, and one of the more unusual pieces of it shows up in right field, where an RV tailgate program he started at New Mexico State and carried to Washington State is now camped in Wichita.

Energy, Relationships, and the Chase

Green's energy is a running theme among people who have played for and against him, and he traces it to relationships first. He also traces it to unfinished business: ten NCAA regionals, deep postseason runs at other levels, and still no College World Series.

"I get energy on chasing things that haven't been done."

Wichita State is a different kind of chase, because here it has been done. The program's last regional appearance was 2009, which makes this a 15-year restoration rather than a first ascent, and Green says bringing something back is its own kind of fuel. He is equally direct about the accountability that comes with saying so out loud: announce where you are going and you have given yourself something to answer for.

He can name the moment he wanted to coach. As a freshman at Riverside Community College he was assigned a tee station at his coach's camp and given a structure he still uses: ten minutes at a station means a one-minute opener, a one-minute review at the end, and about seven and a half minutes of instruction in the middle, so pick three bullet points and get to them. What stuck was not the mechanics of it but how much he enjoyed connecting with eight-year-olds on a tee. The other half of the answer is the feeling of being on a team where 30 people have each other's backs, which he says is very hard to find outside of sports.

Loyalty, Trust, and Alignment

Green does not pretend to be neutral on this: when trust or loyalty is broken, he has a hard time getting past it. He can still remember a player years ago telling him he holds grudges, and he has spent time since then understanding that about himself. The way he squares it with modern college baseball is a distinction he repeats to his team — the portal is situational, not personal.

What that means practically is that a program has to state clearly who it is. When he recruits, the pitch is a description rather than a promise: this is who we are, is there alignment, do you want to be part of it. He holds his staff to the same clarity, because coaches who cannot articulate what the program is about cannot sell it, and players believe instruction from people they trust long before they believe it from people they do not.

He applies the same filter to hiring. Skill is a prerequisite and not a differentiator, and a staff assembled on talent alone tends to keep needing replacements. His pitching coach has been with him for eight years, and he still trades texts with players from stops two decades back.

Girl Dad, and Balance

Green has two daughters, Emily and Zoe, and calls being a girl dad the best thing about his life away from the field. He gets his fill of teaching young ballplayers between his roster and summer camps, so home is a completely different world — and one where the accountability habit does not entirely switch off.

He is clear-eyed about what it does for his perspective. Win championships and he might be the most popular man in Wichita for a week, but at home he is just dad, his wife Becky makes sure any inflated ego gets knocked back down, and his daughters are quick with a joke at his expense. He counts that balance as one of the better things that happened to him as a coach.

The CEO Seat: Bottlenecks and Clarity

Coaches usually earn the lead chair by being excellent in one lane — recruiting, hitting, pitching — and Green says the hardest part of the transition was learning that the job is now about the staff rather than his old specialty. Entering year 11 as a head coach, he names two stressors.

The first is managing his staff well without burning himself out. Working with an outside leadership group, the staff did an exercise they call the 3x3, aimed at identifying where each coach bottlenecks himself and where Green bottlenecks them. Each coach walked away with three things to dominate and permission to ignore the rest: for his pitching coach, own the pitching staff, own the scouting reports, and be a strong assistant head coach and recruiter. The same thinking gets pushed down to the players.

The second is protecting clarity of culture, including the 80/20 trap of pouring all his attention into the handful of players who are struggling or creating drama and losing sight of the rest of the team. Close behind is the obligation he feels to deliver on what he said from the podium the day he was hired.

Vision, Mission, and Saying It Out Loud

Green separates the two words carefully. Wichita State's vision is a place and a date: playing baseball in Wichita in June, which means hosting a regional at Eck Stadium.

"Where you're going is your goal. Your mission statement is just how you're going to do it."

The mission is four words — inspire our city — chosen partly because 18-to-22-year-olds can remember it. Then the staff defines what inspiring a city actually looks like: wearing a pitch, laying out, hustling, community engagement, being a good student and a good citizen, being tough and competitive. Green describes the aesthetic bluntly as hat forward, shirt tucked in, blue collar, which he considers a good fit for both the city and a game that beats people up daily. Underneath the mission sits an acronym built on trusting the process, with competitiveness, professionalism, relentlessness, truth-telling, and accountability behind it.

For young players, he turns the same framework into homework. Where are you going, how are you going to get there, what are the focal points, and then say it out loud so you are accountable to it. He also insists on the reality check that goes with it: a 110-pound freshman who wants to be a Division I player should go count how many freshmen that size are actually playing, then get serious about closing the gap. Green does the same exercise on himself, and says what he would do differently at 23 is walk into a legendary coach's office at Cal State Fullerton and ask to sit silently in the corner for a year, taking notes and buying coffee.

Controllable Distractions

Green's answer on distractions starts with a story from his UCLA years. Standing in his kitchen, he found an anonymous post taking a shot at him as a hitting coach, and it knocked the wind out of him. His point is not that the criticism mattered; it is that he was 30 years old and not equipped for it, which is exactly why he worries about 14-year-olds reading the same kind of thing about themselves.

From there he splits distractions into two piles. Real ones exist — he mentions losing his father four years earlier and being an average coach for a while afterward — and those require people in your corner. Most of the rest, he estimates three-quarters or more, are self-inflicted.

"The controllable distractions: social media, your lack of sleep, your poor nutrition, your negativity and how you view things. Those are all controllables."

He holds himself to it too. If his energy is not through the roof in May and June, he is not making sharp decisions, and that makes his own conditioning a responsibility to the team. He also points to three players from his New Mexico State years who reached the big leagues without being recruited by anybody: two late finds and a walk-on who, as a freshman, cared more about his own goals than about what anyone thought of him.

For Parents and Players: Value and Accountability

Green leads with empathy for parents. His own mother follows the team wherever he lives and still believes politics kept him from playing more in junior college, and he laughs about it — a parent's job is to protect their child, and a coach has to respect that even when the version of reality on each side does not match. But he asks for a few specific things.

Let the player do the talking, especially in recruiting conversations, because a family that answers every question raises a flag about who will speak up on campus. Keep it fun at younger ages rather than treating a scholarship as repayment for tournament expenses. And be honest early, because players who have never been told they have a weakness tend to come apart the first time a college coach coaches them hard.

His favorite illustration is his daughter Emily, pulled up to varsity volleyball as a freshman, who sat the entire playoff match and then asked her dad what he thought.

"I didn't think you were very good on the bench today."

He walked her through what she could have contributed from there, and she was different the next day. The question he wishes every parent would ask after a game is not about the batting average or the stat line, but whether their son or daughter provided value to the team, because culture drives performance and a roster needs defenders and great teammates as much as it needs run producers.

For the players themselves, Green puts one phrase on the screen at every check-in meeting.

"Everything is your fault. And if you're an All-American, it's your fault too."

He means it as a statement about control rather than blame. A player who cannot get to a facility still has a basement, a mattress, and a tennis ball, so the work is available. Personal accountability is the trait his staff tries hardest to identify in recruiting, and the one they believe separates players who keep improving from players who plateau.

Year Two in Wichita

The Shockers were picked second in the American in Green's second year, which he took as a sign of respect from the other coaches in the league. The nonconference schedule is deliberately hard — Hawaii and Cal State Fullerton among the trips, plus a regional gauntlet of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Kansas, Kansas State, and Nebraska — with everything pointed at being ready for conference play.

Roster-wise, Wichita State returns seven position starters, added from both junior colleges and the portal, and brought back a couple of players who had left the program during the coaching transition and wanted to come home. Expectations, Green says, are high, and every decision runs through the same filter: baseball in Wichita in June.

Episode Timestamps

Tap any timestamp to jump the player straight to that moment.

• 0:00 — Introduction
• 1:06 — What is happening at Wichita State baseball
• 2:57 — New lights, new seats, and a stadium full of tradition
• 3:52 — How a powerhouse got built in the middle of Kansas
• 5:22 — Program building: fan experience, facilities, and community
• 7:10 — Where his energy comes from
• 8:11 — Ten regionals, no Omaha, and the pull of the chase
• 10:39 — Why baseball, and the camp station that pointed him toward coaching
• 13:09 — Loyalty and trust in the transfer portal era
• 14:30 — Situational, not personal: selling who you are in recruiting
• 17:49 — Being a girl dad as a baseball coach
• 22:16 — The CEO seat, and the two biggest stressors
• 24:21 — The 3x3, and bottlenecking a staff
• 27:32 — What a mission statement is, and how to build one
• 30:16 — Inspire our city
• 32:47 — Say the goal out loud, then get serious about it
• 36:16 — The anonymous post that knocked him down at UCLA
• 38:40 — Controllable distractions: sleep, nutrition, and negativity
• 41:21 — Advice for parents of young players
• 44:42 — The volleyball bench lesson
• 47:29 — Everything is your fault
• 49:18 — Spring outlook for the Shockers
• 51:27 — An RV in right field, and the fan experience

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Brian Green is the head baseball coach at Wichita State University. Subscribe to the Baseball Forward Podcast for more conversations with the players, coaches, and leaders elevating the next generation of the game.