It was a learning experience for the younger Leach. “I was young enough, I didn’t understand how that worked,” Joe says, “Frank was technically the coach but, yeah, Mike did all the coaching.” Leach’s dad Frank was the titular coach of Cronk’s Little League team in Cody – sponsored by First Wyoming Bank – but Mike was in charge. Let’s go back to that baseball game in the summer of 1978. The only thing is the money is just not very good.”īut we are getting ahead of ourselves, way ahead. “I started cowboying for a living, and I loved it,” he says in a recent phone conversation, “then I got married and had a family. Little “c,” and, to hear Joe tell it, little pay. Not with a capital “C,” like at the university. Heck, before he became a police officer, Joe had another job, one once ubiquitous in Wyoming. Before that he was in the NYPD, Joe says, but the wilds of Wyoming beckoned. His dad was a 22-year veteran of the Cody police department. That Little Leaguer grew up to be many things, but these days he is a police officer, part of the family business. The guy you can credit for Mike Leach’s coaching career. And, after a few missed connections, it led to Joe Cronk: It led to the police department and to a 51-year-old freshly minted sergeant. It led to Green River, a town of about 13,000 on Interstate 80, the main highway that dissects the southern part of the state. The search led to the southwest corner of Wyoming closer to Salt Lake City, actually, than Laramie – or Cody. Then Leach, always curious, mentioned he would like to know what Joe Cronk was up to. How many of us keep up with our Little League teammates, let alone the coaches, over 40 years? So I was determined to ask Leach about Cronk. The first time I read Leach’s book – written nearly a decade ago with The Athletic’s Bruce Feldman – the entire Little League episode, with a young Leach exploiting baseball’s time-honored unwritten rules and winning a game, sort of passed me by.īut a few weeks ago, when I read the book again with an eye on preparing for an interview, what Leach wrote stuck mainly the part about how he stuck with Cronk and encouraged him, and how Cronk’s success against Cody’s version of Kelly Leak (look it up if you are too young for “The Bad News Bears”) not only propelled a Little League team into the playoffs, but Leach into coaching as well. Not Michael Crabtree nor Graham Harrell nor any of the number of future NFL players Leach coached over the years at Valdosta State, Kentucky, Oklahoma or Texas Tech. Think about that last sentence for a second.Ī Little League player from Cody, Wyoming, is why Leach lives in Pullman, ready to lead the Cougars into another Pac-12 showdown at USC Friday night. It describes a player, one of the thousands whose path crossed Leach’s over the years an 11-year-old boy from a small town in rural America. It’s something Washington State’s Mike Leach has done often over the past 40-some years.īut what may be surprising? The final two sentences of the chapter entitled “The Early Years” – a chapter written, seemingly, to explain why Mike Leach is Mike Leach. Cronk earned a bachelor’s degree in management science from the University of Georgia and an MBA from Mercer University in Atlanta.None of that, except maybe the setting, is surprising. At IBM, he was responsible for the AT&T global relationship. In his 17 years with PwC, he held a series of leadership positions including Managing Director of sales and marketing, strategic planning, global account management, and management consultant. Cronk worked with multiple global companies, including PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), IBM and Unisys. which delivers business development transformation consulting, leadership retreats and Rainmaker coaching to select high performing teams and executives. Cronk also serves as the Managing Partner of Rainmaker Partners, Inc. His clients have included many Atlanta companies, including Novelis, CRH/Oldcastle, UPS, AT&T, Cox, Georgia-Pacific, First Advantage, GMS, The United Way of Greater Atlanta and The Woodruff Arts Center. Cronk brings 36 years of business strategy, market and client development experience with proven results in strategic planning and sales and marketing optimization.
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