Courtesy photo Former Broncos pitcher and assistant coach Adam Perkins is succeeding Mike Lee as the new Alvirne baseball coach.

HUDSON — Adam Perkins felt strange a week or two ago when he collected former longtime Alvirne High School baseball coach Mike Lee’s jersey from him.

“He turned over his jersey and uniform and stuff, and I felt weird taking the bag from him,” said Perkins.

But that’s one of the duties the Broncos head coach has to perform, and that’s what Perkins is now, having been recently named to the job as Lee’s successor.

It still may feel strange. That’s because Perkins has been playing for Lee since he was nine years old, all the way up through high school, plus seven years coaching with him.

“You get a feel for a person being with him all that long,” said Perkins, who was recently named as Lee’s successor as the Broncos new head baseball coach. “It’ll be interesting. Not having him there, he’s been a staple for so many years.”

But so has Perkins. He’s been visible in the Hudson community helping Lee out as well as working with some of the youth teams in town, including AAU.

He worked on Lee’s staff for four seasons after playing for the University of Rhode Island and then came back a few years ago for three seasons as an assistant. And remember, Perkins played first base, outfield and pitched on the 2001 Alvirne squad that made it to the then-Class L (now Division I) finals vs. the one Nashua, a team that also featured former minor leaguers Kyle Jackson and Bobby Tewksbary. He and Jackson both went 7-1 on the mound.

“You look at the teams I played with, we all had aspirations of playing in college,” he said. “More than half played some sort of collegiate baseball.”

But now, Perkins has seen that Alvirne over the recent years has had few Division I players, and players who have played in college, period.

“That is one of my goals,” he said. “Creating that culture of getting better every day and wanting to play in college. Using that platform, really, to change a lot.”

Perkins says he’s always wanted to coach; at URI he changed his major to education, knowing he wanted to coach. He teaches in the Hudson system so it’s not like he’s coming in from the outside.

He had an eye on perhaps sometime succeeding Lee, “but I didn’t feel like I had to. Being a head coach often isn’t all it’s cracked up to be; there’s a lot of other things you’ve got to do.

“But when you’ve been part of a baseball community for so long, I really want to give back to it. The things that Hudson baseball, Alvirne baseball, has done for me, as a person, it’s been literally my livelihood. It helped pay for my college education.”

Perkins said he’ll obviously keep in touch with Lee and pick his brain. One of the biggest things he observed and will continue to learn will be game management. “Really, that’s where I know that I need the most work on,” he said, “being a new head coach and that sort of thing. I’m (more of) a player development guy. I want to see guys get better with technique, practice, and reps, and creating a good routine.

“Now I have to change my focus to game management, when to pinch-hit, and really catching the flow of the game because that’s not something I’ve done a lot of.”

He knows about developing practice plans, etc., and has his own plan in mind.

“When I came back three years ago, there wasn’t much of an off-season program, and even when I wasn’t running one, we wouldn’t have many guys showing up,” he said. “But last year we had great off-season attendance, three days a week since Thanksgiving. Creating that culture of getting better.”

He’s also learned from Tewksbary, for whom he worked at his instructional center for years.

Perkins has held informal workouts already, very much missing the high school season last spring after a great off-season of workouts that he feels led to Hudson’s success in the NEIBL this past summer.

“It’ll be weird not having coach Lee there,” Perkins said. “He’s done so much for me personally and for the program, obviously.”

Maybe someday they’ll say it’s weird not having Coach Perkins there. He was asked by someone at a recent workout if he could be a longtime coach.

“I don’t know how anybody can do it for 40 years,” Perkins, 36, said. “There’s only two or three guys who have done it. I haven’t even been alive that long.”

He obviously wants to put his own stamp on the program, for which he’s expecting a good senior class.

“The transition is going to be smooth I think for the players,” he said. “We’ve tried to do a lot of things in the last three years in setting a good foundation. The things that I want to implement, Coach Lee gave me a lot of the freedoms to do those things in the last three years.

“The guys we have are buying in right now.”

Meanwhile, he’ll hold on to Lee’s jersey.

“There’s a good chance,” Perkins said, “that he’ll get it back in one form or another.”

That will be a fun task for the new Broncos head coach, a guy named Adam Perkins.