Telegraph photo by TOM KING Ryan Brown has had a lot to smile about in his first few weeks as the new athletic director at Bishop Guertin.

NASHUA – It was a round of golf that completely changed his life.

Ryan Brown was building up an impressive resume as a college football offensive line coach, at his third school, Utica College, where he was also the recruiting coordinator.

One day some 14 years ago, while playing golf with a buddy, that friend told him about an opening in New Canaan, Connecticut, at the high school level. The friend’s friend was the athletic director at St. Luke’s School, and needed an assistant AD who could also be his football coach and help start a hockey program.

“Sure, give him my number,” Brown said. “I’ll have a conversation.”

That conversation led to a change to the high school level not only in coaching, but administration, and eventually has Brown in the corner office on Lund Road as the new athletic director at Bishop Guertin High School.

Telegraph photo by TOM KING New BG AD Ryan Brown has gotten a warm welcome from the people on Lund Road as the sign shows.

Brown also helped coach baseball, coached middle school hockey, high school hockey, and shared in the administrative work. And he’s been involved in athletic adminstration ever since.

He’s always been involved in sports, starting when he was 5 or 6 years old, playing football, hockey and baseball while growing up in Sandy Creek, N.Y. It’s a small town north of Syracuse, right on Lake Ontario.

He played all three sports in high school, offensive tackle in football and left wing in hockey.

“It’s interesting,” Brown said. “I was probably best in football, but growing up, playing hockey was my favorite thing.”

Brown played hockey with his brother, did the 5 a.m. practices and all the things that go with hockey.

“I grew up in the snow belt,” he said, “so it was the 5 a.m.’s through the lake effect snowstorms when you can’t see the highway. My Dad has some good stories about that.”

Often, you’d go from one practice for one sport to one for another. After high school, Brown went to college at Middlebury (Vt.) College, where he studied political science and played football. He loved it.

“The whole community was great, great school,” he said. “We had some good success with our football program when I was there. Some really great coaches, really great people, really great friends.

It was competitive both academically and athletically.”

Brown, who was a three year starter on the offensive line, loved the comraderie as well as the competitive nature of the game. “The relationship you build with your teammates,” he said. “That whole mentality, we’re in this together, 11 guys (on offense).”

He liked it so much, he stayed at Middlebury after he graduated in 2001 to work as an assistant coach. He did whatever was needed, “whatever young coaches do. I wanted to stay in sports. To be honest, I didn’t know what that path was going to be.”

From that experience, he got a job as the offensive line coach at Hamilton College, and loved it. But he got a chuckle about the fact “I had kids older than me that I was coaching.”

He loved the 6 a.m.workouts, sleeping in the office, etc. Young and single. “When you’re 22 and 23, that’s what it is,” he said. “Go to the cafeteria, get some food, come back and keep working.”

After two years at Hamilton, Brown then became an assistant coach at Utica College, and also was the recruiting coordinator. It was the fifth and sixth years of the program, and Brown was on the map to coach small college football.

“That was the plan,” he said. “Division II and III college football, the long hours, the recruiting, the whole thing. That’s the track I was on for sure.”

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But, as we know now, that track changed. But while at St. Luke’s, Brown still coached. When he walked on to the field for the first day of football practice, he was stunned. He counted 17 kids.

“I said to the kids, ‘Where’s everybody else?'” Brown said. “And they said, ‘Coach, this is all we’ve got.’ Ok then, let’s get down to work.”

That first year, the team played eight games, scored two touchdowns. When those freshmen were seniors, St. Luke’s under Brown tied for the conference championship and won the title the next year, as the roster had been built up to at least 45 players.

“It was nice to see,” Brown said. “A lot of those kids who had been there as a freshmen group, and to see those kids grow up to the point where they were walking around like ‘I’m a football player.'”

It was a fun time. Brown got his coaching fix, but also was learning the administrative end while also teaching middle school phys ed. It helped that he knew a staff member at St. Luke’s who was a baseball coach at Hamilton.

“It was a good six years,” he said.

But now he was married and starting a family and was looking for a new challenge. He saw in 2012 that there was an opening for a full time AD at a tiny Catholic school on the New Hampshire seacoast, St. Thomas Aquinas in Dover, and he applied.

He was a complete outsider.

He got a call from the St. Thomas principal at the time, Jason Strniste – now the principal at Bishop Guertin. St. Thomas officials wanted him to interview. In April of 2012, his daughter was born, and the next day he accepted the St. Thomas job.

Was it tough leaving Connecticut, after everything he’d done there? Of course.

“You build connections with kids, coaches,” he said. “Like I said, that’s what athletics is about, right?”

Brown liked the school and the people at St. Thomas.

“Good families, good kids, they understand it, they get it, they want their kids to be successful,” he said. “They have high expectations for their kids.”

Plus, the area was a selling point. And Brown likes the strong network of sports people in New Hampshire, aided probably by the fact that it’s a small state.

St. Thomas was in good shape, thanks to the work of Brown’s predecessor, Jack Leary. So he set off to build on that success, but also had to manage; as his eight years there went on, there was also a drop in enrollment.

“But we saw the fruits of it,” he said. “We had some solid two and three sport athletes, and we were competitive. Lot of great moments of championships, but just as many great moments of ‘Where did that kid come from?'”

Brown also continued his coaching career at St. Thomas, which, like at Guertin now, was not in the original plan. He coached freshman baseball for a couple of seasons – as he said, nothing taxing – and got back into hockey, coaching the junior varsity hockey team for a couple of years.

However, when Eric Cumba stepped down as the Saints football coach in 2016, Brown felt the program was in a good place.

“You go through it, and I started to think, ‘Maybe I could do it’,” he said, adding he got the administrative approval and coached the Saints for the 2017-18 seasons. It was a big undertaking, but, as he said, to do both jobs, “You’ve got to have the right people around you.” And he had a good support team “that made it feasible” to do both jobs.

The two years he coached, the Saints were 17-4 combined, lost in the semis both years, including a heartbreaker to Alvirne. “It was fun,” he said.

For family reasons, Brown had to give up the football job.

But it’s pretty clear that his experience as a coach helps him as an athletic director. Coaches know he knows what they’re going through.

“I think it’s huge,” he said. “Building that credibility.”

And he says is that each program has a triangle: The coach, the parents, the kids. “And we’re all in this together, right?” he says.

Why BG? Obviously the familiarity with Strniste, but also Brown was looking to move ahead – word is he was also a finalist for the Souhegan AD job – and Guertin is a bigger school with Division I success.

And that fit his career formula.

“When you start to get comfortable,” he said, “it’s time to challenge yourself again.

“In that constant pursuit to get better, you get to that place where things are going pretty smoothly, it’s time for a challenge. It doesn’t mean you’re going to jump and run, but for the right opportunity, maybe, if that’s the right challenge. BG is obviously one of the top programs in the state; a school you look at and say, ‘Maybe that’s the right place.'”

A lot of people – there were 175 applicants – obviously felt the same way.

“It’s been great so far,” Brown said of his time at BG. “You have to get to know everyone. Understand what each coach is trying to do, what each program has done. … What are the areas where we could get better, and how do we go about that?”

Brown, like his BG predecessor, Pete Paladino, said the hardest thing as an athletic director is when you have to make a coaching change. “It’s hard,” he said, adding that talks with kids who aren’t able to achieve success that it looks they are capable of is also tough. “Not an easy conversation.”

The best things? Watching development of a program or a coach. “You see that success and you go, ‘Wow.’ It could be winning a championship, it might be scoring a goal. Depends kind of where you’re at.”

And Brown likes where he’s at, feeling it’s the right place for him.

In the right career for him.

“People always ask, ‘How do you do the job, you’re always working?'” Brown said. “This is what it is. You’re not working. You become part of the community. You become a Cardinal, or you become a Saint. And I tell people, if I wasn’t there as an administrator, I’d be there as a spectator. I’m going to watch kids play sports.”

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