PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Matt Midkiff has been the head baseball coach at Division III Swarthmore College since 2013, and the Garnet have won a lot of games on his watch.
Prior to taking over the program at Swarthmore, Midkiff spent four seasons as the head coach at another local Division III institution, Eastern University. He enjoyed success there as well, but his first season was rough as Eastern went just 3-29. But Midkiff learned from that experience.
"It was tough. That's the thing you're kind of talking about is you sort of question can I do this? Am I capable? Because we stink," he recalled.
"So I had to learn at that point that I can't get my value as a person from my team's record. If those two things are tied than I'll never be happy because only one team wins the national championship every year and that coach probably isn't completely satisfied, either."
Since coming to Swarthmore, Midkiff has led the Garnet to national success. In 2018, Swarthmore won the Centennial Conference and advanced all the way to the College World Series. He's won 60% of his games as head coach at Swarthmore and he talked about having success.
"I hope that people think I'm good because I'm good to them and care about the players that play for me and care about their families and hopefully have developed a program that everybody can be proud of being a part of and that winning is a side effect of what we do well," he said.
You can listen to the entire interview with Matt Midkiff by checking out the latest episode, above, of the KYW Newsradio original podcast, "1-on-1 with Matt Leon." Subscribe on the RADIO.COM app or wherever you get your podcasts.
