For Haverford baseball head coach Dave Beccaria, success is never an excuse to stop grinding

PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Dave Beccaria has been the head coach at Division III Haverford College since the summer of 2000. He has led the Fords to well over 400 wins, three Centennial Conference titles and three NCAA tournament appearances.

On 1-on-1 with Matt Leon, a KYW Newsradio original podcast, Beccaria talks about his life in baseball from his days as a player, how he got into coaching, his success at Haverford and more.

Get a taste of the podcast below, then listen to it in the player or in the Audacy app.

[Matt Leon]: So you take over as the head coach mid-2000. What was that like? That’s incredibly young to be running a program.

[Dave Beccaria]: I was 25 when I got the job. I mean, I felt fairly well-prepared for the job because I tried to be so diligent about learning about the craft of coaching, learning a lot about Haverford, my experience over the previous few years. … But I don’t think you ever really know what you’re getting into until you actually start doing the work. So even though I felt pretty prepared to get started with my head coaching career, there was a lot more that I needed to learn pretty quickly. And again, fortunately, I feel like I have a growth mindset. So I’m constantly trying to figure out how to do a little bit better than I’m doing right now. And I think that was really helpful, especially that first year. I was also grateful that the guys on the team, I think, were really patient with a first-year coach. I don’t think there were any major mistakes along the way, necessarily. But there are going to be some ups and downs and some growing pains any time you have somebody doing something for the first time. And the group that we had was, I think, just really helpful. It allowed me to kind of find my own way, find my own voice as a coach.

[ML]: So you’re working as an assistant, and I would imagine a lot of the kids on the team were your teammates the month before you get the job. Is that difficult? From you’re one of the guys and now you’re kind of an authority figure, do you have to kind of build a wall to separate life [between] your days as a player, days as a coach?

[DB]: It’s as difficult as you’ll make it. I think you have to kind of understand what you want your role to be and what you want to be able to get out of it and what you need the players to be able to get out of that relationship as well. So I didn’t find it all that difficult because I felt, pretty early on, I knew what I wanted, how I wanted that relationship to take place. So I actually still lived with some of the players on the team. But whenever it came to social gatherings or going out at night, I kind of let them do their thing while I tried to avoid some of those social situations that maybe I would have entered into with them if I was still a player.

[ML]: How proud are you that you can draw a line to the success of Haverford baseball? The line starts going up and you get it to the point on your watch where you guys are the big kid on the block, and everybody knows in the centennial, which is a grind of a conference, when you guys are coming to town. How much pride do you take in that and what you’ve been able to build?

[DB]: We’re all really proud of where the program’s gone. I don’t think we’re satisfied yet with where we are. I think we’re constantly trying to do more. I think that the goal in our program now is instead of just being a really good team that competes for conference championships every year — and one of the better teams in the country — we want to be a truly elite Division III baseball program. We’re really aspiring to have the same kind of lofty reputation athletically that our school has academically. So that’s kind of what we’re working toward right now. We’re definitely proud that a lot of the hard work and time and effort that was put in has allowed our program to advance, but I don’t think anybody’s satisfied yet with where we are. And I think one of the really important things is that we’ve been very fortunate to have a lot of people moving in the same direction. So our alums, parents, friends of the program, all the assistant coaches and all the players we’ve had over time have all wanted similar things and have all been willing to work really hard and sacrifice certain things in order to try to help our program move forward. And this has been a group project over a really long time. We don’t take that for granted. We know how important our program is to the people who have been a part of it. And, we need to continue to make sure that we are doing justice to everything that they’ve invested in the program.

Featured Image Photo Credit: David Sinclair