Family First Mentality: Men’s Basketball New Head Coach Brody Jackson

Brody Jackson comes to Pitt-Greensburg after six seasons with the University of Mount Union.

Jackson explained how his coaching career began and how he got to this position.

“I had a weird journey,” he said. “I was a head coach when I was 23 years old. It wasn’t because I was like this great guy, the interview process was like ‘Are you sure you want this?’ I was like ‘yes, I’m 23.’ They were bad, but we focused on the positives and we ended up winning the tournament game for the first time in years, and that was the coolest part. We had a water fight in the locker room. That is what it’s supposed to look like,” he added.

After coaching high school, Jackson became an assistant coach at the University of Mount Union.

“I had some success [coaching high school], and then I went to be an assistant coach, which is kind of backwards. I had a great time at Mount Union, we were very successful, I was just confident that I was ready to do it [become the head coach at Pitt-Greensburg],” he said.

Coach Jackson believes in a “family” mentality.

“I was worried about that when I first got here,” he said. “The first thing I did when I got hired here was go to everyone’s house and meet the players and their parents. Then I realized [the team] was already kind of a family.”

In terms of his initial fear, he explained.

“They lost a lot of games last year, and I was afraid because losing can hurt relationships, it’s hard to do that for a whole year,” he said.

The team will also be having character sessions almost every Sunday throughout the season.

“It’s like a group therapy session.  Anything that needs to be said is said during those meetings,” Jackson said. “It’s good to get things out in the open. That’s how my family is, when there’s something going on, you deal with it head on,” he said.

His expectation for the season is to get better every day.

“I have no idea how many wins that will earn us,” he said. “But we watched a video at the beginning of the year, it’s called ‘Tapping the Rock,’ it stresses just keep doing good habits and eventually the rock breaks. That’s how we’ll be successful,” he added.

Jackson said despite the team having a rough season last year, there’s good that can be taken away from it.

“I’m that type of person, where I’m a positive guy,” he said. “I’m going to see the bright spots in things and that’s what I’m focusing on. Did they go out there and try to lose 24 games? No, no one does,” he said.

Jackson says there will be hard times even this season, but he wants the positives to be the focus.

“Rewarding positive behavior, that’s like my number one thing in coaching,” he said. “We’re going to have some fun this season.”