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03/22/2018 12:00 AMThe Valley Regional baseball team has a new head coach in Brian Drinkard, and one of his first moves was recruiting Charles Wolfe to join the program as an assistant coach. Charles returns to coaching for the first time since 2004, and he brings a championship pedigree to the Warriors. Charles won Class S state championships as head coach of the Valley Regional boys’ soccer team in 1997 and also with the Lyme-Old Lyme baseball team the following year. In 1998, he was recognized as the Connecticut Sports Writers’ Alliance Coach of the Year.
Now back at Valley, Charles hopes to help build another championship contender and is looking forward to that familiar feeling of watching baseball from the dugout. Well, that and winning ballgames.
“My first game back, I think it’s going to be really comfortable. I’ve spent an awful lot of time in dugouts. I think I’ll be excited,” says Charles, who lives in Deep River. “These kids I’ve worked with, I think we’ll be pretty good. Brian has a really good handle on the overall operation...I don’t think I’ll be telling him he should do this or that. If he asks me, I’ll talk, but I’m not interested in being in charge. I’m interesting in winning.”
Charles’s coaching career began in 1976 at Old Lyme High School, where he coached baseball for 25 years. Charles later coached the Valley Regional boys’ soccer squad from 1995 to 1998. No matter what sport he’s coaching, Charles feels that his job is to inspire his athletes.
“It’s about dealing with kids,” Charles says. “It’s important you have a good staff that knows what they’re doing...My job generally has been to direct and motivate the kids. I’ve had pretty good success over the years.”
Charles saw some strong baseball teams come and go without winning a title at Old Lyme. However, his 1998 club was simply too strong on offense to be denied.
“I would say we had four or five teams in 20 years that could have won a state championship. Baseball doesn’t really follow any real pattern in that you know the best team in the tournament is going to win. So much can happen,” says Charles. “In ‘98, we hit the baseball very well...The players told me they were going to win the tournament at the beginning of the season, and I told them ‘Hey, feel free.’ They put up. They did what they said they were going to do.”
As the head coach of Valley boys’ soccer, Charles featured a team that played with tons of skill and plenty of physicality en route to taking its title in 1997.
“I had some highly skilled players, and we were very physical,” Charles says. “We had a lot of success in those years. It was an incredible group. We graduated virtually the whole team in ‘98, and they went to the finals the next year with the guys that were on the bench the year before.”
After graduating from UConn and getting his master’s degree from Wesleyan, Charles taught English at Old Lyme for a number of years. He most recently served as a tutor at Valley and, during that time, Charles started talking baseball with Warriors’ assistant coach Ryan Fuller. Fuller became an assistant at Haddam-Killingworth, and Charles began attending Cougars’ baseball games. When Charles told Fuller that he was contemplating coaching again, Fuller informed Coach Drinkard, who leaped at the opportunity to bring Charles aboard.
Coach Drinkard couldn’t be more excited to welcome Charles back into the fold at Valley Regional. Drinkard already knew about Charles’s reputation, but now he’s even more impressed after working with him.
“Getting a guy with 30 years of experience and a state championship in two sports is just huge. I just reached out to him and, if there was any chance he wanted to come back, I wanted to get him back at Valley,” Drinkard says. “He’s got a really nice demeanor, laid back. The kids are responding to him...I think we’re a perfect fit together, along with coach Lou Rolon...The three of us are a perfect mix of personalities.”
Charles agrees that Valley’s coaches are meshing together well as they get ready to lead the Warriors into battle on the baseball diamond this season.
“All of us have the same view toward how the kids should be treated and how to do things right,” says Charles. “We’re old-school. Not so much in discipline, but in approach to the game.”