After graduation from Carthage College 2014, Mike Pugliese prepared to intertwine baseball, the game he loved playing, into the rest of his life. 

Seven years before he joined the Eastern baseball coaching staff as the team’s hitting coach and recruiting coordinator, Pugliese took the first steps toward his next chapter in life. 

“Immediately the day after graduation I started coaching baseball,” Pugliese said. 

Pugliese took a job as general manager/director of player development for the Illinois Travel Baseball Club working with high schoolers. It was valuable experience for Pugliese, who said that he learned just as much as the kids he was teaching during that time. 

“I got to learn how to teach a swing,” Pugliese said. “I had to learn how to coach different types of personalities.” 

In 2020, Pugliese volunteered as a coach at Oakton Community College in Des Plaines on top of continuing his work with the travel baseball club. 

In his second season with Oakton in 2021 after the 2020 season was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Pugliese helped coach the team to a 32-21 record and a trip to the National Junior College Athletic Association Division Three World Series. 

Experiencing that kind of intensity and atmosphere is what sold Pugliese on his aspirations to continue to coach college baseball. 

“I dipped my feet into the college level, and I was like, ‘I want to do this,’” Pugliese said. “I really started to love the college level, and I had always kind of known I wanted to be at the Division 1 level.” 

In August of 2021, Pugliese noticed a job posting from Eastern for an assistant coach. He was already familiar with some of manager Jason Anderson’s assistants, who he had built a relationship with while they were scouting some of his players at the travel baseball club. 

Encouraged to apply, Pugliese sent in his resume. After a conversation with Anderson, Pugliese was hired as the fifth person on Eastern’s coaching staff in fall 2021. 

“I got a chance to meet him, and I just saw his desire to [coach],” Anderson said. “That’s something I always look for is do guys really want to coach because you don’t really realize how tough it is until you get in there.” 

Pugliese appreciates the stability of the job, he said, and he was happy to stay put at Eastern rather than taking a job somewhere else and bouncing around different teams like many assistant coaches tend to do. 

“I’ve kind of had the full scope of roles on the staff, so I’ve been able to learn this level [of baseball] at a high level,” Pugliese said. “Just like how we want to find players that are a fit for us, as a coach this place has been a fit for me.” 

Pugliese’s commitment to Eastern allowed him to be able to move up the ranks of the coaching staff from the fifth guy to the assistant head coach. 

“I think he brings a lot of different things,” Anderson said. “For me, he brings trust, which is hard to find in coaches. He’s obviously been dedicated to Eastern Illinois.” 

In his first three seasons at Eastern, Pugliese said he learned that a coach can help a player make more progress in their development if the coach figures out what makes the player “tick” as a person. 

In redshirt junior Cade Zalewski’s case, Pugliese knew what made him tick long before Zalewski began his collegiate career. 

Zalewski was one of the players coached by Pugliese during his time at the Illinois Travel Baseball Club. Playing for the high school-aged Illinois Indians at 14 years old, Zalewski built a relationship on trust, a major factor when he decided to play baseball at Eastern. 

“I trusted him, and my family trusted him,” Zalewski said. “So, it helped a lot.” 

Gabe Newman can be reached at 581-2812 or at ghnewman@eiu.edu.