Meet MBU Head Coach Matt Brock

(St. Louis, MO) – We are barely into the second season of Matt Brock’s head coaching career, but it is easy to see that the Missouri Baptist University coach has the makings of something special.

The son of a coach, a collegiate player, several stops as an assistant coach and Brock seems to have found his niche as the lead man at MBU. In Brock’s first year at Missouri Baptist he took a team that had won five games the previous season and won 19 games. He brought in new players, beefed up the coaching staff and ushered in a new era of successful basketball.

Using relational ties from his basketball travels, he landed European players, transfers and strengthened the resolve of the returning players from the previous season. The Spartans were able to knock off three nationally ranked teams, finish in the top four in the ultra competitive American Midwest Conference and land a player on the all-american squad. Not bad for year one.

MBU is off to a 3-0 start this season, but we wanted to get to know the man outside of ‘game day’ and to learn about his values and what is making him successful at MOBAP.

An admitted ‘stat nerd’, Brock has fully embraced the advanced analytics movement of college basketball, and yet admits he had a lot to learn in his first head coaching season. Brock is instituting some true core values in the program and in his players. Those values are energy, discipline and growth.

 

 

Raised a coach’s kid by his hall of fame coaching father. Brock says his father (Skip) is always learning and hungry to understand the game of basketball. He coached Matt at Camdenton High and his younger brother Tomas at Mount Vernon High. When Matt moved from an assistant position at Columbia College to take the head-coaching job at MBU, Columbia’s Bob Burchard didn’t waste any time looking for a replacement. He hired Tomas.

Brock has had many important influences on his life and coaching career. His time at Truman, Columbia and Pittsburgh State were important, but he got his start in coaching at Hannibal-Lagrange.

 

 

The 34-year-old Brock is just in his second year of head coaching and his wife Sheryl recently gave birth to the couple’s second child. Matthew has the unique middle name of Earnest. Coach Brock tells us about the name’s history and his thoughts going forward in the transitory world called coaching. Icons like Belmont’s Rick Byrd have stayed in one place for decades. Others find they have to move from place to place.

 

 

The Spartan program has a man bred for the job, with a passion for the game and to encourage young men. Those qualities should serve him and MBU very well.

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