When Muskegon Clippers head coach Logan Fleener accepted the hitting coach job at NAIA Tennessee Wesleyan University after the 2025 season, longtime assistant Brian Wright - Shelby’s 46th-year head baseball coach - was a logical choice to replace Fleener.
Except for one problem - initially, Wright wasn’t really interested. Wright was happy being an assistant, just as he was before Fleener took over following Walt Gawkowski moving from head coach to a general manager’s role.
It wasn’t until a postseason meeting with Clippers coaches after the team lost out on a playoff bid by percentage points in the standings, that Fleener was able to show Wright that, as Fleener said, “It’s your time.”
“The day we got beat out...(Fleener) said, ‘Tell me one reason you shouldn’t take this,’” Wright said. “I didn’t have a reason. I love baseball and I love working for the Clippers. That’s not why I became an assistant, to be a head coach down the road, but I took a couple days and then I called Walt and said, ‘Yeah, I’d like that job.’ I didn’t know if it was something I needed or wanted, but I’m all the way in.”
Wright’s move continues something of a tradition within the Clippers to keep the top position in the family. Gawkowski, who coached North Muskegon and Mona Shores for many years and whose late brother Pete was the original owner of the summer collegiate league team, coached the Clippers their first seven years of existence, helming the organization into the Great Lakes Summer Collegiate League. He then handed off the coaching reins to Fleener, who was a Clipper during his playing days. Wright, the team’s third head coach, has been with the team since its start - Gawkowski is a close friend and brought him on as an assistant - and will now be making the calls from the dugout.
Gawkowski said Wright’s natural gift for relationship-building made him an easy choice to move into the head coach position. In summer baseball, there’s not much time for players and coaches to get to know each other. Players, fresh off their college seasons, don’t need to work their way into shape, so teams assemble, have a few workouts, then jump right into the season. A leader who can quickly develop a rapport with his players is a valuable thing to have.
“He’s been an educator and has been around kids his whole life, which certainly helps,” Gawkowski said. “I think it’s a skill that’s innate....I suppose you can develop that to a degree, but I think it’s more of a skill you have or you don’t. Kids like him and he likes them. They know he cares about them as people, and that’s what coaching really is about.”
Wright turns 68 in April, but apart from a couple of knee replacements, you’d never know it; Tigers fans, players and parents alike have seen the energy he brings to the baseball diamond each day. It’s energy Wright said has never abated. He still loves the game, and you’d have to in order to coach as many games as Wright has over the decades.
Perhaps his experience in the game is what gives Wright another quality Gawkowski loves in a coach - a predictable and relatively easygoing manner day to day.
“Brian is pretty much the same every day,” Gawkowski said. “It’s not a situation where you come to the park and you’re not sure how he’ll be that day. He’s always approachable and he’s always positive. That’s a comforting thing that people appreciate.”
Wright says part of what keeps him in both jobs is the different atmospheres of the game. He loves coaching high school kids, and he said the 2026 team is “a special group” that will include several players whose fathers he also coached. When he gets to Marsh Field each summer, the college-level players provide a different atmosphere that keeps things fresh.
“They’re there because it’s their craft,” Wright said of Clippers players. “They’ve been doing it forever, and they come to Muskegon to hone their skills before they go back to their respective schools. The relationships I’ve made the past 11 years coaching the Clippers, somewhere along the line I’m (constantly) getting a text from one of my old Clippers. I feel blessed to have done it this long.
“When you walk down that ramp going into Marsh Field, you look out and that field is 110 years old, and it seems like every year it gets better. I played on that field in high school and post-college, and it’s so neat. When you get there on a summer night and there’s 400-500 people in the stands, it’s a dream. It’s not 40,000, like the major leagues, but it’s pretty darn special.”
Another nice thing about doing both jobs is there is not much overlap. Since the Clippers’ roster is largely set by the spring, and the players are busy with their college seasons, Wright is able to fully lock in on Shelby’s season. He’ll send the occasional encouraging text to the guys he’s set to coach a couple months later, but otherwise it’s all Tigers in the spring. (And to some extent in the winter as well; Wright said the team has begun optional Sunday sessions to work on hitting in advance of the season.)
The relationship between coach and GM certainly won’t be an obstacle, either. Wright and Gawkowski have been friends for decades, and Gawkowski has favored a collaborative approach to the two jobs since his days coaching the team. That won’t change with Wright.
“I think it was (longtime NFL coach) Bill Parcells that said, ‘If I’m going to cook dinner, I should be doing the grocery shopping,’” Gawkowski chuckled. “I sign the kids and I try to get input from a lot of people - their college coaches for one - but certainly I talk to Brian about that too. If he says, ‘I really want this kid,’ I’ll sign him.”
Wright said Gawkowski has his own gift for relationship-building when it comes to college coaches, which helps the Clippers get good players each year. That’s certainly shown in recent years’ standings - the 2023 Clippers won a GLSCL record 33 games, and the 2024 team reached the league championship series, a franchise first.
That creates a lot of optimism that Wright’s time in the head coach chair will be a productive one. It’s certainly one he’s looking forward to, now that he’s realized he did in fact want the challenge.
“The shoes are a little bigger now,” Wright said. “I’ll be the one to make the lineup out, pull a pitcher in the eighth inning with the bases loaded, or make the decision of whether we hit and run or bunt. After coaching at first base the past seven years, it’ll be nice to switch to the third-base box. It’ll be a little more intense over there.”
