He came on the scene years ago, making his presence known throughout the school. Coaches on other teams don’t phase him. Handling the schedules for every team on campus doesn’t phase him. Washing the countless nets of jerseys doesn’t phase him.
Back in his heyday, he could jump over cars when he felt like it. He (allegedly) ran a 4.5-second 40-yard dash. He’s been hit by cars and walked away with less than a minor bruise. Someone might have to check the car. Nothing. Phases. This. Man.
Students walk by his office every day. They say “hey” or “wassup” as he hollers back. That’s all most students see or hear of him. They might peer into his office or grab their jerseys from outside his office.
He jumps around his office, poorly decorated with Miami Dolphins memorabilia from the last time they were above average (the Dan Marino era), popping into the jersey washing room in the back, which serves as a corner office behind horizontal steel bars. He is praised daily. Coworkers can only describe him by his last name, as that is the most accurate description of his personality.
I am, of course, talking about the athletic super-weapon that is Matt Kocay.
I first reached out to Kocay trying to get a sense of what his life was like, and what brought him to his career at KO in the athletics department. I kept reminding Kocay about what I wanted to interview him for, and he would always give the same generic answer.
“Gold!” Kocay would yell at me. “We gotta do that interview thing. I’m free at the end of the week. We’ll find a time Gold, don’t worry.”
We did not, in fact, meet at the end of that week. It took three weeks to find a time.
It had been a marathon to finally track down a time to get into his busy schedule, but I finally made it past his old-school hardwood door and into his natural habitat: his front office. I assumed it was a new experience for him – being interviewed for the journalism class was not an invitation extended to most KO faculty. Nevertheless, he led me back into his locker rooms where I couldn’t help but think about Kocay, the avid fan. When he coached me and my friends in middle school, he was always the first to talk to us about how his Dolphins did the previous week, and always sported his vintage “KO Football” apparel whenever he could.
The original Dolphins and KO logos hint that he loves and lives for the past, and I fully realized that he is one of the coaches at KO most dedicated to helping in any way to return his beloved KO football to the dominant seasons from just a few years ago. He looks at me, eager to share more about his life.
Despite coming off as a devoted sports fan, he was relatively late to the party in terms of playing sports. “I started sports probably later than most kids in West Hartford, and I wasn’t particularly interested in sports,” he said. “Eventually my parents forced me to play soccer, and I had a lot of success at the West End Soccer Club.”
Upon discovering soccer, Kocay added football and basketball to his athletic resume entering middle school. His father first introduced him to football, while basketball and baseball were the most common sports in West Hartford. For those of you keeping track, at this early point in his athletic career, Kocay was playing four sports annually. “Football came late,” Kocay recalled. “I grew up trying soccer then doing basketball. Didn’t want to do any of it, but I knew a lot of basketball people, including Coach Calhoun and George Blaney, so everybody was like, you have to play, so I ended up doing it.”
His early athletic prowess led Kocay to Hall High School, where he was the running back for the football team, as well as playing other sports. He did not find the comfort he does in football when looking back at his first years on the team, noting that it was demanding and hard to adjust to. As he shifted into his senior year at Hall High School sometime in the 1990s, Kocay looked for colleges that would accept him. The young Kocay hoped to get into college for his football talent but suffered a number of injuries and couldn’t pass a physical. He was not accepted into American colleges and universities, but had one opportunity from a basketball camp at Central Connecticut State University in front of Howie Dickerman, who helped him get into a university.
At this point in the story, this is where most people tend to not believe him – he went overseas for one year to play basketball. “I played basketball and attended the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, England, for a year until they gave me the boot,” Kocay said. “Those guys were really good, a lot of guys that played on other countries’ Junior Olympic teams, so I was probably one of the weaker members of that team, but it was a great experience playing with a bunch of players that really couldn’t speak English well.”
Kocay returned from his time balling out in England in 1997. Once back in the States, he took some time off from school and moved out West, working in several restaurants for three years all over California before coming back to Connecticut in 2000 to finish college at CCSU. He took the job at KO that same year. Not playing basketball or any other sports, Kocay went to CCSU for academics only at this point. While still a senior at CCSU, Kocay was coaching West Hartford town football for a few years before being offered the gig at KO.
Kocay was offered the position to join the KO staff as a coach on the football team. “My initial position here was to be a coach – the offensive coordinator for JV or JV football coach and the varsity hockey coach, and then I was the varsity offensive coordinator in the next season,” he said. “When I got here around 2000, KO had a new AD [athletic director] from Florida named Garth Adams – great guy, [and he] really wanted to take our sports programs and figure out if we could compete with the big-time teams.”
Kocay showed early interest in possibly becoming a history teacher at KO but jumped on the opportunity to join the athletic department and find a family in coaching the football team. His favorite memory of coaching was when the varsity football team won the championship in 2015.
The members of that winning team were more of a family to Kocay than a team, helping fill in his duties when he couldn’t. During most of the season, Kocay was away for personal reasons and was thankful for the young players who filled in to help him around the office by doing tasks for Kocay that were difficult for him at the time. This team in particular helped Kocay realize that he wanted to stay in the athletic department, rather than potentially becoming a history teacher in the Upper School.
Kocay has been working here longer than most in the athletic department, and varsity baseball Assistant Coach and varsity volleyball Head Coach Ryan Radmanovich (Rad, for short) has worked with him countless times over the years. “The first time I met Kocay was in the lunchroom, of all places,” Rad said. “When I first came to KO, I was a Middle School hockey coach for that winter before baseball started because they needed somebody to help out with hockey.”
Rad will tell you Kocay never changed since his first meeting with him. The only way he can ever really describe Kocay is just that: Kocay is Kocay. There is simply no word that compares when describing him. He’s just that guy. He’s eager to do everything that’s thrown at him, doing so with a smile all day.
Rad works with him to schedule his teams’ games, which Kocay does for over 30 teams across the Middle and Upper School. Rad loves watching the effect Kocay has on students walking to the locker rooms. “When kids come down to sports, it’s time for them to kind of get away from the academic piece,” Rad said. “And Kocay is there with the athletic piece – he’s your prototypical, loud, funny gym teacher kind of guy, which is amazing.”
From a student perspective, senior and varsity baseball Captain John Kumpa loves seeing Kocay around campus. “He seems to have a sort of a similar sense of humor to a lot of us,” John said. “He just kind of gels with everyone.”
Building his way up from Hall High School as a young running back to one of the biggest personalities on campus, Matt Kocay is truly a treasure, improving the lives of co-workers, players, and student-athletes alike. He will be remembered at Kingswood Oxford for decades to come.
