Hopkins hopes to coach politicans to `build bridges'

By Jacob Marrocco
Posted 5/24/17

By JACOB MARROCCO Ken Hopkins may have retired from coaching two weeks ago following the end of the CCRI baseball season, but he's not done yet. Not by a long shot. Hopkins (R), 62, had taken up new challenges recently, namely his baptism by fire as a

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Hopkins hopes to coach politicans to `build bridges'

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Ken Hopkins may have retired from coaching two weeks ago following the end of the CCRI baseball season, but he’s not done yet.

Not by a long shot.

Hopkins (R), 62, had taken up new challenges recently, namely his baptism by fire as a citywide representative on the City Council. Since Hopkins took office last fall, he has heard some controversial topics in the chambers: the panhandling ordinance, Garden City’s new heights and the school budget crisis, to name a few.

It has given him a chance to practice what he preached for years. After all, he spent decades teaching history and civics across the area, most notably at Cranston East. He said the most significant difference, in his eyes, between teaching about government and actively participating is the increased need for compromise in reality.

That mindset is necessary for a Cranston council effectively split down the middle with four Democrats and five Republicans.

“When you’re reading out of a book it’s more factual, when you’re doing it in real life, it’s more give and take,” Hopkins said in a phone interview last week. “Nothing’s set in stone. You try to come up with a balance and that’s one thing I’ve brought to the council. My goal is to build bridges between Republicans and Democrats, and I’ve worked pretty hard with members of both parties to do what’s best.”

Hopkins has been in a leadership role for most of his life. Fresh out of Rhode Island College, he was offered assistant basketball and baseball coaching positions and a teaching job in the history department at Our Lady of Providence High School in 1978.

In 1981, he was brought on as the assistant pitching coach at CCRI, the institution where he would eventually manage the baseball team for the last 17 years. Despite his four decades in the industry, he has never held a head coaching position at the high school level.

While he said he would keep that door open in the future, his present decision to step away was family-driven.

“Maybe that’s something down the road,” Hopkins said of a high school head coaching job. “I’m still young enough where I could have kept going, but I wanted to spend time with my four grandkids, and they’re all under 3 years of age. That was really important to me, to spend more time with my family.

“You’re on the buses, on the planes, in the hotel. I don’t know if I’m ruling it out altogether. I want to do something different whether it’s in politics or coaching or something else, you kind of take it one day at a time now.”

Hopkins said he has noticed a couple of major changes in coaching since he started. One of them is that coaches don’t teach players “how to fail” and fight back against adversity.

“I kind of took a holistic approach to coaching,” Hopkins said. “Seventy percent of the [baseball] is based on failure. You have to think to play baseball, it’s not just a brute force game. I think there’s a good parallel between life skills in the classroom. I taught history all those years, you can’t just teach a lesson. You have to teach why it’s important and historically why it’s successful or a failure.”

That connection between the classroom and the playing field is also fading, in Hopkins’ view. He pointed out the recent success of Cranston East’s football and baseball programs as examples, led respectively by Tom Centore and Mike Walsh. Both Centore and Walsh work at East.

He said that constant interaction and watch over the members of their teams helps forge deeper ties.

“I’d say that if you look at the high schools in Rhode Island, 90 percent don’t teach in the high school they coach at,” Hopkins said. “When I was AD in Cranston, I must’ve had 120-125 coaches and I don’t think 90 of them were teachers.”

While he is retired from teaching and (for now) coaching, Hopkins isn't slowing down. Now, though, it isn’t a bus ride across state lines or a plane trip to Florida. It’s a short drive to City Hall, with more time for family in between his time in the chambers.

“I like doing it,” Hopkins said. “I like serving the people trying to make Cranston a better place. I’m learning a lot. I still have a lot more to learn.”

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