Gary Lamm ready to hit the ground running as new Muscle Shoals baseball coach

During Wednesday’s meeting with his new Muscle Shoals team, Gary Lamm looked to see where his seniors were sitting. After a quick scan of the room, it didn’t take long for him to spot them.

“With the seniors that I saw, they were on the front row,” Lamm said. “I thought ‘good,’ because I was getting ready to say something about that if they weren’t, because that just doesn’t set a very good thing. So when I looked out there and I was talking to the team, and I saw the seniors up front, I thought, ‘that’s good. That’s a plus. I like that.’ So just little things like that.”

The veteran coach has seen many teams during his coaching career, but this new journey is one he’s already seen as an exciting new one.

Muscle Shoals announced Tuesday afternoon that Lamm will be the next head coach of the program, replacing Blake Beck who stepped down after two seasons.

Lamm has more than 500 wins as a baseball coach, 400 of which came at Loretto High School in Loretto, Tenn. He is a 2022 inductee into the Tennessee Baseball Coaches Association’s Hall of Fame.

He helped lead Loretto to its first state baseball title, claiming the 2017 Class A state championship. The field at Loretto is named “Gary Lamm Field,” honoring the longtime coach.

Lamm said that he had an offer to take a drivers’ ed position in the spring when Jimmy Gay left Muscle Shoals to take the Huntsville football job. While he wasn’t certified in the state of Alabama, he was able to get certified easily with Covid protocols, offering to help with baseball as well.

“That’s when I went to the school,” Lamm said. “I got to meet the kids. I was just so impressed with the way the school operated, the way the kids acted, and also the administration, the teachers. It’s just a really good setup.”

After the departure of Beck, who helped lead Muscle Shoals to its first playoff appearance since 2019, the school asked if he would have any interest in taking the head coaching position with the program. Lamm talked to his wife, Cheryl, about the job first.

“She said, ‘Well, why don’t you give him a call and just go down there to see what they have to say?’ I said, ‘Well, I can do that. I don’t think it’s going to happen, but I’ll go down there and do that,’” Lamm said. “I went down there, and one thing led to another, and I said, ‘Man, this is a great situation, but for me to do this, I would have to have a lot of people on board,’ and one of those is starting with my wife.

“She’s been a tremendous help over the years. She was actually a coach at Rogers High School in Green Hill, and coached there for 13 years, and she has just been my number one supporter in anything that we were doing with fundraising stuff, so I knew it would be a big step to get her to get on board.”

After talking with his wife and family, seeing the practice schedule and learning more about the staff and resources he had available, it made the decision to take the job that much easier.

“All that considered, I just told him it looks like a good fit,” Lamm said. “I think if you wanted to go that way, I’d be glad to take it.”

Lamm’s checklist doesn’t involve a drawn-out process to success, either.

The veteran coach said that a part of his vision for the program is getting started quickly and elevating the program past where it was last year almost immediately.

The program finished last season in the first round, falling to Mountain Brook following a forced Game 3.

“Sure, I’ve got experience. And I said, ‘you may want a younger guy that’s going to be here longer, but that’s up to you to decide that,’” Lamm said. “I just told him, I said, ‘I may do two, three years, five years. I don’t know what it’s going to be. God can take me at any moment. I just want to be able to do my best job as long as I can to help Muscle Shoals High School.’ I said, ‘I was at Loretta for 26 years.’ I said, ‘it would be very difficult to be 26 years here at Muscle Shoals.’ So, we’re on kind of a timeline to get as much accomplished as we can in a short amount of time. I just think we’ve got to get there.”

A part of Lamm’s fast-tracked plan is for the players to get past what he called the “mental aspect” of the game, adding that his goal on and off the field is helping the athletes believe in what they’re capable of doing.

“I said ‘we’ve got to buy into this,’” Lamm said. “For us to be successful, we have got to take care of doing a better job mentally and getting over that. And I said, That’s going to be our biggest challenge. Hopefully, we can develop the same type of culture that the other sports have there at Muscle Shoals.

“When you look at their programs, they’re doing things the right way.”

As for right now, before school starts, he said that he’s evaluating how he can combine what he liked about last year’s process at Muscle Shoals with with own coaching philosophies and plans for this new group.

“Right now, I’m just trying to figure out what all they did last year,” Lamm said. “I like some of it, I don’t like some of it, and I’m just trying to make sure that the kids are comfortable with what we’re doing. For me, I don’t want to change a whole lot if possible, because what they did worked last year, and I don’t want them having to change again. The reason for that is it’s a senior group; why would I come in there and try to turn it around with something that proved to work last year? I don’t want to back up and then have to reteach a lot of things that were taught last year.”