Trevor Burmeister was a part of the 2010-2011 WolfPack baseball team – the team that started the seven-year streak of going to the World Series. 

“I was lucky enough to be a part of that streak,” he said. 

So, when Burmeister got into coaching seven years ago, he knew that he wanted to come back to the program. 

Burmeister was recently named the NJCAA Division II Assistant Coach of the Year by ABCA/Baseball America.  This honor is only given to 11 coaches total from all over the United states.  The award is given to three from the NCAA, one from the NAIA, three from the NJCAA, one from the Pacific Association, and three high school coaches. 

Burmeister said it is an “honor, its humbling for the fact that I never saw it coming.  It was never even on my radar, or even something I was striving to get.” 

He added that he is “incredibly thankful that there are people out there that recognize the work that you put in.”

Winning such an award would not be possible, Burmeister said, without being part of a “really special program” like Madison College.

Burmeister started his coaching career at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse and spent two years there before getting the chance to be the hitting coach at the University of Minnesota-Duluth. 

“I was given the job as the hitting coach at a really young age.  It was a perfect situation to walk into, with a talented group that was fun to coach,” Burmeister said about his time at UMD.

The summer after his first year at Duluth, Burmeister got the call he said he always hoped to receive. 

“I was always hoping Coach D would give me a phone call and ask me to come back,” Burmeister said.   

Madison College head baseball coach Mike Davenport called Burmeister and asked if he wanted to come back.  Burmeister told him, “you know how long I have been waiting for this call.”

“I knew how this program worked and wanted to be a part of that again,” said Burmeister about Madison College baseball.

Being able to learn from Davenport was one of the reasons he choose to come back to Madison College.

“I really wanted to be under Coach Davenport again, I wanted to learn from him,”  Burmeister said. “He is a humble guy. He is exceptional at what he does on the baseball field, and is a really good coach. He is a really good developer of culture, and accountability.  I just really wanted to learn from him again, because I knew at that point how young I was, and I wasn’t a finished product.  You are never a finished product; you are always looking for more information.  I knew this was the place that was going to happen for me, to grow my skill sets to be a better coach.”

Burmeister’s favorite part of coaching is the is building relationships with each player and developing it as it goes along.   

While his long-term goal is to become a head coach, Burmeister keeps his focus on achieving more immediate goals.

“I try my best to live my life day by day,” he said. “The way I see it is that you know if you do a really good job today, if you set goals for yourself today or even the week for what you want to accomplish, whether it is for yourself or for your guys, that ultimately put you in a position later on in life to get to where you want to be.” 

Along the way, he plans to learn as much as he can for time when he gets his opportunity to be a head coach.

“That has been my goal since day one – to have my own program and take all the stuff I have learned from all these different programs and try to figure out my own philosophy of how a program should be run,” he said. 

Burmeister said his favorite memory as a player and coach comes from 2018, when Madison College was facing Kirkwood Community College in the World Series. The WolfPack were down 9-1 after the third inning, but scored 17 unanswered runs to win the game.

After the game, Burmeister and Davenport were watching another game and an older couple that lived in the area waved Burmeister over.  The lady recognized Burmeister as someone who once played for Madison College, and even knew the years the Burmeister played. 

The conversation later led to them talking about the game that the WolfPack just played and the lady said, “you guys played unbelievable this morning.” Burmeister’s response to her was “the boys show a lot of fight don’t they.” The lady’s response was “Madison College always has fight.” 

That is the story Burmeister will always remember, not because of how the game ended, but because people recognize what Madison College is about and how the WolfPack will never give up.