RollTide.com announced today that Brad Bohannon was announced as head baseball coach at The University of Alabama today by Greg Byrne, Director of Athletics.
Byrne spoke to the media about Coach Bohannon saying, “As we were identifying potential candidates, Brad Bohannon’s name continued to surface. We sat down on Monday in our home in Tuscaloosa. What I thought it was going to be was an hour conversation of getting reintroduced to Brad and talking a little about the program, and about three and a half hours later he left my house. I could tell right away this is where he wanted to be. He wanted to work with our current team. He wanted to work with our alums and former baseball players and understands the importance in that. He wanted to work with our fan base and our community. He had a really solid academic and compliance plan. He also had an incredible vision for recruiting.”
Bohannon brings 14 years of Southeastern Conference coaching experience to Alabama. Most recently, he was an assistant at the University of Kentucky from 2004-2015, where he was named American Baseball Coaches Association and Baseball America National Assistant Coach of the Year. He spent this past season at Auburn.
Coach Bohannon echoed Mr. Byrne’s enthusiasm stating, “I really think anything can be achieved here at The University of Alabama. My goal going forward is to make Alabama the absolute best place to place college baseball in the country, and we have everything we need in place to make that happen. We’re going to do that by being a players-first program. Everything that we do as a coaching staff is going to be about making sure that our kids get their college degree, helping them grow as men and hopefully one day be great husbands and fathers while helping them become the best versions of themselves as a baseball player.”
The RollTide.com report noted Bohannon played “a pivotal role in turning around both Kentucky and Auburn within three years on the job. The Wildcats became the first team in SEC history to go from worst to first in only one season, winning 44 games and the program’s first league title in 2006, while the Tigers won 12 more games in 2017 than in 2016 and advanced to the NCAA tournament. In addition to improving in the win column, the 2017 squad is on pace to set the school record for fielding percentage.”
Coach Bohannon is also widely regarded as one of the leading recruiters in the country with an eye for scouting top talent. At UK, he signed 13 players that went pro, including 2014 Golden Spikes Award winner A.J. Reed. At Auburn, his first recruiting class was ranked No. 9 by Collegiate Baseball and includes six current starting position players. Since 2008, all of Bohannon’s recruiting classes have been ranked in the top 25 in the nation, with the 2008 class coming in at No. 4.
In addition to his collegiate coaching experience, Bohannon also spent the summer of 2005 managing the Southern Ohio Copperheads of the Great Lakes Summer Collegiate League.
Bohannon earned an undergraduate degree in finance in 1998 from Berry College in Georgia. He then went on to earn a master’s degree in business administration from Wake Forest in 2002. Bohannon began his collegiate career playing at Vanderbilt and Georgia Tech before finishing up at Berry. A native of Rome, Ga., he’s married to the former Kim Traylor.
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