AVRIL KING
Social Media Manager
Brandon Butts, assistant coach for the Fredonia men’s soccer team, was loading the team’s refrigerator. Focused only on getting the task done as quickly as possible, he fit the bottles of Gatorade into whatever space he could find “with no such order,” and then moved onto his next task.
Soon after, the head coach of the men’s soccer team, P.J. Gondek, opened the refrigerator. After one look, he turned to Butts and said “this looks like shit.”
According to Butts, this is a defining characteristic of Coach Gondek.
“He focuses on doing the little things the right way every time. For example, if we have a meeting that starts at 9:00 and it’s 9:01, the door will be locked and you will not be let in.”
So, listening to Gondek’s advice, Butts began refilling the refrigerator a second time.
After carefully organizing the Gatorade bottles into color-coordinated rows, Butts realized that a clean, organized fridge was worth the extra effort. Even if it was a small, simple task.
“See, now doesn’t this look better?” said Gondek in response to Butts’s second attempt.
“In silent thought, I totally agreed and planned to act like a sponge to all the little tidbits he gives me,” said Butts.
Gondek grew up in the small town of Chazy, located in northern New York. It is, as he described it, “a mini soccer community.” Growing up in a soccer-loving town led Gondek not only to play the sport throughout high school, but also into junior college and college as he attended SUNY Cortland as a physical education major.
“After I was out of college, I immediately became a youth coach. Then things just kind of escalated from there,” said Gondek.
And escalate they did. According to Butts, Gondek has had experience coaching NCAA Division One, Two and Three teams, and even those at semi-pro and academy levels.
However, while acting as an assistant coach at Plattsburgh, the men’s soccer coach position at Fredonia opened up. With the help of Plattsburgh’s head coach, Gondek was able to obtain the position and has lived here ever since.
Now, he is in his eighteenth season at Fredonia. With a current standing of four wins and one loss, he seems to be doing something right.
“I’d like to think I’m maybe a little bit more relaxed as a coach than I used to be. If anything, I see coaching for me as maybe a little bit more about mentoring,” said Gondek.
However, he does agree that paying attention to small details and doing things right the first time are important to him, as Butts noted.
“We do use the phrase ‘do the right things the right way all the time.’ It is something that we talk about,” he said. “We figure if we try to do the right things the right way all the time, we probably won’t get it right, but we’ll be a lot closer to perfect than we will be if we don’t.”
Butts agreed with this, saying, “things that will make our team a successful team is holding each other accountable and attention to detail. And we beat that home. It matures our young players so much that they carry themselves on and off the field as you would a last semester senior.”
Looking to the future, Gondek would of course love to see the team be successful and go to the SUNYAC tournament as they did in 2016, among other goals. However, he stressed the importance of taking the season “game by game.”
Of the 25 men on the team, eight are freshman and another eight are sophomores. With the young team that he has, he does not want to get too far ahead of himself, but is instead focusing on getting his players to improve.
Coming up, the men will be facing two SUNYAC rivals: Brockport on Sept. 22 and Geneseo on Sept. 23. If they take things one game at a time — one gatorade bottle at a time — Coach Gondek would be pleased.