Podcast: Prep school legend Rick Foresteire prepares for final season

Rick Foresteire will retire as Thayer Academy coach following the 2022 season. (Steve Safran)

The most recent guest on the New England Baseball Journal Podcast has been as influential as any prep baseball coach in New England. Starting in the 1990s at Buckingham Browne and Nichols, Rick Foresteire helped make the New England boarding school route a comparable experience for baseball players as it already was in a sport like hockey.

Now the head coach at Thayer Academy in Braintree, Massachusetts, Foresteire has helped his players continue their respective careers at schools like Vanderbilt, Penn State, South Carolina, Dartmouth, Harvard, Yale, Brown, as well as every NESCAC school.

Foresteire revealed on the podcast that this will be his final year coaching New England prep school baseball.

“This will be my 26th year as a head coach,” Foresteire said. “So, I guess I’m getting a little old. Luckily, I did start a little bit young. The point is that I’ve decided in general that I’ve been an athletic director for basically 20 years. I was an associate athletic director for five years before that. So, for 25 years I’ve been in athletic administration. It’s been a great journey. My kids got a great private school education, and that prepared them well for the next level. At this time in my life, I want to try something different. So, I just decided it was time to really take the leap and give it a go.”

Foresteire played a big role in jump-starting that transition in his first job as a prep school baseball coach at Buckingham Browne & Nichols in the late-1990s. Foresteire played collegiately at Brandeis University before returning to his alma mater to teach and coach hockey and baseball. He is credited for being the first prep school coach in New England to take his team to Florida for a spring training trip. Now, just about all of the Independent School League teams — as well as many other prep schools across New England — take a week in March in Port St. Lucie, Fla., to play in showcases in front of dozens of Division 1 scouts.

“The league wasn’t known as a hotbed for college coaches to recruit,” Foresteire said. “The biggest thing at that point was hockey. Obviously, all of the prep schools have dramatically changed athletically. When I first took over, I can remember there were some good players, but it was a different league. Out of 16 schools in the ISL, I could circle maybe four games a year that would concern me. Boy, did that change over the years.”

Foresteire also shared a list of the top returning players in the ISL as well as his plans for the future. Listen to the entire podcast here.

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