ANDOVER – Sure the Double-A championship, the Arizona spring training weather and instructing future major leaguers were great perks of being a professional baseball coach.
After nearly two years, though, he realized something:
It wasn’t Andover.
It wasn’t teaching the high schoolers, particularly those at Phillips Andover, baseball the finite levels.
Kevin Graber has returned to the helm at Phillips Academy and Saturday’s season opener at Dexter Southfield can’t come fast enough.
Last week, he took his team to Florida for its annual week of spring break baseball.
“I’m so happy to be back,” he said.
Graber spent 16 years as the head coach at Phillips and led the team to 12 consecutive Central New England Prep Final-4 appearances, winning five titles. In 2023, he left that position and spent two years in the Chicago Cubs system, managing the Tennessee Smokies to the 2023 Southern League Championship, breaking a 45-year title drought for the Chicago Cubs’ Double-A affiliate. On that roster there are a handful of current Cubs players from Pete Crow-Armstrong to Matt Shaw to Miguel Amaya to Ben Brown.
Graber inherits a Phillips team which went 7-13 last year, losing in the first round of the playoffs. This year’s roster features three Div. 1 commits – whom he originally coached as freshmen — including Andover resident and future Penn State hurler Robert Brown, the No. 2 ranked high school pitcher in Massachusetts.
“This is about a core of teaching baseball at such a complete level,” said Graber. “It takes everything from how to take a lead off first base, to your two-strike approach at the plate, to holding runners on as a pitcher. It’s everything that we sort of take for granted at the higher levels. Being here is a platform for teaching the game to the younger kids. It’s just so much fun.”
Ultimately Graber’s decision to travel 931 miles from Knoxville, Tenn. to Andover was much more than just teaching high school kids the game that he loves so much.
“The more comprehensive motivation for me to return to Andover was less about baseball and more about everything that I get to do here other than baseball,” he said.
“I live and run a dorm with fifteen boys; I’m an academic advisor; I’m a classroom teacher; I’m in the office of admissions; and I chaperone everything under the sun,” he said. “I live here with my wife (Tina) and (my three) kids and it’s just a complete life and it’s just about helping students. That is what I missed the most — the (total) experience. It allows (me) to be multi-dimensional and not have to put all (my) focus into one thing.”
Besides managing the Double-A Cubs team, Graber also organized the off-season camps, was a spring training minor league instructor, particularly working defense with the infielders. Throughout that time – especially working a great deal with Shaw – Graber knew that he didn’t have all the baseball answers.
“My goal in baseball is every five years look back and be in wonder of how little I knew five years ago,” he said. “When you’re in baseball, you often think about, ‘how is that taught at the highest level? How is that done at the highest level of the game’? I wanted the answers to all those questions.
“Those two years were about getting all of those burning questions and your curiosities answered. It was quite a learning experience,” he said. “And of course I had an amazing time being around such great players.”
Graber has circled back to Phelps Park on the Andover campus to coach a different group of talented players.
“Everyone has really bought into the way that K.G. has run this team,” said Brown. “It’s a lot more of a small ball approach – slash and runs, bunts, momentum steals, delayed steals and just really buying into the team culture that he’s creating for us. I think that’s going to do a lot and I think we have just as much chance as anyone else in the league to make a real run for the championship.”