A career path that’s night and Day

CEDAR RAPIDS — He was a half-time teacher at Cedar Rapids Kennedy High School a couple of years ago, an assistant coach at Kirkwood Community College just a year ago.

Yet this weekend, Corbin Day found himself in Peoria, Ill., a hitting coach for the Cedar Rapids Kernels.

A high school teacher to professional baseball, high-Class A professional baseball, in very short order definitely is a unique career path.

“It just kind of happened,” Day said. “It wasn’t something that was on my radar.”

Day, 26, is a Cedar Rapids Prairie graduate who played two years at Kirkwood and two at Mount Mercy University. He did the teacher-coach thing for two years, teaching at Kennedy in the mornings and coaching at Kirkwood in the afternoons, then was all coaching last season for the Eagles.

Kirkwood assistant coach Pete Lauritson was a minor league hitting coach and hitting coordinator in the Cleveland Guardians organization before going to Kirkwood as hitting coach. He talked to a couple of people he knew about Day, including Minnesota Twins minor league hitting coordinator Bryce Berg, a Carroll native who was with the Kernels in 2021.

The Twins contacted Day and interviewed him. There you go.

“I would say in today’s player development in Major League Baseball, he is exactly what teams are looking for,” Lauritson said. “Which is a willingness and open-mindedness to learn. What he’d already learned in a three-year period, he was on a mission every day to learn, and it just never stopped.

“That obsession with wanting to learn and wanting to get better, you combine with his teaching background, the way that he can teach, the way that he can command a group and command a room, he’s just a very, very good teacher ... He knows how to teach.”

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“Corbin is mature beyond his years,” said Kirkwood head coach Todd Rima. “When it comes to the coaching side, he is a learner, he studies, he has worked at it. He tries to learn anything new, get better at what he knows. He has absolutely worked at it to earn a position like this.”

Day said originally he was going to be hitting coach for the Rookie-level Florida Complex League Twins, but some shuffling within the organization created an opening in Cedar Rapids. Boom, he was in high-A.

“That was a surprise,” Day said. “It was like oh, it’s the Twins, maybe someday down the road, I can get back to Cedar Rapids. It happened way quicker than I thought.

“Great people in the organization from top to bottom. Something that was really impressive was our coordinators, our front office, they’ve been awesome up and down. Learning from other coaches, getting to meet big names that you hear about, it’s been really cool.”

Day said he feels he brings a “fresh lens” to the table. He said players have been receptive to him, noting how this particular Kernels team has a number of guys who are junior college age.

“I think the Twins are doing some really awesome things, and I think there are some things that I’m interested in learning and just continuing,” he said. “It’s definitely just a continuation of what they have going on and maybe (me) coming up with an idea here and there.

“Training our players as close to the game as possible. It’s getting creative with different types of environments and trying to make our practice sessions look like what’s happening on a nightly basis. I think they’re doing an awesome job with that, and I think we’re still trying new things and getting creative there ... Using technology. Everything to serve the players. We’re trying to get these guys who are already really, really talented, better. That’s kind of the name of the game.”

What are his ultimate goals? Day said he honestly doesn’t know.

He is immersed in what he is doing right now.

“I don’t have a plan,” he said. “I want to learn from the people I’m around. I want to help these players here get better. At the end of the day, I love working with young people.

“As long as I’m learning and helping people to where they want to go, I’m good. I’m trying not to live down the road. I don’t have a plan. I’m trying to be really good here, and whatever happens, happens.”

Comments: jeff.johnson@thegazette.com