Syracuse, N.Y. -- Considering how long Mike Cabrinha has been a teaching and coaching fixture in Central New York, it’s a real eyebrow-lifter to consider how close he came to never setting foot here at all.
Cabrinha’s life changed forever in August 1990 by the simple act of walking into the right restaurant at the right time in Santa Cruz, California.
Cabrinha is a San Jose native who was working as a painter after stints selling insurance and real estate. One day, he and some friends randomly entered the Santa Cruz eatery. Rhonda Kenney, a Syracuse native who was visiting the area with her friends, also happened to be dining there.
Cabrinha went over to talk to Kenny and they immediately hit it off. Kenney returned to Syracuse, but they began a long-distance relationship. In the days before unlimited cell phone plans, Cabrinha said the phone conversations cost the couple about $500 a month.
Cabrinha moved to Syracuse in 1991 to pursue a teaching career and be with Kenney, and the couple married in 1992. Cabrinha said that if he had never met Kenney, there’s no way he would have given up California for CNY.
“My god, talk about ships passing in the night. There was that one moment. It’s amazing how things can happen in life. You can say what you want about fate, but that was a big one there for me,” he said.
And for the next three decades, thousands of CNY athletes have reaped the benefits.
From 1993 to 2015, Cabrinha coached baseball, tennis, football and indoor and outdoor track at Corcoran. An avid guitar player -- he has a music cave at his home that houses 31 guitars -- he also established “Corcoran Live,” a group featuring staff and students that played school concerts and other events.
Since 2015, he has coached football and indoor/outdoor track at Liverpool. But Cabrinha, 66, is walking away from coaching after helping a handful of Liverpool athletes at this weekend’s state meet.
“My wife’s getting closer to retirement. We want to travel,” Cabrinha said. “When you’re coaching 7-10 months a year you really have no flexibility to travel. The time has come.”
He’ll take a lot of memories with him. He’s coached 30 years, three sports a school year for almost every one of them. That breaks down to almost 90 seasons of coaching, thousands of practices and more bus rides than he cares to remember.
Cabrinha, who retired from teaching at Corcoran in 2019, recently took a few moments to reflect upon his career.
His emotions heading into this weekend
“The hardest part, we had a little pizza party last week (with the team). And I hadn’t told the kids yet because my wife wasn’t sure, we were still hemming and hawing. And a girl came up to me and said, ‘OK coach, I’ll see you next season.’ And that was really, really hard because I have some kids that I’ve cultivated and are now going to start becoming better throwers and all that.
“My job, as is most teachers’ jobs, especially in high school, is that we get to hang out with teenagers every day. Not be a teenager, but it keeps you young. These are young adults and you have so much influence over them. So that’s the part I’m going to miss the most.”
His underlying coaching approach across the different sports
“I start this in the classroom and the first thing I ever say to my teams is, ‘We only have one rule here. When I’m talking, you’re not. And when you’re talking, I’ll make sure everybody else is quiet. It’s called simple manners.’
“The next thing, a good coach has to be a good teacher. And a good teacher has to realize that not every kid in front of him is going to learn the same way. Carrying the teaching part into coaching, making sure there’s always dignity and respect around your teammates, how you treat the people on the team. That’s a real important thing to model for them so they see how adults act.”
How he maintains his energy
“You get really tired. This season, there’s two invitationals I went to where I got home at 1 a.m., left at 11 or 12 and was gone 12 hours. Stuff like that is very tiresome. But being retired I don’t have to wake up super early. It’s what we chose to do. I’ve always been a professional about what I did and therefore what I chose to do I did as well as I could every time I went to practice.”
Music as a diversion from coaching
“My satisfaction with music every night starts about 10 o’clock at night and goes to about 2 in the morning where I just play straight for four hours. It’s just a really nice release. There’s not too many things we can get better at in life later on. Everything kind of goes the other way. So this is still something that really gives back to me a lot. Ever since I retired it’s put my wife to bed and play some guitar.”
His worst bus ride
It came in 2017, right before bringing his Liverpool team back from an invitational in White Plains.
“It was raining really hard. I walked back up to the bus and I got some fresh gloves. I stepped off the bus, I took one step, I did a summersault and landed on my butt and looked down. My kneecap was standing straight up. I looked up at the bus driver and said, ‘You better call 911 because this ain’t right.’ Sure enough, I tore my quad tendon and had to take the bus ride all the way home, six hours, and wait for my surgery two days later.”
Adjusting to not coaching
“This will be the first time in 30 years that I haven’t had continuous relationships with students and athletes. They are part of your school year. They are part of your seasons. I’m still hoping I can hear from kids and things going on, but that is by far going to be the biggest void, those relationships there.”
How he’d like to be remembered by his athletes
“I would hope they would think that I was a nice guy who always showed them love, dignity and respect and always did what was best for them.”
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