Mount Olive’s Jonathan Biale Completes First Season as Drew University Assistant Baseball Coach

24-year-old Jonathan Biale recalls the first thing he did when he was named an assistant coach for the Drew University Rangers baseball team.

“I have friends who played at Drew,” he says, “and the day I took the job, I called them all and said, ‘We're going to make something you guys are proud of.’ I'm really trying to just live up to that.”

Biale, who played for two North 1 Group 3 title winners while at Mount Olive High School, was a member of perhaps the finest County College of Morris Titan baseball squad ever, the 2017 #4 nationally ranked team, and also played catcher for two seasons at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Florham Park, describes his first spring season in Madison. “We took some positive steps,” Biale says. “We kind of inherited a little bit of a rough situation. Because of the time that coach (Brian) Eberly - who is our head coach - got hired, it was later on in the summer, and we unfortunately didn't have the chance to bring in a ton of our own recruits. We had our roster set, which I think we made the most of. It took us a little bit of time to get to know everybody and seeing and getting to know where guys fit, and I definitely think we took some big, positive steps, building towards a great path for the future.”

Biale is no stranger to coaching, and his treks have taken him to familiar territories. In the COVID-19 year of 2020, Biale helped lead the Mount Olive entry to the Sweet 16 round of Garden State’s Last Dance Tournament. His former Mount Olive Marauder high school coach, Jim McDermott, opened that door. “I kind of understood how he likes to do things,” Biale explains, “and he gave me an opportunity to coach a few fall games and a few fall seasons with him. We ended up losing to Bergen Catholic, who just is completely dominant, but we had a good run.” In 2021, he served as an assistant to Eberly when the latter was head coach at County College of Morris, the year the team won the Garden State Athletic Conference title. Biale was also a recruiting coordinator for Eberly, for whom he also played at CCM. Next was his lone professional coaching experience with the independent New York Boulders during the All-American Baseball Challenge. His former assistant coach at FDU-Florham, Andrew Romanella, tasked him this time around. For Biale, it was an interesting dynamic. “I myself was 22-years-old, just was fresh out of college. I had just graduated less than a month ago, and here I am technically a coach for guys who are 25 to 29 years old, and it was very interesting. More so, I was a sponge. I was there to listen; I picked everybody’s brain about anything you can imagine, anything I could pick up. That's where it happened for me.”

Biale’s age, which is so close to some of the players he coaches, he feels is important. “It's definitely interesting being only a few years older than our oldest guys,” he says. “Last year actually, a kid on the team was my age, which was obviously very interesting. But I think going in, we set the dynamic as a coaching staff of, ‘I am a coach. I might be only a few months older than you or a few years older than you, but the reality is, I'm a coach.’ I think they (the players) respected that first and foremost, and I applaud them for that. I also think it helps now that there's a ton of technology in the game, whether it's using swing data analysis stuff or video capture, or even scouting reports. I think that being on the younger side really helps me embrace all of that. And there's a fine line to over analyzing things, but I think me understanding how they, the player, might understand and look at this data, definitely helps me communicate with them.”

Biale is comfortable and feels at home wearing a Rangers uniform. “I’m looking to stay at one place for a while,” he says about his coaching future. “When I got the opportunity to come over to Drew, I jumped at it. Drew is the next step, making this place something that our alumni can be proud of, something where our guys will compete for a conference and regional bid every year.”