Meet Bruno Baltazar

We were lucky to catch up with Bruno Baltazar recently and have shared our conversation below.

Bruno, looking forward to learning from your journey. You’ve got an amazing story and before we dive into that, let’s start with an important building block. Where do you get your work ethic from?

It’s important to create routines, without these work ethic cannot exist. For example creating a plan is essential for success in whatever field on chooses or has. Strategies in case the plan doesn’t go accordingly also need to be in place as usually you find many road blocks along the way.
So creating routines , healthy ones in the long run will allow you to overcome easily these roadblocks we all are faced with. The hardest part is the beginning , changing habits or creating new ones, you need a certain mental toughness for being able to change habits and create new routines, I believe it takes about 2 weeks to develop and survive the new routines, the issue is most people give up along that period of time, but surrounding yourself with others who can be positive but strict to make you accountable is essential.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I am the boys soccer head coach for Hempstead High School in suburban Hempstead. I also teach there and have 2 boys, ages 7 and 6 years old. I like to try to balance a work and personal life as much as I can, I believe it’s important to set a standard for your kids via your actions, professionally but also how you can use your profession to touch other people’s lives, as these become your legacy.
I grew up in Portugal and moved to the States at age 19. I had several careers from being a basketball scout, to coaching, serving as a educator, security officer, etc… So valuing your current career and how you can change people’s lives, as they will also change yours for the best is important.
I also wrote a book called “The Timeless Victors”, a true story about the semi pro football team called the Pottstown Firebirds that existed from 1968-70.
And I am always having new projects that keep me fresh and bring a certain income as well.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

I think being personal and being “out there” is very import, if you branch yourself and let yourself go cultivating positive relationships with people and doing good deeds for them, eventually these actions will pay themselves back. Creating healthy routines is also important, but honesty and communication as well as being very emphatic are very important to me.

Is there a particular challenge you are currently facing?

I think when running a high school program, the most important thing is to have the community around your project, of course money is always a problem or the lack of it, but parent and community engagement can be very important, keeping the opportunities of a community within a community is essential to make this community better, special in smaller towns. They say ” It takes a village to raise a child” and in this case it takes a town’s support to also have a positive program with resources to support the kids who in these type of communities struggle to have fair opportunities. For instance, there isn’t any true soccer clubs in the nearby town, and they would have to drive over 20-25 miles for the next one, so the only chance they can truly play organized sports is within the school system.
So allowing the community to support these kids, allow the kids to grow as human beings in a positive way and who knows if one day they can use these tools and make their living by giving back to the community that poured into them as well.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.hempsteadisd.org/o/hhs/page/athletics-directory
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/coachbaltazar