Golden West College names Andrew Ramos new head baseball coach

By Matt SzaboStaff Writer

Published May 13, 2020 Updated May 14, 2020 5:21 PM PT

Andrew Ramos knew the moment was coming, but he still called it “surreal.”

Ramos has been named the new head baseball coach at Golden West College.

He becomes just the third head coach in program history. Fred Hoover was the program’s first head coach for 22 seasons, followed by recently retired Bert Villarreal, who guided the Rustlers for 32 years.

“We’ve discussed this for a while, and I’ve known I was going to be the next guy,” Ramos said. “But to actually get officially hired, it got more emotional than I expected. There was a lot of hard work and little pay to cut my teeth and prove that I was worthy. For it to actually happen, it was really cool.”

Villarreal was with the Rustlers for 38 years total, also including two as a player and four as an assistant coach. He finished with 626 career victories at the helm.

Ramos has been the Rustlers’ bench coach and recruiting coordinator the last four years.

“This has been Bert’s baby, and for him to entrust me with his program moving on, it’s not something I take lightly,” Ramos said. “I take it very seriously and I’m very humbled, that I get to be only the third [head coach] in 54 years.”

Ramos, 35, graduated from Long Beach Poly in 2002 and briefly played at Golden West before he walked away from the sport for a time.

Ramos got back into coaching from 2010-12, as a lower-level coach at Poly.

“I was literally going to get out of baseball, because it wasn’t going anywhere,” he said. “I went to do an interview with AAA to sell insurance, and the next day they called me and said I didn’t get the job. I was devastated. The next day after that, Bert called me and said, ‘Hey man, you want to come coach at Golden West?’ And the rest is history.”

Ramos coached with the Rustlers for four years before taking an assistant job at the University of Nevada-Reno in 2016. However, when his wife Cortney became pregnant with their first child, he said they decided they wanted to move back to Southern California.

Ramos now lives in Long Beach with Cortney and his daughter, Adeline, 3, and son, Langston, 1.

This year, Ramos said that Golden West baseball had seven players commit to NCAA Division I programs. He worked tirelessly behind the scenes to help make that happen.

“He’s a very good baseball man,” Villarreal said. “He gets it. He knows what the program’s been all about. You know, I tried to just build on what coach Hoover did, and he’s going to do the same. He’s going to care about the players the way we did, as family members. He’s going to treat them right, and he’s going to be straightforward and honest with them. That’s all you can ask for out of a head coach.”

Golden West baseball was 12-10 overall, and 4-1 in the Orange Empire Conference, before the rest of the 2020 season was cancelled due to the novel coronavirus pandemic. Ramos said he expects a younger team in 2021, with plenty of freshmen in key positions.

He is eager for the opportunity to lead them.

“My biggest thing is to let players do what they do best,” he said. “I believe in giving them the freedom to be who they are.”

Ramos said pitching and defense are areas that he emphasizes.

“I’d rather get no-hit than make five errors in a game,” he said.

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