Brad Campbell: Cedartown High School/McIntosh
Campbell was inducted into the Georgia Dugout Club Hall of Fame in 2023.
Brad Campbell was honored.
The longtime baseball coach who had stops at Villa Rica, Cedartown, Carrollton and McIntosh was inducted into the Georgia Dugout Club Hall of Fame as part of the Class of 2023. Campbell said he was thrilled.
“As you get older, these type of these mean more,” he said. “When you are young, it’s like you are going to be able to coach for the rest of your life.”
The former West Georgia College standout was an All-American in 1978 and later inducted into the West Georgia Hall of Fame in 1990.
As a high school baseball coach, he retired from McIntosh in 2018 with a 426-209 career coaching record. Perhaps his greatest success came at Cedartown where he guided the Bulldogs to a semifinal appearance in 1995.
Campbell was a two-time region Coach of the Year, won three region titles and four subregion titles. He made four trips to the state playoffs, sent more than 50 players to college and coached two future Major Leaguers.
Georgia Dugout Club Hall of Fame coach Phil Williams played with Campbell in the Stan Musial semi-pro baseball league in the 1980s on a team in Douglasville. He saw first-hand Campbell’s desire to be successful as a player and as a young coach.
“He was amazingly competitive and pretty good as a player,” Williams said.
The two played together, then coached together. Campbell was an assistant under Williams at Douglas County. The pair also coached football together.
It wasn’t long before Campbell ventured out on his own as a head baseball coach. Williams said he knew Campbell would be very successful.
“He was so knowledgeable,” Williams said. “He wanted to learn as much as he could about coaching even though he had played and done all he could as a player. He liked to go to all the coaching clinics so he could get better as a coach. Brad was a great competitor, which is what you want in a coach.”
Campbell had a son, Brett, play professional baseball in the Major Leagues. Williams said the elder Campbell’s coaching probably polished the younger into a well-rounded player.
“You could tell that Brad spent a lot of time working with him,” Williams said. “Just like he did with a lot of other players he coached.”
But what Williams remembers the most about Campbell is their friendship off the field. When Williams’ wife Suzanne suffered a heart attack in March, 2021, Campbell was one of the many to keep a constant check.
“He probably called her 10 times when she was in the hospital,” Williams said “That tells you the kind of person he is.”
While Campbell is excited to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, he said it’s the relationships he built with former players that still mean a lot to him.
“A lot of kids, they still call or I run into them, guys you didn’t think you made much of an impact in their life,” Campbell said. “Then they tell you they appreciate what you did.
“We had a guy at Cedartown named Wesley Cupp who was about 6-foot-5, 240 pounds and we were playing in Game 3 of the quarterfinals. He had pitched in the first game and said he was going to pitch again. I told him,’Wesley, you’ve already pitched.’ He told me that he was going to go again and I had to tell him that he wasn’t going to pitch again. I saw him a while back and he thanked me for taking care of him back then. Those types of things still mean a lot.”