Ryan Brownlee: What do you attribute to Hialeah High School being so good?
Johnny Hernandez: Man the coaches that we had again you know, coach Bilski, Hector Aguila, and Coach Marti. Man those guys knew what it was to be a Hialeah team. There weren't any travel ball teams, you know we had a long season and a short season. I think that they did a pretty good job of bringing us all together as a community.
RB: For somebody that has to start a program from scratch what would you tell them?
JH: There’s no substitute for hard work. You know at the end of the day it was a small program branched out of ASA College. We brought in about 30 brand new student athletes just to head up the program. You know, you’re getting to a point where nobody knows who you are and you have to be able to recruit not only the players but the parents and even some high school coaches.
RB: Do you feel like starting on the high school side helped you relate to those players a little more because it's a little bit close to the high school age?
JH: Yeah absolutely. I think that experience too kind of falls into where I am at today where I am able to still relate to the high school coaches and some of the junior college coaches because of the experience that I have been able to go through.
RB: Did you have to make any adjustments when you got to Bethune?
JH: Yeah, I mean, I’d be lying to you if I told you that there were no adjustments and I had everything figured out, absolutely not. That was a whirlwind of a summer, you know making the transition from junior college to now becoming a division one head coach.
RB: How actively involved are you with the recruiting process?
JH: A lot, you know. Again it’s a situation where you know we all work together with it. I don’t handcuff our assistant coaches if they see a player and everything checks off. They know kind of what, we expect for them to be with our program and meeting the standard day in and day out.