Yorkville’s Joe Grimaldi traces his experiences in Army to how he became a leader and mentor as baseball coach

YORKVILLE – As Joe Grimaldi charted a cross-country trip for a niece’s wedding, Joe Grimaldi reflected on his road here.

It’s a journey that he can trace back to the U.S. Army.

It was in the military that the 54-year-old Yorkville man learned and realized that he possessed skills that he could be more than he was led to believe growing up. Raised by a single mom in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Grimaldi didn’t know how to be a good husband and father. He is that now, and a mentor to so many boys Grimaldi crosses paths with as a baseball coach in Yorkville.

“My service, it shaped everything that I am, both professionally and personally,” Grimaldi said. “I learned a lot about commitment, dependability, a lot about what leadership is and requires. I learned that leadership is in its truest form being a servant in nature. I hadn’t been introduced to any of those concepts prior to being there.”

Grimaldi these days wears many hats as a leader in his community.

The retired Deputy Chief of Police in the Winfield Police Department and a father of three boys, two currently serving in the military, Grimaldi is the Safety and Security Supervisor for the Yorkville school district. He is in his third year as an assistant for the Yorkville High School baseball program and is the owner and coach of the Yorkville-based Reds Baseball Academy that has sent 70 players to college baseball programs over the last 10 years.

“Everything that I see Joe is to our boys and friends and all his athletes and even kids at school that are not athletes, he is every bit the mentor and advisor to them that he never had,” said Grimaldi’s wife, Pamelyn. “He exemplifies that in every way.”

Grimaldi had just turned 19 when he entered the Army in 1988. He was assigned to Fort Lewis, just southwest of Tacoma, Washington.

“In my experience, people enlist in the Army for three reasons – one is escape, one is opportunity and the other is patriotism,” Grimaldi said. “For me and where I grew up, it was escape and opportunity. I discovered my real patriotism there.”

An infantryman, a lot of what Grimaldi trained on was tactically related, tactics and operations and a lot of reconnaissance and larger unit warfare tactics.

He was moved down to an airfield in California during Operation Desert Storm, which expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait, in 1991.

“We were moving so many soldiers that we started utilizing civilian aircraft,” Grimaldi said. “We were assigned the responsibility of combat readiness for deploying. I got to watch the ‘shock and awe’ [the beginning of the invasion of Iraq] from the barracks rather than experience it.”

Grimaldi finished his time in the military in 1993, packed up his Blazer and drove from Seattle and moved to Illinois, responding to a newspaper ad with a job offer with the Winfield Police Department.

“I’ll be honest, I didn’t see law enforcement in front of me until right about the time I was getting out. I came from a place where law enforcement was around but was a pretty rough area, there wasn’t relationship building,” Grimaldi said. “I didn’t get struck with the thought until the end of my service; it was a similar structure and learning in the military that I actually had the skills. I discovered a lot about myself and started me down that path.”

Besides learning what it takes to be a leader, Grimaldi learned how to relate to people from all walks of life.

“The Army truly is a melting pot,” he said. “You have guys and girls from the hills of Kentucky and the rougher areas of Chicago, and farms of Illinois. I learned how to relate to anyone and that skill carried me through law enforcement. That is the core of my success, is being able to relate to people in a diverse community and now in the education setting it’s of course more diverse now and socially more complex.”

Grimaldi, who played baseball and football growing up, first fell into coaching through his three sons. He spent the few years while his oldest son was playing learning the game, and by the time his two youngest boys got into it hit the ground running.

The Reds Baseball Academy has a full indoor facility with a physical training side, lessons, clinics, with a focus on fundamentals, skill development and culture. The Reds currently have 11 teams ranging from ages 8 to 18, and one competitive softball team.

Grimaldi said that any athlete he works with knows his story, knows where he came from and about his military service.

“It’s a two-way street in coaching athletics – you’re competing athletically, but those are foundational to competing in life. It’s 100% transferrable,” Grimaldi said. “That’s why it’s important to being a dugout guy. In baseball, 30% is success. If you don’t learn to battle those failures and setbacks in a game where it’s not life and death, how can you do it when you have children and a wife.”

Grimaldi’s middle son, Brock, who graduated from Yorkville, currently is serving out of Fort Campbell in Kentucky and is a Sniper Section Leader. His youngest son, Cade, is with the 82nd Airborne out of Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

“The boys I coach, they know that part of my life, they ask about my boys all the time. For some reason they connect with me and I connect with them,” Grimaldi said. “I’m a lucky guy that I have close relationship with all the guys. It felt like my history, my past, were I came from there are lessons in there for them, to see the long game, to not see just about right now.”

Grimaldi feels fortunate to be in the position of leadership that he is today.

“Anything I can stress is the importance of relationships and healthy influences when it comes to the skills developing these young men,” Grimaldi said. “I’m so lucky to own an organization that believes in that, and to be part of a high school staff that believes in that. I’m a lucky guy. I just never want to fall short, nobody does.”