Winning is hard. Even though new Central Michigan head coach Andy Bronkema has made it look easy – capturing championships as a player and twice as a coach while compiling a 278-105 record – he calls winning an “inexact science.”
“The main thing that goes into winning is making that the number one priority,” Bronkema said. “That’s just how I grew up. The most important thing was to figure out how to work with your team and do whatever it took to win. I never knew anything else.”
Bronkema’s hometown of McBain, Michigan, isn’t one most could point to on a map. Spanning just 1.26 square miles and holding a smidge over 600 residents as of 2024, Bronkema’s youth centered around sports and family.
His father, Joel, held roles as coach and athletic director at McBain High School before being promoted to principal. His two siblings, a brother and a sister, of whom Bronkema was the eldest, were thrust, both through nature and nurture, into athletics.
“We just did sports,” Bronkema said. “I grew up around competition, and (learned) what it took to win at those different levels, and was blessed to be around coaches that were winners.”
Bronkema’s high school coach, Bruce Colton, and college coach at Cornerstone University (Mich.), Kim Elders, hold over 800 wins and are Hall of Famers in their respective leagues. The two have brought two very different styles to their extensive, immensely successful coaching careers, which Bronkema has been sure to use as inspiration for his career.
At McBain High School, Bronkema was a standout. While a three-sport athlete, Bronkema led the Ramblers to a basketball state title in 2002. He parlayed that into a successful four-year career at Cornerstone, where he compiled career totals of 1,725 points, 982 rebounds, and 336 assists.
“Cornerstone has three national championships,” Bronkema said. “Unfortunately, I was not a part of one of those. They kind of bookended me, but we got to a Final Four (and) two Elite Eights.”
While Bronkema never hauled in the national championship with Cornerstone, he didn’t leave without continuing to build his habit of winning. Sitting his freshman year in 2002-03, when Cornerstone made it to an NAIA Tournament Fab Four appearance, Bronkema led the program to two more NAIA Tournament appearances in 2003-04 and 2004-05.
In 2005-06, however, Bronkema fell into another role. Through a connection to Grand Rapids Community College’s head football coach at the time, Bronkema joined the staff as a running backs coach, helping Grand Rapids to a non-scholarship national championship before returning to Cornerstone for his senior season in 2006-07.
Bronkema finished his collegiate playing career with his best individual season, averaging 16 points per game, ranking second on the team, and taking Cornerstone to another Elite Eight appearance.
Post-graduation, becoming a college basketball coach wasn’t on Bronkema’s mind. He wanted to be an educator first and foremost, partnering his love for sports with coaching at the high school level. However, when that opportunity didn’t pan out, Bronkema started volunteering with head coach Bill Sall’s staff at Ferris State in 2007.
“I started out as an elementary PE teacher. I wanted to coach high school basketball,” Bronkema said. “I never set out to be a college coach. I wanted to be a high school coach and teacher. That was my passion. Luckily, coaching is a lot of teaching.”
The parallels between coaching and teaching are countless. Bronkema knows this better than most, having earned a master’s degree in curriculum and education, where he applies his knowledge as both an educator and student to develop his coaching, and vice versa.
“We plan practices just like a lesson plan,” Bronkema said. “You look at your curriculum every year to see what can be improved, or what needs to be added in or taken out, and you expand it from there.”
The methodology turned into near-instant winning when he took over as Ferris State’s head coach in 2013-14. After a down year for the program in Year 1 of the Bronkema era, serving as the interim, the Bulldogs went 23-9 in 2014-15, winning their first of two consecutive conference championships.
In Year 5 at Ferris State, during the 2017-18 season, Bronkema began to build a legacy. That year, Bronkema won his second consecutive GLIAC Coach of the Year award, along with his first NABC Division II Coach of the Year award, leading Ferris State to its first national championship.
While many of his best players left for opportunities at the Division I level after the season, Bronkema had a viral moment centered around the beard he had grown for the Bulldogs’ postseason. Although a funny moment, the beard represents the winning culture and dedication that Bronkema has built his programs around.
“(Culture) is super important … you’re around these guys every day. You’re doing life with them,” Bronkema said. “My alum that I’ve had the privilege to coach … I could pick up the phone and call any one of them to reminisce, but a lot of them I’m close friends with.
At the end of the season, in front of all of Ferris State’s local media, Bronkema shaved the beard, building up and donating over $12,000 to Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
“(The beard) was a good thing, but eventually, it ran its course,” Bronkema said. “The one thing I didn’t like about it was it took attention away from the team, and put it on me … but certainly you don’t see a seven-month beard on a coach too often.”
Bronkema spent the next seven seasons keeping Ferris State at a contending level, successfully recruiting competitive teams from the limited player pool that Division II teams are forced to contend with.
Select players Bronkema coached have gone on to play at the Division I level, or even at the professional level, demonstrating Bronkema’s keen eye for talent honed from not having a mainstream path to follow. The best player on the 2017-18 championship team, Zach Hankins, who Bronkema offered a scholarship to at a Ferris State-sponsored camp, is the prime example, as he went on to play for Xavier in his final collegiate season.
It’s a useful skill, coming into his first season at the Division I level, as Bronkema has had to patch together a team from scratch. Following the coaching change, the Chippewas’ entire team flocked to other opportunities.
“There were some great players remaining (after the coaching change), and there were some other players who were talented but didn’t fit our system or our vision,” Bronkema said. “If we didn’t start fresh, we would love that, but the fact that we had an empty locker room, we love that too … we got to build this thing from scratch.”
Building something from the ground up may not be ideal, but in the imperfect nature of it all is excitement. Bronkema and Central Michigan may not be favored to win much in Year 1, as was the case in his first year with Ferris State, yet winning will always remain the top priority as Bronkema builds this next generation of Mount Pleasant basketball.
“There’s one overarching goal that everyone should be working off, and that’s to be the best you can be,” Bronkema said. “The satisfaction you get from knowing you did your best to be the best is the goal.”
