Tom Martinez
Coach of Bulldog football, softball and women’s basketball, 1974-2005
‘Quarterback whisperer’ for Tom Brady and other NFL and college players
Coach Tom Martinez’s 1,400 wins over the three sports of his CSM career place him at the very top of California community college athletics. He built CSM’s impressive softball and women’s basketball teams in the wake of Title IX, and he extended CSM’s great coaching legacy in Bulldog football. His coaching relationship with NFL quarterback Tom Brady, a San Mateo native, lasted from when Brady was 13 through five Super Bowls until shortly before Martinez’s death in 2012 of cancer.
Martinez is not as well known nationally as his CSM predecessors, players John Madden and Bill Walsh and coach Dick Vermeil, because he chose to stay local. He reportedly even turned down a chance to head-coach the Oakland Raiders (with whose staff he had creative differences).
“CSM was my laboratory,” Martinez explained in 2009. “It’s where I learned about coaching. The NFL is more glamorous, but it isn’t any more touching. The kids here mean just as much to me.”
He played at San Francisco State, then developed his coaching style by teaching math. Wrote Brady biographer Charles Pierce in his 2006 book Moving the Chains: “Martinez learned that ‘Because I said so’ was not good enough an answer.” Instead, he learned to walk all his students through “the fine mechanics: the drop into the pocket, the stride with the throw ... how long each step should be and with which foot.”
After CSM hired Martinez in 1974, he won championships in all three of his sports his first year.
“It was hard work,” he said. “I went from never having coached a women’s sport to winning over 1,300 games between softball and basketball. I said, ‘I’m not going to fail. I’m going to coach harder than the coaches on the other side.’”
He was the youngest person on the coaching staff and one of few full-timers. In that respect, Martinez’s story intertwines with two other CSM narratives – the rise of women’s sports and gender equity, and the decline of funding after the passage in 1978 of Prop. 13, which capped California property taxes.
In 1983, CSM let go all its part-time coaches. Martinez, with his massive three-sport workload, was a full-timer. Men’s basketball had only a part-time coach. As Martinez looked on helplessly, the men’s team was cut entirely. Not until 2018 did men’s basketball return to College of San Mateo.
“I spent 70 or more hours a week here for 32 years,” Martinez said. “I couldn’t have done any more. I did it as well as I could. I really appreciate the athletes who played for me, because at times I wasn’t easy to play for.
“I still get calls from students who think this was the best experience they ever had. The stability [they got] at an age when they needed guidance and leadership. They lived the values we taught them and raised their families with those same values, because they came to realize how important those values were in everyday life.
“Especially with the women, who hadn’t had the depth of coaching that the boys or men had. My goal was to give them lifelong experiences that they could take into their jobs or into raising their families or just looking at themselves and being proud of who they are.
These former students, he said, “never talk about the championships.
“They talk about the way they were dealt with, the values and motivation that was given to be as good as they could be.”
After retiring from CSM, Martinez continued high school sports camps and his work with Brady and other NFL and would-be NFL quarterbacks. He costarred in a 2010 Fox TV reality show, The Ride, that put a dozen underrated high-school quarterbacks through a season of top-drawer coaching.
He believed that throwing mechanics ought to be worked on daily, even and perhaps especially at the highest levels. NFL teams have specialists on staff, but, as Martinez told ESPN in 2010, “The quarterback coach knows the player is better than he is, and maybe it affects his confidence. He neglects to say things that he needs to say.”
Martinez, in contrast, brought the same lack of filters that famously led him to throw sets of keys at his Bulldog assistant coaches. Because of his Brady connection, quarterbacks sought him out. He worked with NFL quarterbacks, with people trying to get into the NFL and with backup players trying to stay there. He coached LSU standout JaMarcus Russell to the top of the NFL draft (by Oakland) in 2007, and again a couple of years later when Russell ran into trouble there.
Pierce wrote, “Martinez is one of those sports gurus who develop a system for teaching a specific skill extraordinarily well. (He) has dedicated himself to studying every delicate action that makes up the art of throwing the football. ... If a quarterback comes to him with inefficient sidearm motion, Martinez will have him throw while standing at arm’s length from a fence or a brick wall, so that a series of skinned knuckles will themselves explain to the QB that it is better to throw the ball overhand.”
For years, Brady carried a note in his wallet to remind him of the techniques Martinez taught, and he re-read it before every game. When Martinez was diagnosed with cancer, Brady mounted a drive through Organdonors.com in hope of finding a transplant match for him. After Martinez’s death, Brady started a fund in his memory to help finance organ transplants for needy patients.
In 2011, Martinez was made an inaugural member of the CSM Athletics Hall of Fame.
