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By Brian Pitts

Enterprise Record

Bradley Rudisill, who was Davie’s baseball coach from 2019-21 before resigning last fall, has landed on his feet. He picked up his third head coaching job recently at Bunker Hill, in Claremont.

Rudisill, 33, has basically returned home. He graduated from Bandys in 2007, and Bunker Hill and Bandys are 10 miles apart.

Rudisill was an assistant coach at three stops at the beginning of his teaching/coaching career – at Watauga from 2011-13, at Bandys in 2014 and at Montreat College in 2015.

His first head-coaching job was at South Pointe (S.C.) in 2018. He replaced Bobby Byerly as Davie’s coach in 2019, and he immediately caught fire with the War Eagles, who went 22-4, captured the conference championship for the first time in seven years and marched to the third round of the playoffs.

His next two Davie teams, though, went 7-11. Davie went 2-3 in the COVID-shortened season of 2020, and it finished 5-8 in the COVID-abbreviated season of 2021.

Rudisill resigned from Davie in the middle of the 2021-22 school year and became a special education teacher at Bunker Hill. Last spring he was the Bears’ JV coach and varsity assistant. Todd Setzer stepped down after leading the Bears for four years, and Rudisill inherits a 2-A program that has gone 14 straight years without a losing record. Setzer will remain at Bunker Hill as an assistant athletic director.

“He’s knowledgeable about the game and is willing to put in the work,” Bunker Hill athletic director James Byrd told the Hickory Daily Record. “He’s already started acquiring equipment and making contacts.”

Rudisill, who is 43-27 in four years as a head coach, said he couldn’t have asked for a better opportunity.

“The great thing is I’m not walking into a program that has a cupboard that is bare,” he told the HobbsDailyReport.com. “Coach (Marty) Curtis (who guided Bunker Hill for 35 years) and coach Setzer laid the groundwork for how this program should be run, and I am just trying to do right by them and all the former Bears baseball players. We hope the product we put on the field and the young men we are putting into the community is something everyone in the area can get behind. I’m very excited to see where this Bears program can go when we have the community backing it.”