Diane Bell Column August 22, 2019

Michael Brunker to be named 2019 Mr. San Diego

After 22 years as executive director of the Jackie Robinson Family YMCA in southeast San Diego, Michael Brunker stepped down in July to take a position at the county YMCA headquarters as vice president of mission advancement. He stands with the branch’s interim executive director, Anna Arancibia, at his going-away party where he was showered with gifts.

YMCA executive has a long history of inspiring and creating programs for inner-city and disadvantaged kids

When Michael Brunker was a basketball-loving kid growing up in a Detroit suburb, a neighbor two doors down occasionally dropped by to shoot hoops with him in his back yard.

The young man often quizzed Brunker about his schoolwork and then, one day, handed him Kahlil Gibran’s inspirational book, “The Prophet.” That neighbor was Melvin Franklin, bass singer of The Temptations and an early mentor who, in Brunker’s high school yearbook, predicted the teen would become U.S president.

Another neighborhood role model was Dick “Night Train” Lane, of the Detroit Lions, who lived a couple of doors down on the other side. Brunker, whose dad held down as many as three jobs to provide for their family, claims he got where he is today “on the shoulders of others.”

He’s now about to be named the 2019 “Mr. San Diego” for his tireless efforts to uplift and motivate disadvantaged youth. Brunker follows a long list of San Diego community movers and shakers inducted since 1952 into the elite ranks of the annual Mr., Mrs. or Ms. San Diego — most recently Patti Roscoe, Linda and Mel Katz, Leon Williams and Lucy Killea, Betty Peabody, Tom Hom, Steve Cushman and Father Joe Carroll.

A 6-foot-3-inch athlete with a commanding voice, Brunker started out in 1974 on the basketball coaching staff of future Hall of Famer Dick Vitale, first at the University of Detroit and later at the NBA Detroit Pistons.

“Mike was always, to me, going to be a star,” said the ESPN sportscaster. “He cares for people, loves young people. He has always been a guy who wanted to extend a hand to help people in need. ... To put it in ‘Vitalese,’ if I was on ESPN I would say Michael Brunker is awesome, Baby, with a capital ‘A’.”

When Detroit colleague Smokey Gaines was hired by the San Diego State Aztecs in 1980, Brunker moved to San Diego as Gaines’ assistant basketball coach. After five promising years, though, the team suffered two losing seasons. The coaching regime changed and, with it, Brunker’s career.

Rather than coach elsewhere, Brunker and his wife, Maria, decided to stay in San Diego, where he saw a dearth of programs offering the life lessons of sports and promising futures to low-income youth. Brunker refers to them as “alphabet soup” programs: AAU (Amateur Athletic Union), CYO (Catholic Youth Organization), NYSP (National Youth Sports Program), DNP (Developmental Neighborhood Basketball) and PAL (Police Athletic League).

Singer Melvin Franklin, far left, was an original member of The Temptations. He was a neighbor of Michael Brunker in the Detroit suburb of Ferndale and took out the above ad in the 1970 St. James High School yearbook when Brunker was a senior. (Courtesy photo)

He started by running sports camps and clinics until his program at the Memorial Rec Center in Logan Heights caught the attention of Cecil Steppe, then head of the county Probation Department.

“What can you do to keep kids out of Juvenile Hall?” Steppe asked. The next day Brunker was invited to police headquarters to explain his vision. He described a program of healthy activities for kids led by law enforcement and community volunteers. Out of that meeting, the San Diego Regional Police Athletic League was born, targeting youth in troubled neighborhoods with athletic, counseling and mentoring opportunities.

After a decade of leading what later morphed into Star/PAL, in 1997 Brunker took the helm of the Jackie Robinson Family YMCA. It had eight employees and a budget of about $450,000.

Michael Brunker takes the mike at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the $1.3 million MLB All-Star Sports Complex at the Jackie Robinson Family YMCA. To his right is San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, and county YMCA head Baron Herdelin-Doherty is at the far right.

When he stepped down 22 years later to take a promotion to V.P. of the county YMCA, the Jackie Robinson Y had more than 100 staff, a budget of $4.1 million and occupied a new $40 million facility.

When notified of his selection as Mr. San Diego, Brunker’s reaction was: “This can’t be true.” But it is, and he calls it “a tremendous honor and deeply humbling.”

Mr., Mrs. and Ms. San Diego candidates are nominated annually from throughout the county. The San Diego Rotary Club, the fourth largest Rotary chapter in the world, hosts the competition and will formally award the title at a Sept. 19 luncheon.

David Oates, San Diego Rotary president, called Brunker “an inspiration to all who know him” and an “icon in our city.”

But Brunker’s life’s work is far from done. He turned 67 in May. “Most people are retiring. I’m re- firing,” he said. “There’s still more for me to do.”

Brunker invokes a quote from Jackie Robinson, the first African-American to play Major League Baseball, who said: “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.”