National Brewers

Sam Mattingly was appointed by Stu Hyatt in Sept 1968, as the first coach of the National Brewers. Sam, however, had other ideas as he was interested in playing for the Brewers. During the initial practice as Sam (in full equipment) was skating and Stu skated over and said "what do you want to do now?" At that point Sam realized that he was the Brewers Coach. Sam served as a true player coach for the club's first 3 seasons. He continued as bench coach for 5 of the next 7 seasons (skipping 73-74 and 74-75 due to business opportunities)

During the mid-1960's Sam contributed a major part to the Gemini period of the NASA Space Program. His small business, Environmental Research Associates (ERA), developed the training method for astronauts to train for space walks. The business was a partnership with Sam and Harry Loats. Despite their small size of maximum 6 part time employees, they competed with huge companies like General Dynamics, Martin Marietta and General Electric for NASA contracts. Sam was the first person ‘in the pool’ attempting neutral buoyancy tasks to prove his ideas. This work demonstrated to NASA that neutral buoyancy could solve the problem of insufficient training time for astronauts. As a result, Sam's ERA business proved to NASA that spacewalk training needed to be done underwater in a pool setup specifically for training. NASA then built The Sonny Carter Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory at The Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston. This information is documented in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

"There were 2 people I met through sports during my time in Maryland that I considered extra classy. they were SAM MATTINGLY, and JOHN UNITAS.   No offense to all the other great sports friends I associated with, but in my mind they were both special to me." - Bud Hardwick