Transcript
WEBVTT
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Today on the Athlete One podcast.
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Head baseball coach at Troy University, skyler Mead.
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So I need to see things happen really quick and if you know the day and age of letting a kid have three years to figure it out, those are done.
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There's too much investment in baseball.
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You can't have immature guys just sitting around just toiling in your program, right?
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They don't need to survive in your program.
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They need to thrive in your program, right?
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They don't need to survive in your program.
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They need to thrive in your program.
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You're locked in to Athlete One, a podcast for athletes and coaches coming to you from Dublin, ohio, here, to bring you expert advice, insightful conversations and powerful stories from guests who play or coach sports.
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Now veteran high school baseball coach and someone who has jumped out of perfectly good airplanes your host, Ken Carpenter.
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Hello and welcome to Athlete One, a podcast for athletes and coaches.
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I'm your host, ken Carpenter, and Season 2 is well underway.
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If you're joining the show for the first time, don't forget to hit the subscribe button.
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And thanks for joining our show.
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Season two has got off to a great start.
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We opened up with Hall of Fame head baseball coach in Ohio, mike Ginger, followed up by former pitching coach for the Ohio State Buckeyes, mike Stafford.
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Then we jumped to the major league ranks and brought on Clint Hurdle, former manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Colorado Rockies.
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And today I'm excited to bring to you from the Sunbelt Conference head coach Skyler Mead at Troy University.
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We discussed the transfer portal, expectations that come with running a top 20 program in the country and so much more.
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But before we get to that, this episode of the Athlete One Podcast is powered by the netting professionals, improving programs one facility at a time.
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This is the Athlete One Podcast.
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Make sure and tell them the Athlete One Podcast sent you.
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And now to my sit down with head baseball coach at Troy University, skyler Mead.
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Hello and welcome to Athlete One Podcast.
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I'm your host, ken Carpenter, and joining me today is a coach in his third year at Troy University, head coach Skyler Mead.
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Coach, thanks for taking time to be on the Athlete One podcast.
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Oh, absolutely no.
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Appreciate you having me on.
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Well, I'm going to start off with one that's probably a little different than what I typically ask, but you're taking your coach and staff out to eat.
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Are you going to the barbecue house or Hook's Barbecue, and what are you ordering?
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If I went to Hook's.
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We do a lot of Hook's here, which is pretty good.
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I'm going to tell you what.
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I'm going to actually give you a different answer, because I'm not the biggest of barbecue guy.
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Now.
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I like Hook's during the season, but I'm taking them to a new spot in town, baumhauers, the Baumhauers, which.
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There's Baumhauers all over the state of Alabama, but we got our new one here in September and that's become a constant hot spot for us.
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So if the coaches are going out and it's on my tab, that's where we're going.
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There you go.
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I love it.
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Well, you played for the university of louisville and made it to the college world series.
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When did you decide you wanted to become a coach and could?
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you explain the steps you took to make it happen.
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So I mean, like anyone, I wanted to, you know, play as long as I could play professionally and, um, you know, I was certainly a really good player in high school, like most you know people, so it didn't make me really indifferent Went to University of Louisville and, you know, did well my first couple of years and unfortunately it was, you know, I was a weekend starter in my junior year and I kind of knew something was really going on my shoulder and, anyways, ended up having it totally reconstructed, had four things fixed and I missed two years and I'd always, you know, liked coaching and my nickname in high school was Coach Meade, which was probably because I stated my opinion on a lot of things.
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And.
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I'm sure the coaches from time to time appreciated.
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Sometimes maybe they didn't, but I think during that time you know, you just know that there's some frailty to your own career and I was fortunate to come back and you know you mentioned that the team that I was on unfortunately got to be a big part of you know, playing to what you know went to Omaha and we did what we did.
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But I really knew that with the way my shoulder was and different things, if I got a chance in professional baseball it was going to be very short-lived and the reality is I wanted to kind of be intelligent with what my next move was when I was 22 years old and, fortunately enough, dan McDonald, our head coach, was really connected and by happenstance he got a call from Jimmy Schmitz at Eastern Illinois just asking about our pitching staff and he had the wherewithal to give my number to him just to say, hey, there's a player on the team that he's a good communicator.
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You should talk to him.
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He'll tell you what was different this year compared to the past.
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And that one conversation, 20-minute conversation, led to an interview and then led to me becoming the second assistant and pitching coach at 22 at Eastern Illinois and from then on out obviously I've made many other stops, but that was what kind of got me in the door.
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Was, you know, a guy really taking a chance?
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And I've always said this and I'll reiterate it until the end of time Jimmy Schmidt's taking a chance on a 22-year-old to coach his pitchers.
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You know, as he'd been very successful at Eastern Illinois but didn't want to do pitchers anymore, wanted someone else to take that realm and fortunately went there.
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We won two championships our first two years and I've parlayed that to the last 17 years of my career.
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Wow, that's an amazing chance for a coach to take it at that level.
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But you know that's big risk, big reward sometimes.
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And it turned out that he found the right guy.
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And what were some of the stops you had along the way that that led to you becoming the head coach at Troy?
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So I was at Eastern Illinois for five years with Coach Schmitz and you know my last year there we had a guy come on as a volunteer named Ben Wogamon, which I'll get to him in a little bit, but he was with me there my last year at Eastern Illinois and then after there, in the fall of 2012, I went to Middle Tennessee State to work for Jim McGuire, which was a great move.
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Murfreesboro was an awesome town, you know, 25 minutes outside of Nashville, a place that really liked baseball.
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So I was there in the 13 to 14 seasons and then the summer of 14 ended up going to Michigan State, so, you know, getting into the Big Ten, going to work for Jake Boss, who's one of the best guys on the planet.
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I was there for 15, 16, 17 seasons.
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We, you know we pitched really well during my time, you know, had some really good teams and then, where you know, just crazy breaks happened in November of 17, I got a call from South Carolina.
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Jerry Myers, legendary pitching coach there, was having some health issues and had decided to step away for a little bit.
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So the job was open and I knew Mark Kingston and Mike Curran on the staff and went through a process and eventually it led to me and my wife and I flying down there.
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And next thing, you know, I'm the pitching coach of South Carolina in late November of 17 and then was there for four years.
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So, you know, got the SEC experience for 18, 19, 20.
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Obviously, it was shortened with COVID but 2021.
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And then, luckily, in the summer of 21,.
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You know, I got a call from Brent Jones, athletic director here at Troy, and we went on about a 13 day talk text communication deal which led to an interview here on campus at Troy and fortunately he and many other powers that be thought I'd be the right guy for the job here.
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And we're sitting here and almost three years later that was July 15th of 2021.
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And we've experienced some pretty, pretty great success a lot of notoriety and popularity for our program, as we envisioned, and there's been a lot of investment in our program.
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So, yeah, it's funny, you know.
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You think of like the little moments that lead to where you get to.
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And now on my staff, my top assistant, recruiting coordinator, infield coach and hitting coach, ben Wolgamont, was my first hire on my staff.
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So so we're together here at Eastern Illinois and then, you know, I have another assistant named Adam Godwin, who played here back in the day, very successful player, played professional baseball for a while.
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And then a kid that I coached at Michigan State for three years, named Ethan Landon, is one of our assistants as well.
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So kind of you know the people you meet, the people you connect with, the people you trust I've attempted to surround myself with and I think that's a big part of our culture.
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That certainly players feel and and you know, families feel, just as we have kids coming in on campus today Like that's something that you can't fake and it's allowed us to get good players.
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Cause, in the end, all this stuff, I, yeah, I certainly think I do a really good job as a coach and I know you know how to push buttons and all that.
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But in the end you got to have players.
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You got to have talented kids.
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You got to have players.
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You got to have talented kids.
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You got to have strong kids, explosive kids, and you do that by recruiting them, but you do it by them coming there and seeing your place and feeling a connection to not only you, the staff, but how you're going to go about taking care of them during their time.
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Makes sense.
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Well, your season has come to an end and high school players and their parents are hoping to get on college coaches' radars.
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What are your priorities when you're assembling your roster for the upcoming season?
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So I actually just spoke about this Monday night to a large group of high school kids that are playing on our field.
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Throughout that big layer in the back, throughout that window on our field, there's a bunch of kids playing and I told him look as a high school kid in this day and age you have to exhibit outlier tendencies.
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What could that be?
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Obviously, you got to run really fast.
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You need to be an elite defender at a premier position, have a good arm, be able to maybe spin a breaking ball, have great size.
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You have to be an outlier.
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And then you have to have supreme work ethic.
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In the day and age we're in with the portal, with us being a school that's been successful historically recruiting junior college players.
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As a high school kid, you better be very mature, you better be very disciplined and you better be very good.
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You know this is a top 25 level program.
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We were ranked, with a week to go in the season, 21st in the country.
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Like we are, we have incredibly high expectations in terms of the recruiting process.
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So the high school kids that we get they have to be guys that we think can be superstars down the road, and that probably is what I'm saying is very similar to down the road and that probably is what I'm saying is very similar to.
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You know, most of the schools that really are in you know top five to top seven conferences in college baseball, the Sunbelt, the top five league in the country, four teams make, four to five teams can make the NCAA tournament every single year.
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And you know, I think that the formula has changed a little bit with the, you know, open market.
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That's kind of out there.
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So if I'm a high school kid I better really have great work ethic, great grades and I better be somebody that can get on the field or at least exhibit those sort of characteristics to be on those coaches' radars.
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Makes sense.
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Radars Makes sense and are.
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Maybe not necessarily you, but do you find that Division I coaches are going into the portal and picking up players there versus the process of going out and recruiting high school guys?
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Yeah, that's a reality.
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I mean, you know, I heard Jay Johnson talk about it a little bit yesterday in his post-year interview at LSU I mean, look, it's no different.
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And I mean I will say this I say this to our team often and, fair or foul, I'm a crazy.
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I'm a crazy impatient person person.
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So I need to see things happen really quick.
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And if you know the day and age of letting a kid have three years to figure it out, those are done.
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There's too much investment in baseball.
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You can't have immature guys just sitting around just toiling in your program right, they don't need to survive in your program, they need to thrive in your program.
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And I think that has changed the game a little bit.
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I'm not saying that's right or wrong, it's just the reality of it.
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This is we don't think of it this way.
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I have a blast, I have a great day every single day.
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I love what I do, I love the recruiting, I love the chaos, I love our players.
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But what I will tell you is it is big business.
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It has changed.
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I'm sitting in a $13 million stadium at Troy University.
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You think it isn't big business.
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So if a guy's not going to, you know if he's going to have bad grades, if he's going to be kind of sloppy in his work and he's not going to perform.
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Sometimes it does change the game a little bit and while people may not want to hear that, it is the truth.
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And just look at what's going on with the portal.
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I'm not saying it's right, but there's 4,000 kids in there.
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It's pandemonium.
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But you know what that mobility can be helpful to guys sometimes in finding the right fit as they go through their career.
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But I think it also ups the ante in terms of what you need to do to be successful when you enter a program.
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I think the handbook is there.
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I think the information's there.
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It's just are you really willing to do it or you just want to talk about it?
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I'm going to work hard.
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I'm going to do.
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No, you have a one GPA, you aren't gaining weight, you're not stronger, your lunges aren't better, your breaking ball is slower.
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If those things are happening, it's going to be hard to survive in this day and age in college baseball, at least at the highest levels.
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Yeah, I totally agree with what you're saying and, like you said, the number you put out there in the transfer portal you said 4,000 as of right now I guess what happens to a player that jumps into that portal.
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I mean, all those guys don't find spots, do they?
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No, no, what happens is sometimes they find a home, sometimes they aren't as popular as they thought and, unfortunately, sometimes things come to an end.
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That's really the three realities that you go through and one thing that we have felt in our process.
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And look, my first three years we've only had eight guys from the portal.
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We have not been crazy in there.
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We'll be more this year, but we also had 18 seniors and we'll have probably two drafts, uh so, or two junior drafts.
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That is so we were always going to need some guys, so our numbers will be a little higher this year, but that was also by design, um.
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But we felt like you just have to be very intelligent with finding guys with the right fit.
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You know, um.
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I'll give you an example that applies to Troy.
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If you're a kid, that you're from a huge city with three to seven million people and you want to have 250 restaurants at your disposal and you want a professional team to go watch in your free time, we're not the fit for you.
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If you enjoy small town, you like hunting, you love that people know who you are when you go to Publix, you enjoy winning, you enjoy that small college feel, then we're a home for you, and you're going to be a joint venture that's going to allow for optimized success.
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Just watching your team play and seeing the highlights from games this past season.
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Your players play with a ton of enthusiasm.
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How important is that if you want to be a player for Troy University?
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It's incredibly important.
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I don't know if we have enough time to showcase that, but what I will say?
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One thing and I'm not saying that all programs are this way I don't mean this as a negative, but our enthusiasm is with our guys.
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Our enthusiasm is with our fans.
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Our enthusiasm is pure joy.
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If ours ever navigates towards another team, the first person that's going to be after them is me, because we're not doing that.
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This is not about disrespecting the game.
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It's not about messing with fate.
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It's about having a great time.
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We're playing a game, right, yeah, when our season ended and we were sitting there messing with fate.
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It's about having a great time.
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We're playing a game, right, yeah, when our season ended and we were, you know, sitting there watching the selection show being left out.
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This year, I've had no enjoyment since then.
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None In terms of.
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We have to, you know, retool our roster and do all these things, and we have incredibly high expectations.
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But when we're playing, you have to have that.
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You have to have that excitement, that joy, that pure passion to be the best version of yourself.
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Now, some people are more outward than others, but we want that.
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We make sure that that's part of our DNA and our identity.
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If you were to walk into the front corridor of our building, the beautiful new entryway into Riddle Pace Field, here there's a huge mirage of history and there's a lot of history here at Troy Great history, great coaches, great teams but you'd see a lot of pictures of our team from 2023.
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And that was not me being selfish, hoping to get pictures of our you know, our second season in there and a team that was on the precipice of going to a Super Regional.
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I didn't choose that, but people who were making this mural people higher up than me at Troy said those guys were the most fun group to watch.
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I've ever seen the passion, the way that they cared, what they did to represent Troy.
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Those pictures spoke volumes.
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We have to show that, and so I'm proud of the way that we play.
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I love the way our guys get after it, and I think that that jumps off the screen If you watch a video, if you watch us on TV, if you're in person.
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We really resonate in college baseball and that's why I think we've become, in a sense, a national brand.
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We've got to keep winning more and we've got to do way more things, but people know what's going on in Troy because of that excitement that we play with.
00:20:40.170 --> 00:20:41.433
Yes, without a doubt.
00:20:41.433 --> 00:20:51.787
Without a doubt, and I, I, as a coach myself, I, I loved when my teams were enthusiastic and cheering for the guy that that's maybe in their spot.
00:20:51.787 --> 00:20:57.034
And you know you got the bench guys that are into it, because that makes a world of difference in my opinion.
00:20:57.034 --> 00:21:12.681
And you know I wanted to give the listeners an idea about you know what a college athlete's day is like, and it's much different than just your average college student.
00:21:12.681 --> 00:21:20.324
If you have a midweek game, walk us through what a player's day looks like.
00:21:22.210 --> 00:21:27.301
So you know, for our guys, you know, on a game day day we usually play in a midweek game.
00:21:27.301 --> 00:21:30.056
It's let's say it's a home game, so we play at six o'clock at night.
00:21:30.056 --> 00:21:31.759
You know they'll get up in the morning.
00:21:31.759 --> 00:21:44.157
Uh, depending upon um, you know how their body is, they may have like optional lifts going on before class so they may be in the weight room at you know, 7, 45, 8 o'clock, get a 35, 40-minute lift.
00:21:44.157 --> 00:21:50.385
Go to their two classes that they have on that day, maybe at 9 and 10 or 9 and 11.
00:21:50.385 --> 00:22:01.401
Then they'll get to the field and maybe do some stuff in the training room just to move around, get active, maybe go in the cages, take some swings, do their routine.
00:22:01.401 --> 00:22:04.098
That's going on probably from 1 to 1.30.
00:22:04.098 --> 00:22:09.056
Food gets to the field at 1.30, so then they eat 1.30 to 1.45.
00:22:09.056 --> 00:22:13.972
They probably hang out a little bit, maybe play some cards, do some things with their teammates.
00:22:13.972 --> 00:22:17.961
Then they probably start to gear up 2.30, 2.45.
00:22:17.961 --> 00:22:20.431
We'll have a team meeting at 3.25.
00:22:20.431 --> 00:22:25.015
Then after team meeting we stretch, bp, pregame, et cetera.
00:22:25.015 --> 00:22:40.646
After that ends at 4.40, they go in the locker room, have a snack, maybe do some more stuff in the training room, maybe take some extra swings, do some sort of mobility work, and then they're back in the cages at 5.30, preparing for the starter that they're going to see.
00:22:44.390 --> 00:22:46.905
We meet at 5.45, and then at 6.05, it's first pitch, and then you finish the game at 930.
00:22:46.905 --> 00:22:55.453
You have eat food after you shower, I hope and you get back to your apartment or whatever at 1030 at night and then you're ready for the next day.
00:22:55.453 --> 00:23:00.592
So it's a lot, it's long and that's why you have to love it.
00:23:00.592 --> 00:23:03.080
That's why you have to love it, right.
00:23:03.080 --> 00:23:09.881
Just like anything that we do, if you don't have passion for it, it's going to feel like a lot what I described to you.
00:23:09.881 --> 00:23:15.381
If you look at it on a piece of paper, it looks like an insane day For us in the world of baseball, right?
00:23:15.381 --> 00:23:16.442
Or people in sports.
00:23:16.442 --> 00:23:18.652
That's nothing, that's exciting.
00:23:18.652 --> 00:23:24.097
We get juiced up for all those little things that go into that moment when you start the game.
00:23:25.859 --> 00:23:31.405
Let me ask you this one what has been your biggest failure as a player or coach?
00:23:36.058 --> 00:23:38.450
And what did you learn from that experience?
00:23:38.450 --> 00:23:43.153
You know it's funny.
00:23:43.153 --> 00:23:45.528
I will say this and I'm trying to figure out the solution to this.
00:23:45.528 --> 00:23:49.060
You know I have a lot of confidence in what I do and how I present things as the head coach.
00:23:49.060 --> 00:23:57.002
I'm not I'm not changing how I was as an assistant or, to be quite frank, I'm not changing how I've been for 39 years as a person Like I've.
00:23:57.002 --> 00:23:57.871
I've stayed the same.
00:23:57.871 --> 00:23:58.672
I stay consistent.
00:23:59.393 --> 00:24:16.442
But you know, we we've gotten, every time that our program here at Troy, we've gotten a ton of notoriety, a ton of you know, press, a ton of social media all these years and the one thing that over this three year span, we've gotten like crazy amounts of love.
00:24:16.442 --> 00:24:18.934
I feel like sometimes we've taken a.
00:24:18.934 --> 00:24:24.223
We haven't handled that maybe as well as we should, both individually and team.
00:24:24.223 --> 00:24:29.372
I could give some instances of individuals who have gotten love and they've sort of struggled team-wise.
00:24:29.372 --> 00:24:30.996
Maybe we go through just a brief lull.
00:24:30.996 --> 00:24:33.422
Is it a real thing?
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