Jeff Dahn is a staff writer for Perfect Game and can be reached via e-mail at jdahn@perfectgame.org
The University of Iowa baseball team was scheduled to play its 2011 home opener Friday, March 25, at Duane Banks Field in a non-conference game against Western Illinois.
Snow was in the weather forecast.
Such is the way of life for collegiate baseball programs – from NCAA Division I to Division III to NAIA – in states like Iowa and other outposts in the northern United States. Cold weather keeps teams indoors for early practices in January and February, and when the season officially opens the third week of February, they hop on a bus and head south.
Jack Dahm just started his eighth season as the head coach of the Iowa Hawkeyes after spending the previous 10 years as the head coach at Creighton, his alma mater. He played at the Omaha school for former coach Jim Hendry, now the general manager of the Chicago Cubs.
Since arriving in Iowa City, Iowa, in July, 2003, Dahm has slowly brought some life back into the Iowa baseball program. The Hawkeyes haven’t advanced to the NCAA tournament since 1980 and made its only College World Series appearance in 1972 under former coach Duane Banks.
Iowa won 11 of its last 14 games last season, with road series wins over Michigan and Penn State and home series wins against Ohio State, Illinois and Purdue. It finished third in the final Big Ten regular-season standings and qualified for the conference tournament for only the eighth time in school history.
The Hawkeyes won three games at the tournament and finished as runner-up to champion Minnesota. It was the best run in the Big Ten tournament for the Hawkeyes since the 1983 team also finished as runner-up. Iowa finished the season 30-28.
“Nowadays it’s very hard to find kids that are going to develop as leaders in the program,” Dahm told Perfect Game in December. “We had some kids (last year) … who developed into tremendous leaders for our team. Even when we struggled early with a very, very demanding schedule, those guys could see that we had a chance to be good.”
Any advances made by the 10 Big Ten schools that play baseball (Wisconsin doesn’t have a program) have to be made incrementally, and the progress made in 2010 was certainly a big step for Dahm and his Hawkeyes given the challenges they face.
And the challenges come in bunches for northern programs.
The Hawkeyes opened the 2011 season with 17 straight games away from Iowa City. They opened the season at the Big East/Big Ten Challenge with games against West Virginia, Pittsburgh and Seton Hall, and also played games against Kansas, Mississippi State, Georgia State, Texas Tech, Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, Notre Dame and Gonzaga, all on the road. They completed the stretch with a 7-10 record.
“The biggest obstacle is the travel and playing on the road the first (17) games of the year,” Dahm said. “We’re gone from Thursday until Sunday, go to school all day through Thursday, leave Thursday afternoon – the wear-and-tear on our bodies physically and being at a very good academic school like the University of Iowa, that’s the toughest thing.”
Dahm said the NCAA needs to tweak its ratings system to recognize that schools from cold-weather climates will play their entire non-conference schedules on the road. He said that makes it extremely difficult to compile an adequate won-loss record and a decent RPI rating to qualify for an NCAA regional with an at-large berth.
“I would like to see some things (done) differently to allow northern programs to get into the regionals,” Dahm said. “Could you imagine (Iowa football coach) Kirk Ferentz having to play all his non-conference games on the road? Could you imagine our basketball program playing all their non-conference games before Big Ten play on the road? And then you get penalized for losing those games.”
The champion of the Big Ten tournament receives an automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament, but it can be rare for a league team to earn an at-large bid. Michigan advanced to the CWS in 1984 and is the last Big Ten team to do so.
It capped a terrific run for the Wolverines when they made it to Omaha five times between 1978 and ’84. The league’s most recent national championship was won by Ohio State in 1966.
“It can be done, realistically,” Dahm said. “The Big Ten, we need to continue to make progress as a conference … and the Big Ten is getting much better.”
Perfect Game picked Iowa to finish fifth in the league this season behind Minnesota, Michigan, Indiana and Michigan State. PG named junior left-hander Jarred Hippen to its preseason all-conference team based on a 2010 season in which Hippen finished 6-4 with a 3.71 ERA and four complete games in 16 starts.
On the long preseason road-trip, the Hawkeyes four-man rotation included Hippen, junior right-hander Nick Brown, sophomore left-hander Matt Dermody and sophomore righty Ricky Sandquist. Brown was the most effective, going 2-1 with a 2.57 ERA in four starts, and was named the Big Ten Pitcher of the Week for the week ending March 20.
Dahm hopes to win a conference championship and earn an NCAA regional berth with a roster filled with home-grown Iowa guys. Fifteen of the 33 players on the Hawkeyes 2011 roster are from Iowa, including Dermody (Norwalk), Sandquist (Fort Dodge), standout senior infielder Zach McCool (Manchester), hard-throwing junior left-handed reliever Patrick Lala (Marion) and junior infielder Andrew Ewing (Iowa City).
Dahm’s 2011 recruiting class includes outfielder Derrick Loveless (Solon) and left-hander Andrew Hedrick (Ankeny), ranked the No. 1 and No. 5 top prospects in the state by Perfect Game.
All of those players were or still are active participants at Perfect Game events.
“It starts with recruiting,” Dahm said. “We need to continue to get the best players that we possibly can and then develop those players. It’s not just about getting the best players it’s also about developing them, and it’s also about them getting their degrees.”
The Iowa roster also features 10 players from Illinois, but Dahm is going to concentrate on getting the best players from Iowa first.
The Hawkeyes represent the only Division I program in the state. Iowa State dropped baseball after the 2001 season and Northern Iowa after the ‘09 season.
“It’s always important,” Dahm said of getting the local talent to stay home. “We want to start from within; we want to get all the top Iowa kids that we possibly can. I’m still sick to my stomach, though, that we’re the only Division I team in the state of Iowa because it’s taken so many opportunities away from Iowa kids.
“But in the state of Iowa there’s a tremendous amount of pride about the Hawkeyes, and that has not been in the baseball program for a long time. We’re slowly getting it and the Big Ten Network has been a huge advantage for us.”
It has now been 30 years since Iowa has advanced to the NCAA postseason, but Dahm remains undaunted. His enthusiasm for the program is boundless and when it comes to where he hopes to take a cold-weather program located in the heartland, he needs only to look about 250 miles to the west.
“We want to get to Ameritrade Park. We want to get back to Omaha (and) I look forward to the day we go back there and play in the College World Series,” he said.
“It’s hard. And it’s extremely difficult as a northern program, but it can be done. We’re not going to make any excuses. We’ve got to get more consistent and we feel like we’re going to be a team battling for that Big Ten championship all the time.”