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College  | Story | 2/16/2011

A&M fans spawn success

Jeff Dahn

(Note: This article is part of a series, by Jeff Dahn, that highlights specific collegiate baseball programs going into the 2011 season.  To view the articles on other schools in this series please click here.)

Recently retired Marshalltown, Iowa, educator Brad Clement has played, watched and coached a lot of baseball in his 57 years, but wasn’t quite ready for what he experienced during his first visit to Olsen Field on the Texas A&M University campus in College Station, Texas.

Clement, now the Vice President of Development at Perfect Game USA, was no first-timer to the college baseball scene when he arrived at Olsen Field. His youngest son, Jeff, was an All-America catcher at Southern California before the Seattle Mariners took him in the 1st round with the third overall pick in the 2005 MLB June Amateur Draft. His oldest son, Mike, played collegiately at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa, and is a volunteer assistant coach at A&M.

It was Mike’s association with the Aggies program that led Brad Clement to College Station last spring for a Big 12 Conference game between A&M and visiting Oklahoma. Clement was stopped in his tracks.

“The atmosphere in College Station is different than at other college venues,” he said. “Many places have rabid spectators and the Aggie fans certainly fit that description. What set the experience apart from other places are the Aggies’ traditions that are on display from the time you pull into the parking lot and see the RVs that set up early to tailgate on game day.”

Clement went on to describe how knowledgeable the Aggies fans are – including the students – and all the songs and routines that are sang and played out during the course of the game.

“It all adds up to provide an entertaining environment, and undoubtedly a significant home field advantage,” Clement concluded.

Clement experienced a home field advantage that has been in place at Texas A&M at least since 7,000-seat Olsen Field opened in 1978. The Aggies averaged 3,641 fans in 36 home dates in 2010 m- 11th best in the nation – many of whom gathered well in advance of the first pitch to tailgate in “Aggie Alley” just outside the stadium.

“Texas A&M is a special place,” sixth-year Aggie head coach Rob Childress offered during a recent telephone conversation with Perfect Game. “There is a lot of tradition here.”

In his first five seasons at A&M – a public research university with close to 39,000 undergraduate students – Childress has taken the Aggies to the NCAA tournament four straight years and to two Super Regional appearances.

They have competed on increasingly equal footing with Big 12 powers Texas and Oklahoma, but haven’t been able to keep pace with the rival Longhorns in one critical category – College World Series appearances. Texas has made a national-high 33 trips to Omaha, including six since 2000. A&M has been to the CWS four times in its history, most recently in 1999.

But Childress has gotten the Aggies to Omaha’s front doorstep and they have earned the No. 20 ranking in Perfect Game’s 2011 preseason poll. League coaches picked A&M to finish third behind No. 6 Oklahoma and No. 5 Texas in this year’s Big 12 championship chase.

In mid-January, A&M officials expressed their confidence in Childress by awarding him a contract extension through the 2015 season. The extension will carry Childress through the years Olsen Field is undergoing $24 million worth of renovations.

“Coach Childress has done an excellent job maintaining and building upon the standard of excellence that the Texas A&M baseball program has achieved,” A&M athletics director Bill Byrne said when the extension was announced. “We are excited about the future of Texas A&M baseball as our facilities improvement will give us one of the finest ballparks in the country, and I can think of no better person to lead our program than Rob Childress.”

Childress established a solid reputation while serving as pitching coach and recruiting coordinator at the University of Nebraska from 1998 through 2005. During his time in Lincoln, he annually assembled a pitching staff ranked among the nation’s elite, groups that helped the Cornhuskers reach the CWS in 2001, ’02 and ’05. In Childress’s final season at Nebraska (’05) the ‘Huskers’ staff compiled an astounding 2.69 ERA.

The baseball program at Texas A&M University wasn’t exactly wallowing in the mire when Rob Childress took over as head coach just in front of the 2006 season.

The university had fired Mark Johnson after 21 largely successful seasons on the College Station campus, a tenure that included a pair of College World Series berths in 1993 and ’99. Johnson led the Aggies to an NCAA Super Regional in 2004 but was let go after they finished 30-25-1 and missed the postseason in 2005.

Childress was brought to College Station in time for the 2006 season and his first Aggies’ team sputtered to a 25-30-1 record (6-20-1 Big 12). What happened next was nothing short of remarkable.

The 2007 Aggies finished 48-19 (13-13 Big 12), won the Big 12 tournament and rolled into an NCAA Super Regional where they lost to Rice University in two games. The 23-game single season turnaround was the biggest in NCAA Division I since the stat was began being kept in 1998.

“We brought in 25 new players that year and it just changed the whole culture of our program,” Childress said.

The Aggies kept it rolling in 2008 when they finished 46-19, won their first Big 12 regular season championship in nine years – they won 16 straight league games during one stretch – and once again advanced to a Super Regional, again losing to Rice in two games.

A&M finished in the middle of the pack in the Big 12 each of the last two seasons and didn’t make it out of NCAA regional play. The 2010 Aggies did win the Big 12 tournament, however, and finished with a 41-21 record.

“It was a good year, not a great year,” Childress told Perfect Game. After being eliminated from the Coral Gables (Fla.) regional by host Miami, Childress had this to say about the 2010 Aggies:

“This is my fifth year here at Texas A&M and I’m more proud of this team than any other I’ve had here. We haven’t gone as far as some other teams, but I’m more proud of this group than any other, I can tell you that.”

Three 2010 Aggies were drafted, including starting pitcher Barret Loux, selected in the 1st round (6th pick overall) by the Arizona Diamondbacks. Childress also had two members of his 2010 recruiting class sign professionally after being drafted.

College Station is located in the center of an area in east Texas that is home to many of the top collegiate baseball programs in the country. The city of about 86,000 residents is 85 miles northwest of Houston, home of the PG No. 14 Rice Owls; 170 miles southeast of Fort Worth (No. 3 TCU Horned Frogs) and 110 miles northeast of Austin (No. 5 Texas Longhorns).

It’s a challenge recruiting head-to-head against those programs but Childress continues to bring in top-notch Texas talent.

The strength of the 2011 Aggies appears to be their pitching corps, which shouldn’t be a surprise considering Childress’ reputation and expertise.

Junior right-handed closer John Stilson is the headliner. Named a preseason first team All-American by the NCBWA (he didn’t make the cut in PG’s much more limited list), Stilson was 9-1 with a 0.80 ERA and 10 saves in 33 relief appearances and struck out 114 in 79 innings. He was named to several all-America teams at the end of the 2010 season.

Sophomore right-hander Michael Wacha and junior righty Ross Stripling are the top returning starters. Wacha was 9-2 with a 2.90 ERA in 25 appearances (10 starts) and Stripling finished 6-5 with a 4.50 ERA in a team-high 17 starts.

The Aggies also return four of their top position players from last spring, including all-Big 12 performers Matt Juengel and Kevin Gonzalez.

Juengel, a junior infielder, hit .359 with 11 home runs and 30 RBIs while boasting a .421 OBP and a .629 SLG. Gonzalez, a senior catcher, is coming off a junior campaign in which he hit .318 with nine home runs and 38 RBIs with a .994 fielding percentage.

Other top position players back for 2011 include junior second baseman Adam Smith (.268, 10 HRs, 42 RBIs) and sophomore outfielder Andrew Collazo (.245, 3 HRs, 22 RBIs).

The Aggies will continue to build on the energy of their fans that pile into Olsen Field as they look to win a league title, advance to the postseason and get back to Omaha after what is viewed by many as way too long of an absence.

“We’re going to continue to try to outwork everyone else,” Childress said. “We still haven’t realized all of our goals.”

(NOTE: A complete 2011 Texas A&M roster was not available as of mid-February).

If there is a college program that you want PG to do astory on, please feel free to let us know. Email Jeff Dahn at jdahn@perfectgame.org.
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