Photo by: All Pro Photography/Dale Sparks
WVU ‘All In’ On College Baseball
May 29, 2019 02:25 PM | Baseball
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – The way former director of athletics Oliver Luck remembers things, he was confronted with basically two alternatives when West Virginia University was officially admitted into the Big 12 Conference in 2011 - go all in on WVU baseball or drop the sport as Iowa State did in 2001.
"I thought there were only two paths to go. It was sort of the idea of you had to be all in either way, and one of the paths was dropping the sport," Luck recalled Tuesday afternoon.
For years, the Mountaineer baseball program just sort of plodded along in the Atlantic 10 and the Big East because it was underfunded compared to its regional peers, programs such as Notre Dame, St. John's, Rutgers and rival Virginia Tech when West Virginia got into the Big East in 1995.
WVU produced All-American players Chris Enochs and Jedd Gyorko, and had some pretty good teams in 1997, 1998, 2003 and 2009, but it never invested the resources in baseball needed to win the Big East and advance to the NCAA Tournament on a regular basis.
Soon after Luck, now CEO and commissioner of the XFL, was named West Virginia's athletic director in 2010 and became aware of baseball's long NCAA Tournament drought, he grew concerned that his alma mater was going to be grossly overmatched when it eventually transitioned to the Big 12.
"Given what we were looking at in terms of having to compete in the Big 12, I never wanted to put the University in a situation where we were just out-manned," he explained. "Just having lived in Texas, generally speaking, baseball in the south is incredible.
"When I was in law school in Austin, I used to go to games at Disch-Falk Field and I knew what Disch-Falk was all about and how they filled it up, so it had to be one way or the other. We could drop the program, and there was precedent for that with Iowa State."
To better understand the issues he was going to be confronted with when West Virginia made the jump to the Big 12, Luck in the late fall of 2011 assembled a round-table panel of experts to give him some guidance on what he should do – an eclectic blend of sportsmen that included organizational people from the Pittsburgh Pirates and Arizona Diamondbacks, former professional baseball player and scout Steve Swisher, Mountaineer alum Gyorko (then playing for the San Diego Padres) and Memphis Grizzlies general manager Chris Wallace, whose father, Bobby, was an All-Southern Conference second baseman for the Mountaineers in 1951.
In the meantime, Luck also had phone conversations with Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick and Pirates owner Bob Nutting, and they suggested that he talk to some of their top personnel people who also had college baseball experience.
Out of those discussions, the Diamondbacks sent up to Morgantown vice-president Graham Rossini, who was once the director of baseball operations at Arizona State, and the Pirates sent down Kyle Stark, a former college player at Ball State and once a pitching coach at St. Bonaventure.
Steve Swisher was a late replacement for his son, Nick, a 12-year major leaguer from Parkersburg who played collegiately at Ohio State when he was unable to rearrange his busy schedule to be a part of Luck's Ex-Comm baseball panel.
"I got those folks together to help me make a decision where I could go to my boss, (WVU president) Jim Clements, and say, 'Jim, we either drop the sport or we need to go all in.' That means a lot. That means figuring out a way to get a new stadium built that's representative of what this University deserves."
Before he could tend to the real heavy lifting, Luck believed he first needed to hire a proven coach with an established track record in major college baseball. That was going to require a good deal of convincing to encourage whoever it was to take a big leap of faith.
The man Luck eventually targeted in the summer of 2012 was Randy Mazey, a terrific college coach who led East Carolina to a Super Regional in 2004 and was then the pitching coach at TCU when the Horned Frogs were regularly going to NCAA regionals and producing professional pitchers.
Getting a coach of Mazey's pedigree on board for the 2013 season was a clear indication of Luck's seriousness about making a commitment to college baseball at West Virginia University.
"He took a pretty big risk when you think about it," Luck admitted. "He was obviously a good coach, but coming to Morgantown was tough. It was basically going to be a start up."
Once Mazey was in place, then came the other small matter of building a new baseball stadium somewhere in the city to replace outdated Hawley Field.
This is where serendipity intervened because Luck had prior experience in municipal finance having once worked for Houston's Harris County Sports Authority, a government entity created in 1997 to oversee the financing and construction of the city's three major professional sports venues – Minute Maid Park, Reliant Stadium and the Toyota Center.
Luck understood TIFs and how they were utilized to construct stadiums. He said property tax TIFs are pretty common around the country and were used to build Houston's BBVA Compass Stadium, home of the Houston Dynamo professional soccer team, but when he began exploring the possibility of constructing a baseball stadium in Morgantown, the state then had just two types of TIFs available – real estate and sales tax TIFs.
"Stadium deals, no matter if it's an NFL facility for a billon dollars or a ballpark for $25 million, all of them are complicated," Luck said.
Luck explained to Clements that if the TIF process was done correctly, it could be a big win for everybody – the University, Morgantown and Monongalia county.
With the help of local developers Bob and John Lynch, Jason Donahue and area political leaders Bob Beach, Roman Prezioso, Eldon Callen and Tom Bloom, momentum picked up in late fall of 2012 to come up with a financing mechanism for a new ballpark in a commercial development the Lynch family was planning on top of an old mining site overlooking Granville.
"The local political leaders at the time said, 'Oliver, we like this idea, but you're going to have to go find a minor league baseball team. We need something here for the broader community, not just for the University.' That's when Ken and the Nuttings really came through because I didn't know a thing about minor league baseball."
A minor league franchise in Jamestown, New York, was available if the West Virginia Legislature could approve TIF funding for a new ballpark during its 2013 winter session. It eventually took a special session to iron out all of the details before the funding was in place for Monongalia County Ballpark, which was completed in the spring of 2015.
"Extra innings," Luck joked. "That was all it was. Having a team like Texas coming to Morgantown (in 2014), and their reaction to it, kind of indicated to everybody, including the local political leaders, what needed to be done. It wasn't like this was some luxury item for the University.
"These TIFs usually work – I've seen them work and this is an example of a TIF working exactly the way it's supposed to," Luck added. "That was the beauty of it. Everything the political leaders here at the time said came to pass."
Just four years later, surrounding Monongalia County Ballpark is a growing number of commercial businesses that are about to swell to the other side of Interstate 79.
And all of them will be packed full of people during this weekend's NCAA baseball regional, the first event of its kind to take place in Morgantown in 64 years.
Texas A&M, from the Southeastern Conference, is one of the teams that will be here, making it the first time an SEC baseball team has ever played in this city.
That's a couple of Halley's Comets streaking past Morgantown this year.
It's a credit to Luck and the local political leaders in place at the time to have the foresight to take the risk to build the stadium, and it's also a credit to current athletic director Shane Lyons and his senior leadership team for maintaining the course and putting together a bid to secure an NCAA regional, as well as to Mazey, his coaching staff and the players for having a team good enough this year to host it.
The NCAA baseball committee doesn't just hand these things out on a whim.
"The thing I really liked about building that ballpark with the county was doing something that not only benefitted the University, but also benefitted the entire community," Luck said, adding, "we may have helped set the table, but Randy and his outstanding baseball team cooked the meal. It's so exciting to see the guys play so well and Randy doing such a good job. And people in West Virginia being so excited about baseball!"
Luck said he had an inkling college baseball could take off in West Virginia under the right circumstances, provided money wasn't being thrown down a rabbit hole.
"I always thought that Mountaineer fans needed more than just football in the fall and basketball in the winter. What are they going to do in the spring?" he explained. "Many times after the last basketball games I'd hear fans say, 'Well, I guess we have to wait until the spring (football) game' and that's really not much of a highlight on the sporting calendar."
Understanding all of that, there is still one question that persists: What sold Luck on going all in on college baseball at West Virginia University in the fall of 2011?
What convinced him to lead WVU (and Monongalia County) down the path toward investing millions of dollars in a college sport that has traditionally not fared too well in this part of the country?
It was a conversation he had with Stark, today Pittsburgh's vice president and assistant to general manager Neal Huntington.
"He told me, 'Listen, the players up in the north are every bit as good as the guys who grew up down in the south. They just might be two years behind because they can't play as many games in high school. There is no reason a baseball program can't be successful just because they are in a part of the country where the weather can be challenging,'" Luck recalled. "His point was we can do well in this part of the country as a member of the Big 12.
"We just have to appreciate the fact that a kid who comes to WVU from Ohio, New Jersey or Pennsylvania might be a year or two behind a kid from Texas, but he's every bit as good," Luck added. "There has to be a little bit of a different way of how you treat them and you coach them up and all that kind of stuff.
"That was one of the things that really convinced me to go all in," Luck concluded.
"I thought there were only two paths to go. It was sort of the idea of you had to be all in either way, and one of the paths was dropping the sport," Luck recalled Tuesday afternoon.
For years, the Mountaineer baseball program just sort of plodded along in the Atlantic 10 and the Big East because it was underfunded compared to its regional peers, programs such as Notre Dame, St. John's, Rutgers and rival Virginia Tech when West Virginia got into the Big East in 1995.
WVU produced All-American players Chris Enochs and Jedd Gyorko, and had some pretty good teams in 1997, 1998, 2003 and 2009, but it never invested the resources in baseball needed to win the Big East and advance to the NCAA Tournament on a regular basis.
Soon after Luck, now CEO and commissioner of the XFL, was named West Virginia's athletic director in 2010 and became aware of baseball's long NCAA Tournament drought, he grew concerned that his alma mater was going to be grossly overmatched when it eventually transitioned to the Big 12.
"Given what we were looking at in terms of having to compete in the Big 12, I never wanted to put the University in a situation where we were just out-manned," he explained. "Just having lived in Texas, generally speaking, baseball in the south is incredible.
"When I was in law school in Austin, I used to go to games at Disch-Falk Field and I knew what Disch-Falk was all about and how they filled it up, so it had to be one way or the other. We could drop the program, and there was precedent for that with Iowa State."
To better understand the issues he was going to be confronted with when West Virginia made the jump to the Big 12, Luck in the late fall of 2011 assembled a round-table panel of experts to give him some guidance on what he should do – an eclectic blend of sportsmen that included organizational people from the Pittsburgh Pirates and Arizona Diamondbacks, former professional baseball player and scout Steve Swisher, Mountaineer alum Gyorko (then playing for the San Diego Padres) and Memphis Grizzlies general manager Chris Wallace, whose father, Bobby, was an All-Southern Conference second baseman for the Mountaineers in 1951.In the meantime, Luck also had phone conversations with Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick and Pirates owner Bob Nutting, and they suggested that he talk to some of their top personnel people who also had college baseball experience.
Out of those discussions, the Diamondbacks sent up to Morgantown vice-president Graham Rossini, who was once the director of baseball operations at Arizona State, and the Pirates sent down Kyle Stark, a former college player at Ball State and once a pitching coach at St. Bonaventure.
Steve Swisher was a late replacement for his son, Nick, a 12-year major leaguer from Parkersburg who played collegiately at Ohio State when he was unable to rearrange his busy schedule to be a part of Luck's Ex-Comm baseball panel.
"I got those folks together to help me make a decision where I could go to my boss, (WVU president) Jim Clements, and say, 'Jim, we either drop the sport or we need to go all in.' That means a lot. That means figuring out a way to get a new stadium built that's representative of what this University deserves."
Before he could tend to the real heavy lifting, Luck believed he first needed to hire a proven coach with an established track record in major college baseball. That was going to require a good deal of convincing to encourage whoever it was to take a big leap of faith.
The man Luck eventually targeted in the summer of 2012 was Randy Mazey, a terrific college coach who led East Carolina to a Super Regional in 2004 and was then the pitching coach at TCU when the Horned Frogs were regularly going to NCAA regionals and producing professional pitchers.
Getting a coach of Mazey's pedigree on board for the 2013 season was a clear indication of Luck's seriousness about making a commitment to college baseball at West Virginia University.
"He took a pretty big risk when you think about it," Luck admitted. "He was obviously a good coach, but coming to Morgantown was tough. It was basically going to be a start up."
Once Mazey was in place, then came the other small matter of building a new baseball stadium somewhere in the city to replace outdated Hawley Field.
This is where serendipity intervened because Luck had prior experience in municipal finance having once worked for Houston's Harris County Sports Authority, a government entity created in 1997 to oversee the financing and construction of the city's three major professional sports venues – Minute Maid Park, Reliant Stadium and the Toyota Center.
Luck understood TIFs and how they were utilized to construct stadiums. He said property tax TIFs are pretty common around the country and were used to build Houston's BBVA Compass Stadium, home of the Houston Dynamo professional soccer team, but when he began exploring the possibility of constructing a baseball stadium in Morgantown, the state then had just two types of TIFs available – real estate and sales tax TIFs.
"Stadium deals, no matter if it's an NFL facility for a billon dollars or a ballpark for $25 million, all of them are complicated," Luck said.
Luck explained to Clements that if the TIF process was done correctly, it could be a big win for everybody – the University, Morgantown and Monongalia county.With the help of local developers Bob and John Lynch, Jason Donahue and area political leaders Bob Beach, Roman Prezioso, Eldon Callen and Tom Bloom, momentum picked up in late fall of 2012 to come up with a financing mechanism for a new ballpark in a commercial development the Lynch family was planning on top of an old mining site overlooking Granville.
"The local political leaders at the time said, 'Oliver, we like this idea, but you're going to have to go find a minor league baseball team. We need something here for the broader community, not just for the University.' That's when Ken and the Nuttings really came through because I didn't know a thing about minor league baseball."
A minor league franchise in Jamestown, New York, was available if the West Virginia Legislature could approve TIF funding for a new ballpark during its 2013 winter session. It eventually took a special session to iron out all of the details before the funding was in place for Monongalia County Ballpark, which was completed in the spring of 2015.
"Extra innings," Luck joked. "That was all it was. Having a team like Texas coming to Morgantown (in 2014), and their reaction to it, kind of indicated to everybody, including the local political leaders, what needed to be done. It wasn't like this was some luxury item for the University.
"These TIFs usually work – I've seen them work and this is an example of a TIF working exactly the way it's supposed to," Luck added. "That was the beauty of it. Everything the political leaders here at the time said came to pass."
Just four years later, surrounding Monongalia County Ballpark is a growing number of commercial businesses that are about to swell to the other side of Interstate 79.
And all of them will be packed full of people during this weekend's NCAA baseball regional, the first event of its kind to take place in Morgantown in 64 years.
Texas A&M, from the Southeastern Conference, is one of the teams that will be here, making it the first time an SEC baseball team has ever played in this city.
That's a couple of Halley's Comets streaking past Morgantown this year.
It's a credit to Luck and the local political leaders in place at the time to have the foresight to take the risk to build the stadium, and it's also a credit to current athletic director Shane Lyons and his senior leadership team for maintaining the course and putting together a bid to secure an NCAA regional, as well as to Mazey, his coaching staff and the players for having a team good enough this year to host it.The NCAA baseball committee doesn't just hand these things out on a whim.
"The thing I really liked about building that ballpark with the county was doing something that not only benefitted the University, but also benefitted the entire community," Luck said, adding, "we may have helped set the table, but Randy and his outstanding baseball team cooked the meal. It's so exciting to see the guys play so well and Randy doing such a good job. And people in West Virginia being so excited about baseball!"
Luck said he had an inkling college baseball could take off in West Virginia under the right circumstances, provided money wasn't being thrown down a rabbit hole.
"I always thought that Mountaineer fans needed more than just football in the fall and basketball in the winter. What are they going to do in the spring?" he explained. "Many times after the last basketball games I'd hear fans say, 'Well, I guess we have to wait until the spring (football) game' and that's really not much of a highlight on the sporting calendar."
Understanding all of that, there is still one question that persists: What sold Luck on going all in on college baseball at West Virginia University in the fall of 2011? What convinced him to lead WVU (and Monongalia County) down the path toward investing millions of dollars in a college sport that has traditionally not fared too well in this part of the country?
It was a conversation he had with Stark, today Pittsburgh's vice president and assistant to general manager Neal Huntington.
"He told me, 'Listen, the players up in the north are every bit as good as the guys who grew up down in the south. They just might be two years behind because they can't play as many games in high school. There is no reason a baseball program can't be successful just because they are in a part of the country where the weather can be challenging,'" Luck recalled. "His point was we can do well in this part of the country as a member of the Big 12.
"We just have to appreciate the fact that a kid who comes to WVU from Ohio, New Jersey or Pennsylvania might be a year or two behind a kid from Texas, but he's every bit as good," Luck added. "There has to be a little bit of a different way of how you treat them and you coach them up and all that kind of stuff.
"That was one of the things that really convinced me to go all in," Luck concluded.
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