MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) — Believe it or not, we’re already halfway through the conference season in MIAC baseball.
Once again, everybody is chasing St. Thomas, who has a perfect conference record.
The St. Thomas baseball team is in a familiar place…first place. By a lot. The Tommies are 10-0 in conference play after two more wins today, and 17-3 overall.
“A lot of it’s some of our upper classmen really stepping up and doing what they’re being asked to, really sticking with what we’re talking to them about hitting, in terms of approach,” said Chris Olean, St. Thomas baseball coach. “That group of guys has really stepped up and really got the hot streak going.”
Which is cute and all, but when your school’s football team just went to the national title game, and your men’s basketball team just won a national title, standards are pretty high.
“You walk down the hallway of coaches, and there’s a national title in about every door you go in. So it certainly sets an expectation of what we want to do here,” Olean said.
But it also actually helps reach those expectations. Because those coaches spend time together, helping each other out.
“You can kind of seek the minds out of some really, really good motivators and good coaches just by walking around in the office,” Olean said. “We all kind of do things a little differently, so whether it comes in to recruiting or whether it comes in to how you prepare your team for a certain type of game situations, yeah, there’s a wealth of knowledge.
“Coach Tower obviously just won a national title, he’s a psychology guy, I picked up a few things from him. Glenn is flat-out intense, you pick up some stuff from talking to Glenn and getting a feel for how he does things and, even go down to volleyball, I mean Thanh’s an unbelievable coach too there who has a national title. So there’s a lot of that, absolutely.”
Aside from wondering what’s in the water at St. Thomas, the bigger question for the baseball team is this: Can they join them? Can they be the third men’s sport this school year to reach a title game?
“We need to keep the pedal down and keep urgency on ourselves the entire time. We don’t play well when we sit back and let the game come to us,” Olean said. “We have to kind of be aggressive and go get it and just go in attack mode. When we do that, we tend to be pretty good.”
