Colonels’ baseball continues upward climb

For most college baseball teams, “next season” begins the day after the team’s current season ends.

But the Nicholls baseball program hasn’t ever quite had that luxury under fifth-year coach Chip Durham.

That’s because the team has long been embroiled in a fierce fight with the NCAA’s Academic Performace Rate (APR) scores. And if improvement in the classroom wasn’t made – in a hurry – there was always the possibility the program would be scrapped altogether.

“We were always sucking wind,” Durham said. “We were at the bottom of the barrel APR-wise. It really was a situation to where another year or two of bad APR, we could have seen our program get cut.”

When Durham took over the team in 2006, the Colonels were 100 points below the NCAA-mandated benchmark for APR (a statistic that measures the success or failure of a team in moving students toward graduation over a 4-year average).

So where competing coaches were hauling together the best players on their campuses to field a competitive team and win games, the Colonels were keeping players who first helped satisfy the NCAA’s requirements.

And as a result, the team struggled on the field, and won just 33 combined games from 2006-08.

“APR is a score you get from eligibility and retention, so we had to sometimes let go of guys who could help, and on the flipside, we had to keep kids in who couldn’t help. It’s a double-edged sword.”

In addition to keeping players they maybe wouldn’t have otherwise kept, the Colonels were also in the penalty phase of the APR, which meant the NCAA controlled aspects of the team’s schedule that other schools take for granted.

“Every year that I’ve been here, we’ve been in some sort of penalty phase, whether it’s scholarships taken away or practice time taken away, or restricting the number of games we can play,” Durham said. “Those aren’t always easy things to deal with when you’re competing with other schools who aren’t in the same situation.”

But after five years of patience and selectivity, the Colonels have catapulted themselves back above the benchmark and will be in the clear in 2011.

“For the first time since there was an APR score, this program’s APR score will be above the norm,” Durham said. “The wins and losses weren’t always there, but we’ve done a lot of great things.”

Nicholls’ Athletic Director Rob Bernardi agreed with the coach and applauded his efforts to get the program back above the number they needed to achieve.

“That takes a lot of patience and persistence,” Bernardi said. “I couldn’t be happier with the progress we’ve made in that program in that short a period of time. I give Coach Durham just a world of credit for what he’s done.”

With the program on more sturdy ground, Durham said the team will now shift its attention to winning more games – something the team has done more of the past two years, even with the APR questions.

Nicholls won 19 games in 2009 and followed that up with a 27-win season this year, which put the team in the conference tournament for the first time under Durham and the first time as a program since 2000.

The Colonels entered the Southland Conference as the eighth and final seed, but proved there was little doubt they belonged, pouncing the top-seed Texas State, 13-2, in the opening round.

The coach said getting that small taste of success would go a long way in getting his players to believe they can win the conference championship in the future.

“I think now they realize that once you get into that tournament, anybody can win it. That was one main thing our guys accomplished – just do what you’ve got to do to get into the tournament, and then once you get there, it’s anyone’s ballgame.”

With a strong core of players returning from the 2010 team next year, the coach said he believes his team can compete for the title as soon as next year – and at the very least, finish in the upper half of the league.

That’s a distinction he says is not so bad when one considers where things were when he took over the job.

“We’re just trying to go forward and get better and we’re doing it in small steps,” Durham said. “We are moving in the right direction. There are a lot of good things happening in this program and I think we’ve got a chance to do some pretty special things in the future.”

Nicholls sophomore pitcher Ryan Cooper fires a pitch earlier this season. Cooper and the Colonels were able to have one of their most successful seasons to date, advancing to the Southland Conference Tournament for the first time since 2000. * Photo by CASEY GISCLAIR