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New Youngstown State baseball coach eyes turnaround
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Steve Gillispie, YSU’s new baseball coach, shakes hands with Boardman catcher Dominic Pecchia after throwing out the first pitch on Wednesday at the Little League district championship game. Boardman defeated Austintown, 12-11, to earn a trip to state.
By Joe Scalzo
YOUNGSTOWN
In 2002, when Steve Gillispie was hired as an assistant baseball coach at Jacksonville (Ala.) State, he was faced with reviving a program that had gone 11-39 the year before.
Only six of those wins had come against Division I teams. Only three had come against conference teams.
“[There was] a team batting average of .219 and a team GPA [grade-point average] lower than that,” he said. “So, when you look at the comparison to those two programs, I think the current condition of the Youngstown State program far exceeds what was at Jacksonville State.”
Gillispie, who helped the Gamecocks to nine 30-win seasons and three NCAA regional berths over the last 11 years, was introduced as the Penguins’ new baseball coach on Wednesday. His biggest challenge is reversing the fortunes of a program that went 11-44 last year and 14-41 in 2011.
“You look past some of the recent years and maybe you have to look a little bit deeper,” he said. “You can look back not too many years before you find a conference championship and a trip to the NCAA regionals.”
Youngstown State has not had a winning season since going 29-27 in 2005, a year after it won the Horizon League tournament.
Despite the Penguins’ recent struggles, there are some selling points to recruits, including the stadium (Eastwood Field), the WATTS indoor facility and the fact that YSU has had three players drafted in the last three years. Also, a 2005 draftee, Justin Thomas, opened the season on the Boston Red Sox roster.
Gillispie, who served as Jacksonville State’s hitting coach and recruiting coordinator, had 19 Jacksonville State players drafted or sign major league contracts over his 11 seasons.
He hopes to have similar success here.
“It’s not hard to pick out the top-level talent,” he said. “It’s fairly easy to see a radar gun show 93 or 94 [miles per hour]. The challenge comes with being able to project kids.
“That’s one of the things I’ve had some success with.”
While YSU must recruit in the shadow of Kent State (which advanced to the College World Series this season) as well as major conference programs such as Pitt or Ohio State, Gillispie said he’s not going to shy away from top-level players.
“We want to go after the best kids and show them Youngstown State is a quality institution and a great place to get an education and a great place to have an experience in college baseball and have a career,” he said. “It’s not a goal to recruit to our league because the talent level is this versus the Big Ten being that.
“We’re going to go after the best kids we can possibly get and try to coach them up from here.”
Gillispie, 48, is a Nebraska native who played collegiately at Northwest Missouri State and Fort Hays State, where he served as head coach in 1988 and 1989. After stints at Nebraska (where he recruited eventual No. 1 overall pick Darin Erstad), Mendocino Junior College, Lassen Junior College, Utah and UAB, he served as the Southeastern Scouting Supervisor for the Phillies from 1998-2001.
When asked why he’d leave Alabama (his wife’s home state) to come to the Midwest and take over a losing program, he said, “At some point, if you have a desire to be a head coach, you want to go ahead and make that move.
“It would have been very easy and comfortable to stay in Alabama but you always want to kind of challenge yourself.”