In a season that you get the idea has even caught Dave Van Horn by surprise, Arkansas finds itself back in Omaha and the surprising part may be they powered their way back.
Dave Van Horn has been considered one of the better coaches in college baseball for awhile.
Now he has to be in the conversation about the best.
And even he didn’t forecast this trip.
“It’s amazing what you can do with a little bit of hard work and a little bit of luck and a bunch of guys who believe,” Van Horn said after the Razorbacks stomped Ole Miss in game three of the super regional at Baum-Walker on Monday afternoon. “This has been one of the most gratifying seasons I’ve ever had as a coach because we weren’t expected to do much.”
Before the season, he told us this team might be a little over-rated because they were ranked by everybody. He gave us the impression after a couple of fall scrimmages this team might not even be ranked in the early polls.
After losing six starters off last year’s team that came agonizingly close to a title, it was understandable these Hogs didn’t get a lot of high rankings in the preseason. Nobody was putting them in Omaha.
“It’s hard enough to make it there once every now and then,” he said. “To get there two years in a row with a bunch of guys who that watched on the side last year — maybe weren’t even with us.
“The case of (third baseman) Jacob Nesbit, he didn’t make the travel squad. He was playing summer ball right now. Today he gets a big double, makes a great diving play to end the game. What a thrill.”
Van Horn is a coach that works with 11.7 scholarships a year. He’s as good at recruiting as any coach in any sport in school history. Blame the kangaroo court that governs college athletics for what is an absolutely ridiculous restriction, but it’s what he has to work with … every year.
“Sometimes you can’t get everybody you want,” he said. “They end up on other teams you play and people wonder why you can’t get ’em because you offer less than somebody else. They call you and say they want to go there but somebody else is offering me this and we say we can’t and they go somewhere else.
“It happens all the time.”
He broke down a philosophy that requires a lot of juggling, psychology and probably downright guessing based on hunches.
“You’re going to put a lot of money into pitching,” Van Horn said. “You’re going to try to be good up the middle. You gotta develop, get some guys on the minimum scholarship, which is 25 percent and you gotta hope that they have a little bit of an edge because they’re not on as much as somebody else. Plus, you gotta get some academic guys that are on academic only.
“Then when they all get here, you tell ’em, ‘I don’t care how you got here and I don’t care if you’re on a scholarship, if you’re a walk-on or a recruited walk-on … if you’re the best player you’re going to play.’ We don’t care.”
Oh, and one other thing that plays a role in it, too.
“You get lucky,” he said.
That’s the recruiting part that is just a part of it. It means nothing if they don’t perform on the field.
“You gotta go back that up,” Van Horn said. “We have to do that every year.”
Van Horn has proven to be as good at that as anybody in the sport.
“It was an incredible ride, journey — whatever you want to call it — this season,” he said.
Simmering below the surface, though, is the fact that winning a super regional is not the goal of the team, despite the celebration after Monday’s win.
Van Horn is downplaying it for the players and the fans to a certain extent.
“This isn’t pressure,” he said. “Having two car payments, a house payment, a wife and three kids and having to come home and tell them you just lost your job … that’s pressure.”
His message to the team is really pretty simple and straightforward.
“This is fun,” is what he told them.
See, that’s a big part of what makes Van Horn so good. He’s well aware that just one team has gone back to Omaha after losing in the final there the year before.
That was Virginia in 2015.
And in case you’re wondering, the Cavaliers won it all that year.
