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By Bill Koch
GoBEARCATS.com
CINCINNATI -- The University of Cincinnati baseball team hasn't played in the NCAA Tournament since 1974. The program that produced Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax, former All-Star Kevin Youkilis and current major leaguer and All-Star Josh Harrison has managed only six winning seasons in the last 18 years and probably won't have one again this spring.
But what the Bearcats do have is an energetic, first-time head coach in Ty Neal who has instituted a plan to build the program from the bottom up, much the same way Mick Cronin rebuilt the UC basketball program when he arrived in 2006.
In his second year at UC, Neal has a roster that includes 22 freshmen and has already signed eight players who will be freshmen next year. The result so far has been an 8-21 overall record and a 2-4 record in the American Athletic Conference.
But those two conference wins were big ones. Last weekend at Marge Schott Stadium the Bearcats took two of three games from Central Florida, the then No. 6-ranked team in the country, providing the first glimmer of hope that Neal's approach eventually will bear fruit.
"With the state of the program now, in what I think is the early stages of something pretty good, when you attach a No. 6 ranking next to that conference opponent, it makes it a little more important for us," Neal said. "I think our guys know that they can beat good baseball teams because we've been in a lot of games and at the end of the game we either handed it away or a lack of depth caught up to us or maybe just our youth a little bit."
Neal, 38, was hired by former athletic director Whit Babcock after Neal had spent the previous eight years as an assistant coach at Indiana. His contract was extended through the 2019 season last July by current AD Mike Bohn.
Neal's plan from the beginning was to start over with freshmen and help them mature with the goal of building a consistently winning program. There are no guarantees, but he saw the same approach work at his alma mater of Miami (Ohio), where he was a pitcher and later coached; at Southern Illinois, where he worked as an assistant coach; and at Indiana, which played in the College World Series in 2013, the year he was hired to coach at UC.
"They were at the bottom of the barrel in the Big Ten when we got over there," Neal said of the Hoosiers. "Our first year there we finished last in the conference with the inherited team, which is the same as what we did here last year. It's very similar, with a bunch of freshmen we just threw into the fire. It's a development year. I want them as sophomores to be ready to help us win. This is the year of the challenges."
The Bearcats have a quality veteran to help show the way to the younger players. Junior outfielder Ian Happ, a pre-season All-American who has been rated as the No. 16 prospect in this June's major league draft by MLB.com. He's hitting .400 with seven home runs and 22 runs batted in.
UC has received solid starting pitching and is sound defensively on most days, but needs to improve offensively and stop giving away games in the late innings. To help solve the latter problem, Neal moved his top starting pitcher, Andrew Zellner, to the bullpen for the UCF series. The move paid immediate dividends, with Zellner saving both of the wins over the Knights.
Working in Neal's favor as he builds the program is the fact that Ohio - particularly Cincinnati - has long been recognized for producing talented baseball players. The problem is that UC has been unable to keep most of those players from heading south to play in the Southeastern Conference or the Atlantic Coast Conference.
Neal is hoping that when the Bearcats begin to win, perhaps as early as next year, those players will begin to more seriously consider staying home to play at UC.
"I think the product is here," Neal said. "I just think there's a lot of locals, a lot of families and kids from the state of Ohio and in the Midwest that are still waiting to see what's going to happen here.
"It's not real sexy right now for those local kids to tell their friends, `Hey, I'm going to go play baseball for the Bearcats.' It's cool for them to say, `Hey, I'm going to go play for Louisville or Georgia Tech or Kentucky' because those are good programs and they've got that ACC-SEC name attached to it."
Despite the long NCAA Tournament drought, Neal knew enough about the UC program to consider the coaching job here a good one, with a beautiful, 3,085-seat stadium to play in and membership in a conference that's currently ranked the fifth-toughest in the country.
"Everybody in college baseball knows that this is kind of a sleeping giant," Neal said. "It adds instant pressure, but it's a no-brainer. For me to land my first head coaching job at a school in one of the six best conferences in the country, it's like holy cow. For a first-time head coach, it's a dream job."
Even during the lean years UC has churned out some outstanding players, but Neal wants the program to be known for more than Youkilis and Harrison.
"There's been great players here," Neal said. "That's the double-edged sword. It's awesome, but in the same breath why can't we have really good players, great players here, and also win? That's the thing that I'm striving for."
Bill Koch covered UC Athletics for 27 years - 15 at The Cincinnati Post and 12 at The Cincinnati Enquirer - before joining the staff of GoBEARCATS.com in January, 2015 as featured columnist. Follow him on Twitter @bkoch.