The Davidson Wildcats are the darlings of this year’s college baseball tournament, and by rights they have no business being in the super regional round. But here they are.
Davidson is your new favorite college baseball tournament team
From a dangerous car crash to a team full of non-scholarship players, the Wildcats are on an improbable tournament run.
Jeremy Brevard-USA TODAY Sports
Davidson came into No. 2 overall national seed North Carolina’s regional in Chapel Hill as the 4 seed. They beat the second-best team in the country on the tournament’s opening day, 8-4. Center fielder Cam Johnson blasted in three RBI, and the Wildcats needed not a single home run to best their hosts.
In the first winners bracket game, they faced down hard-hitting, pesky Florida Gulf Coast, 2-1, in a game that doesn’t feel as close as the score would indicate. Slinger Evan Roberts gave eight stellar innings on the mound, earning just the one run and throwing 67 strikes on 90 pitches. Again, no homers were required to hand FGCU its first loss of the round.
After UNC beat FGCU to eliminate the Eagles, that set up the hosts for another date with Davidson, which, unlike UNC, didn’t have to play a doubleheader on the regional’s final day. All of the game’s scoring occurred in the fifth, with Wildcats right fielder Will Robertson getting a two-run hit in the top of the frame and the Tar Heels’ Michael Busch slapping a solo homer in the bottom of it. That’s all Davidson would need to finish off the No. 2 team in the land and earn rights to a super regional tilt with Texas A&M in College Station.
Outside of their performance on the diamond, though, Davidson’s story involves near tragedy and curious distribution of the team’s scholarships. Most — if not all — of this Wildcats team won’t be playing at the professional level, but that doesn’t matter, because they’re playing with house money every time they take the field the rest of the way.
Ace Durin O’Linger has his priorities in the right place.
O’Linger pitched eight stellar innings in the Wildcats’ regional opener against UNC, then came back for two innings of relief work when they beat them again in the final. He also threw 236 pitches in three days during the Atlantic-10 tournament the previous weekend. Just an absolute workhorse.
O’Linger has no concerns about pitching out his arm — indeed, he underwent Tommy John surgery not three years ago — because his post-baseball designs don’t include baseball at all. He’s already been accepted to a pharmacy postgraduate program at the University of Florida, after graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a 4.0 grade point average.
Skipper Dick Cooke was involved in a serious traffic accident in 2012.
In September 2012, Cooke was returning to Charlotte after a recruiting visit when a drunk driver slammed into the back of his Dodge Caravan at more than 100 miles per hour.
At 60 years old, Cooke has been coaching Davidson baseball for 27 years. In that time, he’d never won a conference title. That changed this year.
In those 27 years, Cooke had never been to an NCAA baseball tournament regional. That also changed this year.
In those nearly three decades, Cooke had never been to an NCAA baseball tournament super regional. That also changed this year.
Only three of Davidson’s starters are on baseball scholarships.
Consider the roster. By Cooke’s count, only three of his starters and 12 to 13 players on his roster are getting any baseball money from Davidson’s limited scholarship resources. The rest must find their way at a place known for its strong academics and cozy feel – with 2,000 undergraduates. But it ain’t cheap. Next year, it’ll cost $63,000 to cover everything.
“It’s a great product to sell,” he said of Davidson. “We’ve just got to find the athletes who are admissible, and can afford the product. Honestly, we have to have guys who overachieve.”
How to explain the fact that only three starters are on full rides and a handful of others have partial scholarships at one of the most expensive schools in the southeast? If may be that, given Davidson’s small size, it just flat out doesn’t have deep enough war coffers to sustain a full 11.7 scholarships for baseball — especially in the case of an athletics program lacking a major college football presence.
In any case, if the NCAA is looking for altruism and that vaunted love of the game, it need look no further than the Davidson Wildcats, who carry around this year’s lovable underdog persona, inherited from Coastal Carolina a year ago. Coastal, recall, won the thing outright in its first trip to Omaha, and in a year of firsts for Davidson and Dick Cooke ... well?
Go Wildcats.
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