Omaha, neb. – On April 22, the College of Charleston baseball team beat Coastal Carolina, and winning coach Chad Holbrook crossed the field to his car and watched the pirogue of the third base. Coastal Carolina players were on the bus and coaches had a meeting. Holbrook considers these coaches friends – they are separated by less than two hours by road and essentially share a beach – and when he looked, he thought they seemed depressed.
So Holbrook stopped.
“I said to them,” Why are you all so crazy? “” He said. “‘You have one of the best teams in the country. You will organize a regional region and probably be a national seed, and you are probably not going to lose the rest of the year.” “
Holbrook firmly believed the first three claims. But not to lose again? It was probably a hyperbola.
Twenty-six games later, Coastal Carolina has not lost and Holbrook seems premonitory.
The Chanticleers, on a sequence of consecutive victories, will face LSU on Saturday in the round of the Men’s College World Series championship.
Asked Thursday about this April exchange, the coast of the Caroline coast, Kevin Schnall, smiled and recalled that day, repeating the quotes almost a word for word. He challenged only one detail – that he and his coaches were from the hoof.
“We were disappointed not to play well,” said Schnall. “But we gathered more and we realized that we are on the same wavelength for the coming weekend.”
Schnall, 48, is precise. He is a first -year coach who spent half of his life as an assistant and leaves nothing to chance. He was an All-American for the Chanticles in the 1990s, replaced his mentor Gary Gilmore as a coach and reached these current summits by calculating everything, including messaging.
On Sunday, he became viral in the university baseball circles after his team beat Oregon State and Schnall made a duty to correct the members of the media who pronounced the nickname of the school.
“Everyone says it with me,” he said, his voice rising. “Shon-Tuh-Cleers!”
The previous weekend, he seemed offended by any label of Outsider after his 13th seed team swept the n ° 4 Auburn in Super Regionals. He declared that “it is not a story of Cinderella”, while reciting the history rich in the playoffs of the program, which includes 21 NCAA tournaments in the last 25 seasons and a national championship in 2016.
The weekend before that, he was not afraid to call Kevin O’Sullivan de la Florida a tyrant after a diatribe filled with explanive to the administrators of the site in the regional of Conway.
And for all this, he aroused respect for past and present capitals.
“I would go running through a wall for this guy right now, and I’m not even in the team,” said GK Young, an All-American from the 2016 title team.
As for these current players, the receiver Caden Bodine, the team’s main striker and finalist of the Buster Posey Award, awarded each year to the main safety net in division I, said that the songs had used the mentality of Schnall’s blue passes.
“It is very intense, but we like it very much, and we really get along,” said Bodine.
Young, in fact, sees a lot from the 2016 Coast Carolina in the current team.
“Location,” he said. “Do not back down, do not give up and is not afraid of anyone.”
But Thursday, Schnall played all these titles rendered for social media and deviated all attention to his team himself. While Schnall stood in front of a downtown training center in Omaha’s city center while Jay-Z’s “Empire” was beating in the background and his players moved with a goal in regimen, he rejected the idea that his players had something to prove, or that they were motivated by light.
“I have the impression that we did as much as possible to win the eighth seeded,” he said. “The committee did not see this in this way. Two of the words in which we live are” possessing it “. We have the 13th seeded and our guys have played very well.”
The Holbrook team beat Coastal Carolina twice this season, representing almost 20% of the losses of the Chanticers. Things just seemed good to them these days, he said. It’s baseball.
Holbrook was forced to stop that day in April, because he knew that the Chanticles were a special team and he thought that coaches should hear this – even if Schnall disputes that he was upset after this loss.
“We are all looking for this advantage to lead our team,” said Holbrook. “This button to support. And obviously, you can say that their players have crazy respect for their chef. He does a masterful job not only to drive them, but to motivate them and to do the back in a public setting. And the players love this.
“He is fired, guy. And he made his boys play.”
