SUNY Niagara completes the long road to the top of JUCO baseball
· Yahoo Sports
When the ball fell into SUNY Niagara third baseman Mike Schaefer’s glove and the dog pile on the mound started, head coach Matt Clingersmith was in tears. They were not tears of sadness but happy tears as he thought about all that it took to win a national championship.
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The process culminated with a 12-8 win over Rowan College South Jersey-Gloucester, Wednesday night at the NJCAA College World Series. But, it started long before that when Clingersmith was first hired 20 years ago and tried to build the program into what it is today.
It even started before he was ever hired on as a part-time head coach at the junior college. It started when he was playing at the NJCAA level with Erie County Community College. He made it to the college world series as a sophomore hurler and learned what it took to get there. But now, over 30 years later, the journey is complete.
Clingersmith did not pave the road to a national championship overnight. He had to fall short and take his time building a level of sustained success.
“No one knows how hard I’ve worked to do it 20 years,” Clingersmith said. “I wasn’t full-time right away, so it was a lot of sacrifice, a lot of travel, a lot of miles on my car to recruit great players, a lot of hours spent in basketball gyms in the winter, 7 to 11, all those hours. So just tears of joy, more for our guys because they were there with me and they believed in me and their parents did.”
In Clingersmith’s first season, the program went 6-11 before having its first winning season the next year at 24-23. That was just the beginning for the Thunderwolves and their success. He reached the Region III tournament for the first time in 2008 and reached the College World Series for the first time in 2012.
The win completed a run for SUNY Niagara that started back when head coach Matt Clingersmith was first hired 20 years ago. HIs teams have always had success as evidenced by his 754-233-1 overall record, 94-38 record in the postseason and a 23-18 record at the NJCAA Division III World Series. But they had never won the whole thing.
“Every team is a little bit different. We’re writing our own story this year,” SUNY Niagara head coach Matt Clingersmith said. “Last year was unbelievable. I think that (2021) team set the path and gave us experience to that. … So I think that team set the tone for this and to get better players in the past and the upcoming years. You can clearly see they’re both special to me.”
The Thunderwolves runs to the national championship game have not come in years where they have been necessarily dominant. That has been the case in each of the team’s four trips to the national championship game. This year’s title came one year after SUNY Niagara won a then program record 51 wins and headed into the tournament rolling at 49-0.
In every one of the previous three trips to the final game, SUNY Niagara won significantly more either the year before or the year after the run. In 2011, the Thunderwolves went 48-11 before making it the next year at 39-22-1. The next time they made it was in 2017 when they went 47-10, one year after going 45-7 and one year before going 40-7.
That trend once again continued by taking a 34-11 record into the final game in 2011 before falling short with a 49-11 record in 2022. After last year’s perfect season being ruined in the college world series, it left Clingersmith wondering whether or not his team would ever win the whole thing. That question was answered by a team that Clingersmith said stuck together, even after they lost six games heading into the college world series, this year’s squad was inseparable.
Between 2012 and 2017, the Thunderwolves failed to make the college world series twice. But since 2017, the team has made it five times including this year.
“I had a vision that we'd get to the World Series. I never thought we'd win one,” Clingersmith said. “Obviously, we came close. We were three-time national champ runner-up, and then that started to become a reality. And then I was like, maybe it's not ever going to come for me. And then last year I thought we'd have it. And fortunately, this year’s team didn’t fold.”
Last year’s team were riding high heading into the college world series with the aforementioned 49-0 record having run through the Region III tournament while only giving up seven runs in five games. But then they faced Century College and lost 4-1 and they had to figure out a way to regroup, which they did winning the next two games before the season came to an end with a loss to Dallas College Richland.
This year’s team was tested earlier than last year’s team, they started 11-0 before suffering its first two losses of the season. They would suffer four more losses this season including one late in the season to Corning Community College on May 2, which served as a turning point in the season.
It forced the team to come together and live up to the team’s motto of “Forget about me, I love you.” on a daily basis no matter the obstacles they were facing.
Even though they were trying to make history, the players were not thinking of it like that. They took the proverbial rear view mirrors off and were just looking through the front windshield.
“We were focused on this year's team, not last year's,” sophomore Cooper Rossano said. “And we were just focused on getting the championship and focusing on our story, and not last year's being rewritten.”