Terps’ baseball coach seeks ‘different way’

It’s mid-July, and three weeks into a new gig, Erik Bakich glances about his workplace as if it’s his first time in the office.

Of course, it very nearly is. The business of building up one of college baseball’s most woebegone programs won’t occur with Bakich sitting in a trailer in the stifling summer heat of College Park.

This early-hour appointment is wedged into the schedule after weeks on the road, at the start of a day certain to end at a ballpark evaluating yet more players who might - just might - lead Maryland out of a four-decade stupor.

The Terrapins, after all, haven’t necessarily strived for excellence so much as relevance, year after year futilely chasing the school’s first NCAA tournament berth since 1971. Yet in the door walks Bakich, a recruiting maestro who was an assistant at Vanderbilt the past seven years as the Commodores rose from SEC doormat to postseason regular.

But isn’t Maryland… different? The Terps haven’t posted a winning record in the conference since 1981. Their home park is so snug that a visiting slugger once mashed six home runs - in a game. They haven’t reached the ACC tournament since 2005.

All of that, it seems, is B.B. - Before Bakich.

“There’s 26 other sports that compete for championships here, and it’s time baseball starts to join the party,” Bakich said.

If that sounds a bit like youthful pluck, Bakich is 31 and less than eight years removed from the day he showed up at Clemson with a car filled with training equipment and asked to become a volunteer coach. Then again, turning around a program he viewed as a sleeping giant when he played at East Carolina a decade ago is a vision those who know him are certain he can turn into reality.

“He’s just got a different way about him,” Vanderbilt coach Tim Corbin said. “He’s a good-looking kid. He’s a chameleon. He can talk to you, can talk to a banker, can talk to a bum on the street and make them all feel good.”

Long-term project

The long list of middling seasons are testament enough to the state of Maryland baseball. There could be just as many explanations for the Terps’ foibles over the years.

Only in the last couple of years did Maryland enjoy a full allotment of 11.7 scholarships. The school was a geographic outlier, though Virginia’s rise to an ACC power and College World Series participant put a giant hole in that theory.

And then there’s quaint Shipley Field, a hitter-friendly venue wedged into a prized slice of real estate at the center of campus.

Just more than two months after the last regular-season game under Terry Rupp - he resigned in May after the Terps went 27-27 in his ninth season - sand is strewn across the grass near the warning track and Shipley looks equal parts college diamond and storage facility.

The listed capacity is 2,500, but the park’s limits are almost never challenged: Maryland’s last crowd of more than 1,000 was in April 2006, 99 home games ago.

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