Maryland baseball has been pretty dismal; offhand, I don't remember them (and despite my designation as a Maryland fan, the Terps are "them" and LSU is "us") making even the ACC tournament over the past several years. Lots of reasons, including other sports (Lax, soccer) competing for the men's scholarships available after football and hoops. Maryland didn't fully fund the limited baseball scholarships until a couple of years ago.

In any event, they have hired Erik Bakich from Vandy. As a college sports fan who supports Maryland as my local team, the lack of any credible baseball has been a sore spot here.

Any thoughts on whether Bakick can turn it around? Florida St, Miami, GaTech, Wake, and more recently UNC and Viriginia have had good programs, but there should be at least some talent in the Washington, Baltimore and New Jersey/Penn areas where the Terps recruit in other sports.

Here are some bits of the Maryland press release; amazingly, this was dated June 29 and they only sent it to the Terrapin Club (TAF equivalent) yesterday along with others bits about women's tennis and fundraising golf tournaments; that shows a little bit of how little baseball has mattered:
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COLLEGE PARK, Md. - Vanderbilt assistant Erik Bakich has been hired as the University of Maryland's new head baseball coach, Director of Athletics Deborah A. Yow announced Monday, becoming the program's sixth head coach in its 116-year history. [snip]

Bakich spent the last seven seasons with the Commodores, where he established himself as one of the best recruiters in college baseball, hauling in top-25 classes all seven years in Nashville, including the top-ranked national class in 2005 and second-ranked national class in 2008. [snip]

"I am eager to attack the recruiting trail and start building a winning baseball tradition at Maryland. There are numerous parallels between Maryland and the Vanderbilt of seven years ago. Much like Vanderbilt, our first goal will be reaching the ACC Tournament and eventually becoming a perennial College World Series contender. [snip]"

In addition to his duties as recruiting coordinator, Bakich trained the Commodores' outfielders and served as a hitting coach. [snip]

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By the way for Chicken, your targeted advertising is pretty good. I was greatly surprised to find something asking me to buy Maryland football season tickets on this site. Impressive. I will let the Terrapins Sports Marketing folks know that they should up the budget for whatever led to that!

This post was edited on 7/16/09 at 10:52 am