Sept. 25, 2006
By Pete LaFleur
The Notre Dame baseball program had featured just five head coaches in a span of nearly 75 seasons – from 1934-2006 – but the Irish will be led by a new skipper in the spring of 2007, as Dave Schrage was introduced on July 18 as the 19th head coach in the 115-year history of Notre Dame baseball.
Schrage’s 19 previous years as a college head coach include 16 at the Division I level, most recently with an Evansville squad that ranked among the nation’s hottest teams in the 2006 postseason – as the Aces won the Missouri Valley Conference regular-season and tournament titles before reaching the NCAA regional championship round and earning a final national ranking of 19th.
Other previous stops in Schrage’s head coaching career – most recently at Northern Illinois (2000-02) and Northern Iowa (’91-’99) – have seen him mold unproven teams into record-setting units, with several seasons spent rebuilding under-funded programs while earning him top honors on the conference and national levels.
A lifelong fan of Notre Dame’s athletic teams and a former standout centerfielder at Creighton, the Chicago-area native now is set to accept a new challenge with one of the nation’s top baseball programs. Notre Dame owns the fourth-best win percentage in the current decade (.728; 324-120-3 from 2000-06) and the Irish are one of just 10 Division I baseball teams to advance to the NCAAs every season since 1999.
“The opportunity to coach at Notre Dame represents for me that dreams can become reality. I really feel that my philosophy in coaching meets what Notre Dame is all about in sense of mission – and that is developing the student-athlete not only as a player, but spiritually, academically, athletically and as a total person,” said Schrage.
“I’ve always been a coach who will try to adapt his style to personnel. In the northern climate, you have to have some team speed and I’ve always built my teams around pitching and defense. I feel like I’m really going to teach the game and make the team better on the field. I’ll do what it takes to motivate them to win.”
Schrage is highly regarded as a consummate student of baseball, contributing to his skills as a developer of talent and teacher of the game. His teams have been founded on pitching and defense while playing with a scrappy and aggressive approach that has helped build confidence and a winning tradition among his players.
Former Notre Dame head coach Paul Mainieri gave Schrage his first job in coaching when he hired him to his 1984 staff at Miami’s St. Thomas University (formerly Biscayne College).
After inheriting an Evansville team that had won only 22 games in 2002, Schrage guided teams that built on the victory total each season – culminating with the second-most wins in the program’s history (43-22) during the 2006 season. Evansville’s performance at the 2006 MVC Tournament included a key 14-3 victory over home standing Wichita State, with the strong season by the Aces causing longtime Shockers coach Gene Stephenson to concede that Evansville had become the “class” of the Missouri Valley Conference.
New Irish head coach Dave Schrage (right) led Evansville to 43-22 record in 2006, winning the Missouri Valley Conference title and a trip to the NCAA regionals.
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One week later, Evansville’s performance at the 2006 NCAA Charlottesville Regional left a profound impact on Virginia head coach Brian O’Connor, who spent nine seasons as Mainieri’s top assistant at Notre Dame. The Aces posted stunning double-digit NCAA regional victories over host Virginia and an NCAA-veteran South Carolina squad in the same day while advancing to an NCAA regional championship game for the first time in the program’s history.
“Evansville had the best offensive output of any team we faced all year and that regional performance showed coach Schrage’s ability in making his players respond to his coaching and execute his game plan,” said O’Connor.
“I played in the MVC at Creighton and to win the regular season and the tournament shows Dave’s ability to recruit and to get players competing at a high level. Having an understanding of what it takes to win championships at Notre Dame, I believe Dave has the ability to coach, communicate and get players to play the game the right way in order to continue the Notre Dame’s great success.”
Four seasons at Evansville have prepared Schrage for Notre Dame’s high level of academic expectations. Evansville – a small, private liberal-arts university – is rated among the top schools in the Midwest and is noted for selective admissions criteria. Schrage’s ability to recruit academic-minded players included catcher Gabe Bauer (currently enrolled in Notre Dame’s accelerated one-year master’s in accountancy program) and pitcher Zach Grage, who both received the MVC’s prestigious Presidents’ Award for graduating seniors with GPAs of 3.8 and higher.
“I think we need to have our players out in the community and I’ll be out in the community getting people fired up for our season.”
Schrage is one of just five who have been named MVC coach of the year three or more times, with the MVC rating among the nation’s top leagues in recent years. He also is the only individual to gain all-MVC baseball accolades as a player and later earn the league’s coach-of-the-year honor.
Evansville’s 78 combined wins in the past two seasons rank just outside the top-10 percent in all of Division I (34th, out of nearly 300 teams). Notre Dame is 20th on that list with 83 wins in 2005 and ’06.
Schrage’s standout playing career at Creighton included all-MVC honors in 1982 after leading the conference with a .400 batting average. He raised that mark to .433 as a senior while receiving 1983 Academic All-America honors and later returned to Creighton to work two seasons (’84-’85) with current Chicago Cubs GM Jim Hendry, who coached the Bluejays to the 1991 College World Series. Schrage coached in Australia during 1987-88 (with the Mt. Gravatt Eagles) and returned to direct the baseball team at Waldorf College (’88-’90) before taking over at Northern Iowa.
A two-sport standout at Chicago’s Fenwick High School – where he played basketball alongside the son of former Notre Dame Heisman Trophy winner Johnny Lattner – Schrage graduated from Creighton with a degree in business administration (’83) and received a master’s degree in sports administration from Biscayne/St. Thomas. He and his wife, Jody, have two teenage daughters, Kaitlyn and Brianne.
Schrage’s staff includes assistant coach/recruiting coordinator Scott Lawler, assistant coach Sherard Clinkscales and volunteer assistant coach John Fitzgerald. Lawler coached previously with Schrage at Northern Illinois and Evansville before pursuing the unique opportunity to serve as the associate head coach on his uncle Jim Lawler’s staff at Arkansas-Little Rock (Jim Lawler previously served 21 seasons as the top assistant at Texas A&M and is one of the nation’s most-respected pitching coaches). Clinkscales was a standout pitcher at Purdue and later one of the top prospects in the Kansas City Royals organization before spending the past 10 years in Major League scouting with the Atlanta Braves and Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Fitzgerald is a unique find for the volunteer position, following three successful seasons as the head coach at Illinois Tech.