• Welcome to BradleyFans.com! Visitors are welcome, but we encourage you to sign up and register as a member. It's free and takes only a few seconds. Just click on the link to Register at the top right of the page, and follow instructions. If you have any problems or questions, click on the link at the bottom right of the page to Contact Us.

Bradley baseball 2014

If going 2-19 last year resulted in extending the contract and boosting salary to among the top two in the Valley then don't be surprised if no move is made this year either.
 
Bradley just got swept again - this time by a sub-.500 Wichita team...
Bradley falls to 21-23 and 4-14 in the MVC and tied for last place in the MVC.
 
BU has lost their last 7, struggling at the worst time of the year, right before the post-season. They have lost their last 33 games in Wichita. Not even the Cubs have lost 33 straight in somebody's ballpark.
 
Da Coach said:
...Bradley ........go into the MVC Tournament with the #7 seed.
http://www.mvc-sports.com/baseball/news/2013-14/7355/2014-mvc-baseball-tournament-field-set/
Click to expand...

Bradley wins their first game of the MVC Baseball Tourney - there's still a ray of hope...
http://www.bradleybraves.com/ViewArticle.dbml?DB_OEM_ID=3400&ATCLID=209501078

btw - if the Bradley mascot, KaBoom!, appears at baseball games, Women's basketball, soccer, etc... - it makes one think he shoulda been given a name that blends with all sports
 
tornado said:
Bradley wins their first game of the MVC Baseball Tourney...
Click to expand...


Bradley's baseball season is mercifully over. After winning their opening game in the double-elimination MVC Tournament against Indiana State 6-2 on Tuesday, Bradley lost this morning to Dallas Baptist 6-5 to drop into the loser's bracket. Then they lost to Missouri State 7-2 this afternoon, and were eliminated.

Bradley's overall 2014 record is 24-27, but their record against MVC foes was 6-18. This is the 6th season, out of the 6 he has been at Bradley that Coach Dominguez has failed to post a winning record.

His overall record in 6 seasons is 127-163-1.

His regular season MVC record in 6 years is 31-95, and his MVC tournament record is 2-10, for an overall MVC record of 33-105 (0.239 winning pct).
 
we have a good group of players - would have liked to see them do a little better..........
- tough scenario to see them go out losing 15 of the final 18 vs. DI opponents, and 24 of the last 35 overall....
There's a fix needed here......... and the "ground rules" have been set already - let's see if we stick to them...

Meanwhile, ISU is in the Championship game again with coach Mark Kingston who was a finalist for the BU job back in 2008
Kingston's career record is 173-101
 
tornado said:
...
Meanwhile, ISU is in the Championship game again with coach Mark Kingston who was a finalist for the BU job back in 2008
Kingston's career record is 173-101
Click to expand...

The other finalist who was not hired back in 2008 was Rick Heller, who instead ended up a year later at Indiana State. Heller turned around a bad Indiana State program, and lead them to back to back NCAA appearances. He was the MVC Coach of the Year in 2012 leading the Sycamores to their first ever MVC title.
Heller won 131 games in 4 seasons at Indiana State, more than Elvis has won in 6 seasons at Bradley!
Heller's success at Indiana State lead to him being hired as the new head coach at Iowa last year. He took over a losing program at Iowa (losing seasons for 3 straight years), and he went 30-22 in his first season.
 
Dallas Baptist is a small (3400 undergrads) school that competes in ONLY ONE Division I sport - and they are in their first year eligible for the MVC conference race and tourney!
...all the rest of their sports are DII and some of them compete only in NCCAA (National Christian College Athletic Association)

seriously -- they have just transitioned from NAIA....they should have practically zero recruiting power compared to us, but they have built a great program that has won almost 300 games over the past 8 years....we need to get the name and phone number of their coaching staff and have a talk........
 
Dallas Baptist gets the MVC's automatic bid - they travel to Ft. Worth Texas to play Sam Houston State, then the winner of TCU/Siena if they advance - but it's double elimination to see who advances out of this Regional site.

Indiana State, runnerup in the regular seaosn MVC race, gets an at-large bid and travels to Bloomington, IN to face Stanford in their first game then the winner of Indiana/Youngstown State if they win.

Evansville, the regular season champion of the MVC gets completely snubbed and are going nowhere.
Both Indiana State and Evansville went 0-2 in the MVC Conference Tourney and were eliminated right away - Illinois State, who had a nice regular season going 33-21, then making a nice run in the MVC Tourney - going 3-0 to advance to the title game where they got edged by DBU - also got snubbed.

This sorta makes the entire MVC Conference regular season race AND the Conference Tourney a little bit irrelevant since the two teams they would have selected based on their RPI formula (Indiana State & DBU) are the only two teams going to the NCAA, even though Indiana State got bounced instantly and looked bad in the MVC Tourney. The team that surprised everyone and had a really nice run in the MVC Tourney (ISU) and the league's regular season champ are going nowhere!

Their formula for RPI placed DBU and Indiana State as the MVC's two best teams.


BTW -- looking at ISU's roster - they stock up on players right out of our back yard!!
Two of their 4 best hitters are East Peoria's Joe Kelch & Brimfield's Danny Dwyer... one of their top pitchers Will Headean is from Morton...
We do not have anyone we recruited from over in the B-N area at all.
...not to mention last year's MVC Pitcher of the Year Chris Razo from IVC ...who got National All American honors...
 
Da Coach said:
ISU obviously has success recruiting Illinois- they have 30 players on their roster from Illinois-
http://www.goredbirds.com/sports/m-basebl/mtt/ilsu-m-basebl-mtt.html

Bradley has only 17 players from Illinois, and 8 of them graduate this year.
Click to expand...

There are no teams from Illinois in the NCAA Tournament and Bradley's best player is from Minnesota, what's your point?

Kingston didn't suddenly bring in Illinois kids when he got the job, ISU has always had Illinois kids. Kingston can coach.

Heller can coach (Indiana kids when he was at ISU and now Iowa kids at Iowa).

Bradley has as much or more talent as most teams in the Valley.

The problem is obvious.
 
You can draw any conclusion you want, and you are welcome to state your opinion, which you hedged on.

But clearly there is plenty of Division I talent right here in Illinois. It seems odd to me that less than half our players are from Illinois. I could understand if it was because we are chasing far better talent from out of state, but our record the last 6 years does not suggest that.
 
Da Coach said:
You can draw any conclusion you want, and you are welcome to state your opinion, which you hedged on.

But clearly there is plenty of Division I talent right here in Illinois. It seems odd to me that less than half our players are from Illinois. I could understand if it was because we are chasing far better talent from out of state, but our record the last 6 years does not suggest that.
Click to expand...

If you want to compete for the mid-level D1 talent in Illinois you need to improve on 2 very important things.

1) Schedule - play someone. All players would love to play in the SEC or ACC. If they are not being recruited to go to those schools the next best thing would be to play against those teams. Playing Alcorn State, Northern Illinois, Dayton and D3 schools isn't luring anyone to the hilltop. Hardly a "championship experience".

2) Facilities - Dozer Field is awesome, but Bradley has no indoor practice facility. The other schools that are vying for the same players have great indoor as well as outdoor facilities.
 
Peyton said:
...but Bradley has no indoor practice facility. The other schools that are vying for the same players have great indoor as well as outdoor facilities.
Click to expand...

We keep hearing excuses on why Bradley sports are so bad....
we used to have a media that reported on how bad they were and held them accountable. - LINK

Sure I'd love to have top notch facilities but is it helping us in basketball?
...but....
The Peoria Chiefs have no indoor facility
the Cubs have no indoor facility
the Yankees have no indoor facility
...does ISU have any indoor facility any better than what we have available to us?
...what MVC team does have facilities any better than we have??

but if we absolutely have to have an indoor facility - there are several in our area that could be contracted...


as for other schools - the one we're discussing right here is ISU - and they do not have such a facility.
Their own AD is lamenting that they do not have an indoor facility.
http://www.pantagraph.com/sports/co...cle_e4a9b732-2636-11e3-b265-0019bb2963f4.html

Many Big Ten schools don't have such facilites... LINK (last paragraph)

Indiana State does have a such a facility but that's not what makes them good - it was the hire of a great coach in Rick Heller - that's what turned them around.
BTW - Here's the Indiana State indoor facility - look at it (LINK) it's not impressive - it's hardly anything that we couldn't find or develop in any number of buildings here in our area.
They just built it in 2011 and the year before that they were 35-19, the year before that 33-21, they were already a good team from good coaching before the indoor facility opened.
Even Wichita's indoor facility is barely bigger than the Mitchell Anderson gym!



I am sorry - the thing that has driven such a big percentage of Bradley fans away is this constant complaining, and excuse-making about why we are so bad.
We are bad in every single sport that has dumped their coach and hired a new one in the last five years!
And we are worse in all of them than we were before we had the outstanding new campus training and practice facilities!

The fans see through the excuses and that's why they've all stayed home and we see thousands fewer at recent basketball games, and why not many care any more about the other sports.........quit making excuses, and the people responsible need to get the job done.
 
tornado said:
We keep hearing excuses on why Bradley sports are so bad....
we used to have a media that reported on how bad they were and held them accountable. - LINK

Sure I'd love to have top notch facilities but is it helping us in basketball?
...but....
The Peoria Chiefs have no indoor facility
the Cubs have no indoor facility
the Yankees have no indoor facility
...does ISU have any indoor facility any better than what we have available to us?
...what MVC team does have facilities any better than we have??

but if we absolutely have to have an indoor facility - there are several in our area that could be contracted...


as for other schools - the one we're discussing right here is ISU - and they do not have such a facility.
Their own AD is lamenting that they do not have an indoor facility.
http://www.pantagraph.com/sports/co...cle_e4a9b732-2636-11e3-b265-0019bb2963f4.html

Many Big Ten schools don't have such facilites... LINK (last paragraph)

Indiana State does have a such a facility but that's not what makes them good - it was the hire of a great coach in Rick Heller - that's what turned them around.
BTW - Here's the Indiana State indoor facility - look at it (LINK) it's not impressive - it's hardly anything that we couldn't find or develop in any number of buildings here in our area.
They just built it in 2011 and the year before that they were 35-19, the year before that 33-21, they were already a good team from good coaching before the indoor facility opened.
Even Wichita's indoor facility is barely bigger than the Mitchell Anderson gym!



I am sorry - the thing that has driven such a big percentage of Bradley fans away is this constant complaining, and excuse-making about why we are so bad.
We are bad in every single sport that has dumped their coach and hired a new one in the last five years!
And we are worse in all of them than we were before we had the outstanding new campus training and practice facilities!

The fans see through the excuses and that's why they've all stayed home and we see thousands fewer at recent basketball games, and why not many care any more about the other sports.........quit making excuses, and the people responsible need to get the job done.
Click to expand...




I am not making any excuses, I am just stating facts.

I have coached kids that have gone to play in the SEC, ACC, Big Ten and have been drafted.

Kids care about facilities and who they play.

Bradley is competing against mid-major schools for Illinois baseball talent (not the Big Ten, Yankees or Cubs). If you don't have a place to work-out on campus and you don't play a competitive schedule, you will lose kids to places that do.
 
I know you are not - the excuses keep coming from the higher ups & the media...and I know recruits care about facilities...but didn't we just raise over $160 million and upgrade our facilities tremendously over the past decade? And it all started and was well underway in 2005-2008 not - just recently as a certain re-write of history seems to say.
http://bubravesblogger.blogspot.com/2010/08/bradleys-new-on-campus-arena-is.html
http://bubravesblogger.blogspot.com/2011/10/bu-fundraising-some-of-history-seems-to.html
http://www.bubraves.com/ViewArticle.dbml?DB_OEM_ID=3400&ATCLID=515906

plus....... our team plays in a tremendous stadium - a professional-caliber facility that has hitting cages under the stands and it is better than 80-90% of mid-major schools

then we have training, conditioning, and other on-campus athletic facilities that are outstanding and perhaps the best in the MVC - that recruits have seen and proclaimed were better than what they've seen in the Big Ten!!

so I guess if you dig enough for something we still don't, like a garage-sized, low ceiling aluminum building like this to throw pitches indoors....but why can't we do indoor hitting practice with the cages at the Ren-Col?
 
Peyton said:
If you want to compete for the mid-level D1 talent in Illinois you need to improve on 2 very important things.

2) Facilities - Dozer Field is awesome, but Bradley has no indoor practice facility. The other schools that are vying for the same players have great indoor as well as outdoor facilities.
Click to expand...
True that Bradley does not have a baseball only indoor practice facility on campus. But they do for baseball conditioning, weight training, and training room needs. In the past they regularly have practiced at the multi million dollar Avanti's Dome 15-20 minutes away in Pekin. This is far superior to most indoor facilities baseball teams in the Midwest have access to. Recruits are not dissapointed to see this kind of facility being used when weather is bad. Access is only needed half of January and February when it is too cold to get outside. Only negative I see is possible limited hours of use. Regular season games start around Feb 15th.

tornado said:
The Peoria Chiefs have no indoor facility
the Cubs have no indoor facility
the Yankees have no indoor facility
Click to expand...

These pro teams obviously don't need an indoor practice facility. They practice in Florida and Arizona before the season starts. Once games begin teams play for 5 or 6 months. They only have approx 180 days to play 162 Major League games. Off days are used for rest and not team practice. If somebody needs extra practice they use the home stadium. The weather is not an issue.



but if we absolutely have to have an indoor facility - there are several in our area that could be contracted...
Click to expand...

Right. They have used the Pekin Dome and the tunnels at Dozer Park on a regular basis in the past.

Peyton said:
Bradley is competing against mid-major schools for Illinois baseball talent (not the Big Ten, Yankees or Cubs). If you don't have a place to work-out on campus and you don't play a competitive schedule, you will lose kids to places that do.
Click to expand...
The Missouri Valley is consistently better and ranked higher than the Big 10 in baseball. Even true this year despite losing Creighton. On average the Valley players are better than the Big 10 players. If a kid is a mid major talent and he lives in the Midwest or North they aren't going anywhere near the top conferences which are mainly in the South or each coast. The Big 10 is not a top baseball conference. No question the schedule is weaker but it is tough for the Northern schools to schedule.

tornado said:
plus....... our team plays in a tremendous stadium - a professional-caliber facility that has hitting cages under the stands and it is better than 80-90% of mid-major schools

then we have training, conditioning, and other on-campus athletic facilities that are outstanding and perhaps the best in the MVC - that recruits have seen and proclaimed were better than what they've seen in the Big Ten!!



but why can't we do indoor hitting practice with the cages at the Ren-Col?
Click to expand...

True. I am sure this is what a recruit would see on a visit. Both fantastic facilities. IMO our facilities are plenty good and not the reason for losing seasons.


If you look up inside the Ren Col you will see the hitting cages. Not sure why baseball can't use them (full or part time). Have they ever been lowered? It would be easy to protect the floor.
 
I was just reading a couple articles on Louisiana-Lafayette...
they are a school in the Sun Belt - they have FAR less resources than we do...
their athletic budget is no better than ours (their athletic funding is 15th in the Sun Belt!!! and on par with most schools that do NOT have football - although they have to fund 80 scholarships for football),
.. their endowment is smaller, their facilities are not better and they are just NOW embarking on an upgrade of facilities that we raised 60% more $$ for and already completed years ago...

And yet Louisiana-Lafayette baseball is #1 ranked in the entire nation (they are 57-7!), and their softball team has consistently knocked off power conference schools (they are 49-9), coincidentally their basketball just had a 23-win season, and their FB has had multiple fine seasons and won a bowl game each of the past THREE seasons.

all I'm saying.....we need to look into how they do it and don't offer excuses.......
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top