College Coaching Confidential: Who Is the Nicest Head Coach In The Country?
Image credit: David Esquer (Photo by Zac BonDurant/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
At the American Baseball Coaches Association convention earlier this month, Baseball America surveyed coaches around the sport on a variety of topics to get the pulse of the profession ahead of the season. The coaches surveyed work at a wide variety of programs, from blue bloods to low majors and everything in between.
Rounding out the survey was what I thought would be a fun question: Who is the nicest head coach in the country? What I failed to anticipate was how tough that question would be. More than any other, the survey participants agonized over this question.
“That’s one I’m going to be thinking about the rest of the day,” one said.
In the end, there was no clear winner. There were not even a handful of names most commonly repeated. That speaks well of the profession—and maybe poorly of my ability to design survey questions.
Anyway, here are all the coaches who received at least one mention. Some received multiple votes but none received more than three.
- David Esquer, Stanford
- Dan Fitzgerald, Kansas
- Jeff Forehand, Lipscomb
- Dan Heefner, Dallas Baptist
- Marlin Ikenberry, James Madison
- Jay Johnson, LSU
- Chris Lemonis, Mississippi State
- Scott Malone, Texas A&M-Corpus Christi
- John McCormack, Florida Atlantic
- Bill Mosiello, Ohio State
- Jim Penders, Connecticut
- Dizzy Peyton, Northern Kentucky
- Butch Thompson, Auburn
- Rob Vaughn, Alabama
It’s a wide array of answers, from several different conferences and parts of the country. There’s nothing to take from the list, really, except that these are all coaches who somewhere down the line helped out another coach or simply made being on the road or a conference meeting a little more bearable. College baseball is a results-based industry, but it’s also about the relationships and people as much as anything.
