Rutgers Coach Steve Owens On Being Underrated, Joining The Scarlet Knights

Image credit: (Photo courtesy of Rutgers)

In our recent Coaching Confidential piece, an anonymous panel of 90 Division I head coaches named Rutgers head coach Steve Owens the most underrated coach in the country, based on the strength of his work in a number of places, all of them smaller schools in the northeast.

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While he might be new to coaching college baseball at the major conference level, Steve Owens is far from a new name around the sport. He coached Division III Cortland State to four DIII World Series appearances in a five-year period between 1995 and 1999, took LeMoyne to four MAAC regular-season titles and three regional appearances, and most famously, turned Bryant into the dominant program in the NEC almost immediately after it moved up to Division I.

In being honored by his peers in this way, Owens is happy to receive recognition for what he has accomplished.

“I guess I’m appreciative of the fact that they recognize that I’ve done a pretty good job over a long period of time at relatively smaller schools in smaller conferences for a majority of that (time),” Owens said.

The track record is hard to argue even beyond the number of postseason appearances and how often his teams punch above their weight. Taking a wider view, Owens has never had a losing season as a head coach at any of his stops.

Given that he stayed at each school for at least eight years, that’s quite an accomplishment. Programs, particularly in smaller conferences, have a natural building and re-building cycle every few years, which often results in a team bottoming out for at least a year at various points before building back up. But under Owens, his teams have never required that.

For those reasons, Owens has been an attractive candidate for larger head coaching openings in the past, but he never felt overly compelled to make the jump until Rutgers came calling.

“Sometimes I feel that I haven’t been as aggressive as I could have been, because I’ve always liked where I’ve been and I didn’t do my job to get somewhere else, I did it to just do it at a high level,” Owens said.

So what drew him to Rutgers?

“It just felt like the right time,” Owens said. “The opportunity arose, and it was an opportunity to stay in the northeast and be able to coach in a really good conference, and just also be around big-time football and basketball, which is very fun to be in those types of college settings when those types of sports are being played. And to be able to take another step professionally, accept a large challenge, because the program hasn’t done well of late. Obviously, during Coach (Fred) Hill’s prime time, things were rolling and there were a lot of great players who came through here and a lot of team success.”

The potential is certainly there for Rutgers to be successful again. The Big Ten affiliation in particular is a huge deal. Unlike Le Moyne and Bryant, which, outside of extreme circumstances, were coming out of leagues that are always going to be one-bid leagues, the Scarlet Knights don’t have to worry about peaking at the conference tournament just to get a shot at the postseason. Simply put, in the Big Ten, if you do well enough in the regular season, you will be a postseason team.

Also, even if it’s not a talent hotbed on the same level as Southern California, Florida or Texas, there are a lot of talented players in the northeast in general and in the state of New Jersey specifically. That talent, combined with Owens’ proven ability to build a program, bodes well for Rutgers’ ability to do enough in the Big Ten to play June baseball sooner rather than later.

Owens didn’t get very much time with his team in the spring, as Rutgers played just 15 games before the season shut down for good, but he was already pleased with a lot of what he saw.

“I do feel that we had made some progress,” Owens said. “We had made some progress with some players. We had a lot of young players, in addition, we had a decent number of veteran players as well, and we went through the fall, got a lot of repetition in. Kind of sat back (and) didn’t get involved in too much change or instruction until we knew what we had, and then we were preparing for a season and trying to do the best we can. I think we had a chance to be solid club. We weren’t going to set the world on fire, but I thought we had a chance to be a very solid club with a lot of good athletes.”

Even though it was short, no one can say that Rutgers’ 2020 season was uneventful. Coming back from a series in Arizona against Washington State in early March, the team’s plane was grounded because many of their bags had been accidentally doused in jet fuel, ruining a lot of what they had brought along.

The season cancellation meant that Rutgers never had to deal with the long-term ramifications of having lost so much gear so early in the season, but it did manage to cause some issues right away, including the postponement of the team’s midweek game that next week against Saint Joseph’s.

It also meant that it was one of the most unique nights in Owens’ career, as he spent time out on the tarmac smelling gear bags to determine which ones had been soaked and which ones were salvageable.

“The pilot or co-pilot came back and called me up to the front. My initial reaction was that one of my guys had gotten in trouble for doing something,” Owens said. “I did the walk up to the front of the plane and then he called me out and said that there were some issues with the baggage, that in their final check, they had noticed that there was a fuel smell coming from a lot of our team bags, and that they were going to have to take them off the plane.

“That started a three-hour circus of getting all the bags off. They put them out on the tarmac. We were out there smelling them, deciding which ones had been damaged, which ones weren’t. There were a lot of people involved, and it was late at night, too, so I think they had called some other people in, and it was just kind of a really bizarre situation.”

As it stands, that situation will likely be the most vivid memory of the 2020 Rutgers baseball season for most. Owens hopes to produce many more pleasant memories on the field for himself, his players and the Rutgers faithful in the coming years, and given his track record, it’s hard to bet against him.