What Davidson accomplished this year is great considering it's a school similar to UR and it looks like the baseball team is even less funded than UR when it comes to scholarships.
They have similar challenges when it comes to academics, admission standards, high cost of tuition, and scholarship funding. We actually probably have a slight advantage over them in most of those areas bc UR is a little larger and seems to have more scholarships available. I'm not sure about financial aid but I suspect we are similar. They seem to have better facilities right now with a fairly new indoor facility but we could quickly catch up.
But lets not make them out to be some kind of juggernaut. This is the first time in school history that they have won 30 games. They have had 4 solid seasons in a row above .500. But in 27 years as HC he is still more than 270 games below .500 and has 21 losing seasons. 16 of those seasons he has lost more than 30 games including multiple seasons with 37 or 38 losses.
I have a ton of respect for what they have done in the last 3-4 years. But let's not make it out like it is easy for schools like UR and Davidson.
I still believe the only way we can be a perennial winner in the A10 and get back to making an impact in the NCAA regionals is if we go all in. It appears we are making that commitment to the facilities. But will we make that same commitment to other aspects like scholarships and admissions?
Sure there is always an example or too that you can pull out about a school like Davidson who has a good year or two every once and a while. But for every one of those you can find other schools with significantly more advantages when it comes to baseball than UR who are putting out winners every year.
Do we have the right coach? Not sure but I think the AD thinks so
Do we have the right facilities? Not yet but maybe soon
Do we have the support from admissions? Not sure but maybe we will be in a better situation once we get a new AD
Do we have the scholarship funding? No and we probably need to improve this
We need to change the answer to these questions if we want to become a great or even solid team year in and year out. We will always have a few disadvantages over some of the power conference schools and even some in our own conference (high admission standards, high cost, smaller student body). But we also have some advantages (better degree, nicer campus, smaller class size). It all depends on who the student is and what's important to them.
But we definitely need to close the gap on some of the controllable items like facilities and scholarships.
