This bold strategy helped K-State baseball reach its first NCAA Regional in a decade
Kansas State baseball coach Pete Hughes remembers what happened on Selection Monday last year for all the wrong reasons.
The Wildcats missed out on an invitation to the NCAA Tournament by the slimmest of margins. They were snubbed even though they won 35 games and finished with a winning record in Big 12 play.
Why? There is always plenty to blame when bad things happen, but the consensus was that the experts in charge of selecting the 64-team field didn’t think K-State played a difficult schedule.
It was a painful way for K-State to end the 2023 season.
In fact, the snub bothered Hughes so much that he spent the rest of that week on his phone calling up quality teams all over the country to see if they would play the Wildcats in 2024. He wasn’t going to let a weak schedule hurt his team again. So he offered to play Tennessee, Clemson, Connecticut, Missouri State and Northeastern ... all on the road. Anything to boost K-State’s RPI numbers.
His bold scheduling strategy left K-State playing 20 games against teams that made the NCAA Tournament this season, including matchups with four teams that are hosting a NCAA Regional this week — Clemson, Tennessee, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State.
No one knew for sure if the Wildcats would be up for that kind of challenge, but they responded with 32 wins. And that was enough to earn them a spot in their first NCAA Regional since 2013. This year, Selection Monday was a happy occasion.
“I was pretty excited. I wanted to jump out of my shoes,” K-State infielder Kaelen Culpepper said. “This is the first regional that I am ever getting to go to, so there was a lot of energy and a lot of emotions.”
This trip to the postseason might not have been possible without the grueling schedule that Hughes put together.
“I got a great group of guys who took on the challenge of that schedule and the travel that came with it,” Hughes said. “It just wears you out physically, it wears you out academically and then you ask them to play 56 games on top of it. But not one of my guys ever complained about that schedule, as grueling as it was, because they never lost sight of the big picture and in what that schedule would allow us to do with the right group of guys.
“It put us in position to play in June and hopefully get hot.”
Now he is hoping that playing big boys all year long will also help the Wildcats when they head to the Fayetteville (Arkansas) Regional against No. 1 seed Arkansas, No. 2 seed Louisiana Tech and No. 4 seed Southeast Missouri State.
The Wildcats will open play against Louisiana Tech at 7 p.m. on Friday.
K-State is not favored to advance to a Super Regional, but the Bat Cats won’t be intimidated when they arrive in Arkansas later this week. Sure, beating teams like the Bulldogs and Razorbacks won’t be easy, but it won’t be any harder than playing road games against Clemson and Tennessee.
Culpepper says his energy level “is at an all-time high” heading into these games.
“A lot of guys on this team have never been to a regional before,” Culpepper said. “So I think we’re just excited for the opportunity. We don’t really know what to expect, so we’re just going to go out there and have fun and soak it all in.”