Don Weir Field at Peccole Park in Reno on May 25, 2019. (Photo: Timothy Nwachukwu/NCAA Photos)
When T.J. Bruce was announced as the Nevada Wolf Pack baseball team’s head coach in June 2015 he made a bold promise.
“We’re going to compete for Mountain West championships and we expect to make the NCAA tournament and make it beyond just making the tournament,” he said. “Nothing other than that will be accepted around here.”
Bruce, so far, has backed up his promises. He’s won Mountain West regular season titles in 2018 and last year and brought the Pack to the NCAA Regionals last year, its first NCAA tournament since 2000.
Now, though, comes the hard part. The Pack lost both its regional games last year (7-0 to UC Irvine and 6-1 to North Dakota State) and has never won a regional in its five appearances. Going beyond “just making the tournament” might be Bruce’s toughest challenge of all.
“We’ll keep the momentum rolling,” Bruce said back in 2015.
That momentum hasn’t been as high as it is now in over 20 years at Nevada, when former coach Gary Powers led the Pack to four regionals from 1994-2000 and numerous Top 25 national rankings. The Pack had momentum in 2015 when former coach Jay Johnson led the program to 41 wins. But Johnson left immediately after the season (replaced by Bruce) to become the head coach at Arizona.
Bruce’s Wolf Pack was picked recently by the league’s coaches to win the Mountain West again this year and is ranked as the 50th best team in the nation by Collegiate Baseball.
The Pack will open its 2022 season on Friday at Grand Canyon in Phoenix and will play 10 road games before opening at home against San Jose State on March 11-13. Oregon State will come to Nevada on March 29-30 and Arizona will play at Peccole Park on April 28-May 1.
Bruce, who will turn 40 years old on March 29, was born just three months before Powers was named the Pack head coach in the summer of 1982. Bruce has a career record at Nevada of 142-142 over six seasons and has never finished more than five games over .500 since his first year at Nevada (37-24 in 2016), when he had the remnants of Johnson’s two teams.
Bruce, though, seems to be on a similar career path as Powers, who ended up winning 937 games at Nevada over 31 seasons despite going just 234-239 at Nevada over his first nine years.
Bruce, now in his seventh season, is the longest tenured head baseball coach at Nevada (other than Powers) since the program moved to Division I in 1970.
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YESKIE NOW AT TEXAS A&M, JOHNSON NOW AT LSU: Johnson will not make his return to Peccole Park in late April when Arizona comes to Northern Nevada. The former Pack coach left the Wildcats after the 2021 season to become the head coach at LSU.
One of Johnson’s assistants at Arizona, Carson High graduate Nate Yeskie, also won’t be at Peccole this spring. Yeskie, who spent two years at Arizona with Johnson, is now the pitching coach at Texas A&M.
Yeskie, who helped lead Carson High to the Class 3A state title in 1992 (the largest classification in the state at the time), also spent 11 years as Oregon State’s pitching coach (2009-19). He is widely regarded as one of the best pitching coaches in the nation and twice was named the National Pitching Coach of the Year by Collegiate Baseball while at Oregon State.
Yeskie will coach under head coach Jim Schlossnagle at Texas A&M. Schlossnagle was the head coach at UNLV from 2002-03. Yeskie pitched at UNLV from 1994-97 and was an assistant coach for the Rebels from 2005-07.
Yeskie, who got the final three outs of the Senators’ 10-6 win over Bonanza to win the 1992 state title, is one of the greatest pitchers in Nevada high school history. He was 21-2 over his last two years at Carson in 1992 and 1993, striking out 247 hitters. His earned run average in 1992 was 1.09 and 0.65 as a senior. He was drafted in the sixth round by the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1993 out of Carson High and in the ninth round by the Minnesota Twins in 1996 out of UNLV.
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DEGENHART NOT ONLY TOP FROSH IN MOUNTAIN WEST: Boise State’s Tyson Degenhart was given the conference’s Freshman of the Week award this past Monday for the seventh time this season.
The only other freshmen to win the award this season have been San Jose State’s Alvaro Cardenas and Myron Amey (one each) and Air Force’s Jake Heidbreder (one) and Ethan Taylor (four times).
The 6-foot-7 Degenhart, from Spokane, Wash., has averaged 8.3 points and 3.2 rebounds a game, with a high of 23 points against San Jose State. He scored just six points against Nevada on Jan. 12 with four rebounds.
Degenhart, though, isn’t the only top freshman in the Mountain West this year. Amey, who will face the Wolf Pack twice this week (Tuesday and Thursday), might be the most intriguing freshman in the Mountain West. He has only recently been starting and is averaging 8.6 points and 2.6 rebounds a game. He had 32 points against Bethesda (California) earlier this year in just 24 minutes off the bench and 23 points in 17 minutes off the bench against UNLV. He has scored 66 points over his last three games combined going into Tuesday’s game at Nevada.
Air Force’s freshman duo (both 6-5) have also been solid all year, starting every game for the Falcons. Heidbreder is averaging 9.6 points and 3.4 rebounds while Taylor is at 9.6 points and 5.1 rebounds.
Jalen Weaver (6-4), the Wolf Pack’s top freshman this year, has played just 46 minutes all season.
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FORMER FALCON BATTLING BRAIN CANCER: Ryan Swan, who averaged 10.6 points and 5.2 rebounds a game for Air Force for four seasons (2016-20), is currently battling brain cancer. The 6-8, 240-pound Swan played 103 games for Air Force (75 points and 29 rebounds in six games combined against Nevada).
Air Force wore gray uniforms and San Diego State wore black during San Diego State’s 76-64 victory over Air Force this past Saturday at San Diego State in honor of Swan.
“It’s kind of hard to hear a story like that about a guy you competed against,” San Diego State’s Nathan Mensah said Saturday. “Hearing the struggle he’s facing now is a bit shocking. People think we’re invincible or supernatural people but we are human just like everybody else. We are all saying prayers for him.”
Swan is currently undergoing chemotherapy treatments. “The hardest part of this thing was calling my mom and telling her I might never see her again,” Swan said recently.
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MOUNTAIN WEST ATTENDANCE DOWN SLIGHTLY: Mountain West men’s basketball teams have an average attendance this year of 5,948 fans. That is down roughly just 400 fans a game compared to the last season (2019-20) that fans were allowed into games (before the COVID-19 pandemic) without restrictions.
But just three Mountain West teams this year, though, are drawing bigger crowds than in 2019-20. Colorado State (up 2,500 a game), Boise State (up 2,000) and Wyoming (up 1,500 a game) have enjoyed the biggest gains compared to two seasons ago. That is likely because all three are getting rewarded for outstanding seasons on the court. Wyoming (21-3), Boise State (19-6) and Colorado State (20-3) are the top three teams in the Mountain West this year, according to the Nevada Appeal men’s basketball rankings.
Wolf Pack attendance (heading into Tuesday night’s game against San Jose State) is down nearly 2,000 fans a game compared to 2019-20. The Pack is averaging 6,804 fans a game this year after drawing 8,721 a game two years ago.
UNLV is down 5,300 fans a game this year compared to two years ago. Utah State (down about 2,000 a game) and New Mexico (down roughly 2,300) have also suffered big declines in attendance this year.
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