Division III baseball has found a home in Appleton. What would the committee want to see from another potential host? YouTube

It was a pretty busy day of decisions and waiting and second-guessing and anything other than getting baseball games played on Sunday, and a lot of the off-the-field talk centered around the decisions made by the Division III baseball committee. So we sat down with Ben Shipp, the committee chair and head baseball coach at Mary Hardin-Baylor. We talk about the rain, the new look of this year's bracket and where the tournament might be headed in the future. And yes, about why we didn't get one game in on Sunday.

D3: What do you think about the way things have gone here so far?

Shipp: It’s going well. This is a hiccup right here that we really could have done without but this is my fifth series and we haven’t gone through one yet where we didn’t have to deal with weather. It’s just something that unfortunately goes with the championship.

D3: Does the new format this year put a different wrinkle in it?

Shipp: Maybe. If we have to go an extra day, we can. We don’t want to. The format does play into our decisions. The pods were adopted to provide us a more competitive championship series at the end. Typically when you have a loser that fights back coming back through, the last day in many cases is anticlimactic. They’re just out of pitching. We saw that with Emory – what a courageous effort last year to get there and their kids battled on the last day and they just didn’t have any bullets left in the gun. We’ve seen that in other years as well. So it’s important for us to try to get in two games today. Just like this decision – we have to use the best decision that we had on hand at the time, which is telling us the rain is imminent. So we’re thinking about this in terms of getting in two games, and not just one. If we did go with one, then we do get into messing up the design of the tournament, where someone is using pitching today and the other team is not.

We’re going to play as many games as we can today in the bracket, but obviously with the prep time, notification of the teams, it’s not a quick turnaround. Our thought process is to try to get in two games, and we think that will preserve the integrity of the tournament. The teams that are undefeated are the ones who would be off today, which is a reward for being undefeated. These two elimination games are the ones we really want to get in.

The home team pitcher was going to start warming up at 9:35. He loosens up and 9:35 and we play until 11:15 and get in three and a half innings, then they’ve lost a pitcher at a point in the tournament where they really don’t have any to lose.

D3: And you know this and the rest of the committee knows this because there are so many baseball coaches in that group.

Shipp: That’s right. We tried to make that determination based on the experience in the tournament and the coaches. That was our first thought, was to think of the teams, the kids, the coaches, the fans, and start from that and work our way up.

D3: In the regionals, teams are very amenable to moving up a game. This weather was anticipated. Is there any reason why they couldn’t have played at 9:00?

Shipp: It wasn’t anticipated at the time when we were making those decisions. We knew there was rain coming today, but if you think back as we were tracking the weather, they kept pushing it back, to a point to where the forecast was really talking about 8:00 this evening up until we stopped watching the weather when that last ballgame started last night. Late last night and then early this morning, that’s when the weather system began to change and intensify. When I got to the ballpark early this morning and met with the Timber Rattlers folks, now we’re talking about 11:00, 11:30, and it kept moving up. That’s when we went ahead and made the decision, even though as it worked out we probably could have played most of this (Frostburg State-Ramapo) game but at the time when we needed to make the decision to keep those pitchers from warming up, thinking back to the scenario that we’re trying to get in two full games, not just one, that’s why we made the decision.

D3: Bigger picture than today, you mentioned having a competitive championship series at the end. We come to this tournament without you guys getting the opportunity to reseed, and there’s no crossover game so there’s the distinct possibility that in any given year, the best two teams might be in one pod. Is there any thought for the committee after we play this out that you go back and evaluate, might you go back and say you have to go back and reseed, even using the seedings you’ve already created, to make sure there’s a balance between regional No. 1 seeds, No. 2 seeds, etc., who advanced?

Shipp: I think that’s a good point. We talk about seeding. I’ve been through four annual meetings that take place after the season in June and I think every year we discuss the fact that this is not a seeded tournament and the regionals are.

D3: But there’s some urgency. There’s a reason to fix it, because in the old tournament if the two best teams were randomly matched up in the first round, someone could theoretically come back around.

Shipp: You could. The discussions were still there. You guys keep up with the whole country. You understand the big picture and that there are teams everywhere that can play baseball, and they play it very well. We see it here. But in pockets of the country, there are people who say (I’m going to go back a ways) we’ve got Chapman and Kean in the first round, and in most polls, those guys are 1 and 2. That’s just not fair, we need to be seeding this. That has happened many times. So before we got to the pods system, we still had that. Even as a committee, we have the same reaction. I think it’s something to look at. We want to flesh this thing out. We think this rivals the Division I tournament. The bracket is the same, but it’s miniaturized because we play it in half the time, which I think intensifies it and makes it fun. But the difference is the D-I tournament is seeded. I know where you’re coming from and we’ll look at it again in June.

D3: Is that something that you guys as a baseball committee have sole control over or does that have to go through the Division III championships committee also?

Shipp: No, that is handed to us from other committees. Some of the other championships in Division III are quasi-seeded.

D3: Right.

Shipp: We will talk about that again.

D3: Seeded, but not published.

Shipp: Correct. So my experience before this in dealing with basketball and football when I was the AD, it’s always one of those things – how do you explain it to your fans, how do you explain that there is a process to it but it’s not published. We try to be as transparent as we can, but I’d like to get to a point where that’s a really public thing, so people can understand. It’s like a lot of decisions we have to make where we don’t have head-to-head competition. There’s always going to be misunderstanding and not enough information. We just want this championship to be of the highest quality. I think this committee is committed to not just going with ‘this is the way it’s always been.’ This year we were able to get the opening ceremony as opposed to the banquet, which I thought the committee did a good job of breathing a little fresh air into it. I think the kids enjoyed the fireworks, things like that. The new pods, I’m hoping that at the end of this tournament we look at it and we’ve had a great championship two out of three and it was positive, the work that went into it to develop it.

Emory was one of three South Region teams that reached the Division III World Series. If the committee had bracketed the regionals the way they used to, it's likely two of those teams would be sitting at home this week. Photo by Steve Frommell, d3photography.com

D3: You guys moved a lot of teams around for regionals this year. Was this intentional and is this something you expect to be able to continue?

Shipp: We did it to probably a more limited point last year. We moved some folks around. We saw one of the impacts last year, taking Baldwin Wallace and moving them over to the Mid-Atlantic, which is traditionally one of our toughest regionals. They came through there and won and I think maybe they were the No. 4 seed in the Ohio Athletic Conference tournament. (Ed note: Indeed, they were.) They still got in and fought their way through, which is one of the beauties of these tournaments. That just reinforced our feelings about trying to get those best teams out there, get them away from traditional teams in their region. Being able to take Pacific Lutheran and move them to Georgia was just great. It worked out for us. They were thrilled to be over there. They just had a great time. And they said most of their kids would never go to Georgia in their lifetime, never see Atlanta. We still had, within the West, we still had a lot of the traditional teams. But we were able to bring over Millsaps, which kind of changed the mix a little bit. I also think some of the things that we did in New England, I thought were good.

I think the parents and the kids and the coaches and the administrators that are not privy to everything that goes on in the selection process, they look at it and they (compare it to D-I basketball). We can’t replicate that. But if we can take traditional rivals and maybe move them to different regions, that helps. Every year there’s always a chance to spice things up a little bit and get some new teams in. We had some interesting things with Salisbury and Frostburg being at the very northern tip of the South Region that it really worked out better to move them. They saved us two flights because we would have had to have flown them to Atlanta. And really, I think they enjoyed going where they went, and made an immediate impact on the field, obviously. And it opened up the South. We could have had Emory, Salisbury and Frostburg all in the same regional, and look at the difference it would have made up here at this tournament.

I anticipate that we’ll continue to try to mix it up the best we can. I think it’s good. I think it keeps it fresh. If you’re in the same region with say, Kean, we’ve seen them here almost every year I’ve been on the committee. I’d hate to think I was coaching somewhere and I had to play in the same regional with them year in and year out and that was my only route to getting into the series, that nobody was every looking and saying, ‘Poor old Ben’s down there and he finishes second to Kean every year. Maybe we’ll give him a chance to move somewhere else.’ We just think it’s good for the game and good for the division.

D3: The championship has been here for 16 years. If someone’s looking to bid to host this championship, what’s the committee and what’s the NCAA looking for?

Shipp: Couple of things. One, we want a facility that is appropriate for the championship itself, so a nice facility, seating that will handle the crowds that we have. Obviously this stadium more than handles it. You also need to demonstrate good community support, because it really does take the community to put this together, the local organizing committee dealing with host families; enough hotel space, restaurant space and staff to be able to handle it. I think we are here for three more years before it comes back up again. We’ve had a couple of other places but I don’t think everybody understands the enormity of this undertaking. You’re talking about an eight day ordeal, essentially, when you have teams come in, going then all the way to the finals, all the events that go on. That’s kind of the way it is. We see it in Salem and other places that have had it for a long time. They understand the process. We’re always open to it.

D3: A more central location, better for fan support, better for accessibility – are those things factors? Obviously the facility where the kids play is the most important but how about being able to get more fans here?

Shipp: It’s a really good point, a good line of thought. When we were an NAIA school, a lot of our championships were played in Tulsa, in Oklahoma City. And that was great because that is more accessible, more people could drive there. Any time when you’re on an extreme end of the map, it creates problems.

D3: Central on the Division III map, rather than the national map.

Shipp: Yeah, which generally speaking is east of the Misssissippi, mostly north of the Mason-Dixon and on over toward Texas. That would make life certainly different. I think a lot of people could drive there. I don’t know exactly where that would be on the map, probably around Kentucky, somewhere in there. If you are centralized, that would help, but you have to have a Division III presence. That’s why Wisconsin works well. A lot of these programs are long-term, well-established, lot of national champions up here, so a lot of the schools in the area are familiar with NCAA championships. All of the championships work well in Wisconsin and there are probably other regions in the country where you would have a similar kind of thing. I’m biased, I’m on the committee, but I think this championship is getting better, and Division III baseball is getting better. Not the quality of the top end talent, but the number of teams that are getting better, the number of teams that are challenging at the regional levels. We see some new faces that are coming here and some that haven’t been here in a little while. And there were a couple of other teams, top seeds, that were close to not getting here, that were challenged in the regional. I’m excited about the future of Division III baseball and this championship because I think baseball is getting better in Division III. There’s a lot of schools now that are getting turf facilities, that are able to play through that tough March weather, and I think it’s beginning to show up. The selection was brutal this year. It was hard. There were some teams left off that have legitimate arguments. A 64-team field would certainly make things much nicer, but even at 64, the people at 65, 66, 67 would have an argument.

Ramapo was an at-large team in the tournament field. And Rutgers-Camden, a team that beat the Roadrunners all three times they met, would surely have loved the chance to be the 57th NCAA Tournament team. Photo by Steve Frommell, d3photography.com

D3: Instead of 64, let’s talk about 58 for a second. I think people understand why 57 teams isn’t possible, because those seven-team regionals just are messy, but if I count it up, I have 374 teams who were eligible this year. We’re just a couple of teams away from getting 377, which is what we’d need in order to have 58 teams in the playoffs. How long after that do we get the 57th and 58th playoff teams?

Shipp: I haven’t been through an increase. I don’t know how long it would take to do that. We’re on a tri-annual budget but I don’t think it would take a lot to do that. It’s not a big increase. I don’t know that the access ratio is tied to the budget. Obviously the access ratio helps the NCAA project their budget and to allot money for it, but I don’t think they’re that closely tied. If that goes through, I don’t think it would take that long to increase that.

D3: You see softball the past couple of years, obviously they’re not quite at 64 teams yet, but they have this extra week of the tournament and this super regional format. As a baseball coach and a committee chair, what do you think of this format?

Shipp: It’s good. We have talked a lot about that format. We’ve talked through the years about selections  in football, primarily, when I was in my other job, but I don’t like to tie conversations to money because I think it gets misunderstood. There are a lot of people out there who think our selections are tied to money. The selections aren’t tied to money, but the travel is tied to money, who people play. That’s unfortunately why sometimes you have to play somebody that you’ve already played two or three times.

D3: You guys in Texas know that more than anybody.

Shipp: The Texas bowls. But I think when we look at what softball did, because the summer they got that voted in, we’re all meeting at the same time, so we heard what they had done, and we were thinking that was going to cost so much money. Well, it turns out it costs a lot less money.

D3: And that’s because you’re traveling fewer teams that first weekend?

Shipp: Because you cut down on the flights. That’s the deal. If we were able to cut out X number of flights, it might be conceivable for the baseball committee to look at that and say, ‘maybe we need to propose that we go to regionals, super regionals, and actually if we went up to 64, we’d save money.’ You’d actually save money by going beyond the access ratio. That gets us back to the conversation we had about budgets. Is the access ratio that closely tied to the budget or is it philosophical? I don’t know, I’m not on the Management Council or Presidents Council. They’d never let me get that far!

D3: You had VP in your title!

Shipp: I was, I was. But not now. But I think it is intriguing to look at. The down side of it is, if we take this year’s bracket and we do that, is it possible to have no flights in the first round? It’s pretty close. It would be minimal flights. Then we’d have to say, what would we do with the teams that are here? Would we have left Frostburg and Salisbury in the regionals that we put them in? Would we have picked someone that close to them rather than put them in the South? Those are the kind of things, as we talk about this, if we think this is a good field, which we do, how would it affect it? Would we say that we would need to find someone within driving distance within the South Region for those two teams to play? Obviously we would have left Pacific Lutheran in the northwest and they would have paired up with somebody up there.

D3: They would have played the same teams they’ve already played.

Shipp: It’s always the same thing. When you’re on the extremes, when you’re talking about the South and the West, and the West being really two regions, that’s what you get into. You would have a Texas championship and something out on the West coast. And that’s what it boils down to. Obviously for the whole membership, I think people would certainly like that. It’s intriguing but there’s a lot of things that would have to go into it. That access ratio has been a hard ceiling. Those are just things that will pose this summer.

D3: And in the West, I think you really have three regions. You have Southern California, you have Texas and you have the Northwest. I think when you look at the West, you’re always going to have to fly somebody. Back when this championship started, Cal State Stanislaus is playing a five-game series instead of a double-elimination tournament.

Shipp: When you look at it, what you have is instead of eight tournaments, you have 16 tournaments. How do you space 16 tournaments out, which is a pretty cool concept. And it works. As a member of the West, as a chair of the West, I would like to see it be possible to perhaps play the teams you traditionally play in the first weekend, but then maybe we can mix it up in the second round.

D3: Since you’re going to have to fly anyway.

Shipp: So instead of flying Concordia to McMinnville, maybe we fly them to Cortland, N.Y. Or fly Cortland to Atlanta, some non-traditional matchups that really in Division III that would be the only time you’d see these people play each other.

D3: In a lot of other sports over the past couple of years, they’ve realigned their regions. Sometimes they’ve renamed them to be in line with other sports and shifted some conferences from one region to another. But baseball is kind of an odd duck there – you have some different alignments, your regional names aren’t the same as everyone else’s. Is there any talk in the baseball community about trying to line up with that?

Shipp: We haven’t talked about that specific model. I think where we have gone that is perhaps separated a little bit, is we’ve tried to keep conferences together. It wasn’t too long ago that in the SCAC, Trinity was in the West and the rest of the conference was in the South. That’s the same thing that we had a little bit with Salisbury and Frostburg, in their conference, is that we tried to keep them together. When we kept them together and then tried to balance the numbers within their region – and more teams play basketball than play baseball, so it throws us a little bit off, so that’s why the West and the South mess things up – that’s why we haven’t gone that route because our balance doesn’t allow us to do that.

D3: How do you guys deal with a team that doesn’t get to 40 games? I know there’s a lot of places where the weather doesn’t make it feasible to play 40 games, but a conference tournament might take place in the middle of April, and the team doesn’t play again. Obviously I’m thinking of a specific team but I’d like to talk more about the big picture.

Shipp: I think we want teams to continue to try to improve their stock. There’s a lot of reasons why teams play athletics on their own campuses. Our concern is about the championship, so when we look at teams, we want to see what are they doing to try to get here. But there are also individual situations where school calendars, school budgets, a lot of those things, don’t allow for 40 games. We just want to see teams improve their stock.