Will Marietta celebrate as the first repeat champion since 1978-79, in 2012? We will know in May. Marietta athletics photo

Which NCAA team sport has gone the longest without a repeat national champion?

Answer: Division III baseball. And it’s not even close.

It happened so long ago that the last school to win consecutive D-III baseball titles, Glassboro State College, has changed its name twice in the interim. That college has since been renamed Rowan College and now Rowan University. Whatever the name, the last repeat D-III baseball championship occurred in 1978-79.

Excluding the D-III men’s volleyball championship that debuts this year, the nearest competitor to D-III baseball’s repeat drought among the 88 NCAA championship sports is D-II men’s basketball, which last had a consecutive title winner, Cal State Bakersfield, in 1993-94. For those scoring at home, that’s a difference of 15 years.

To put a finer point on it, 83 of those 88 NCAA championships have had a repeat national champion in the 2000s, including all of the other Division III sports.

It’s been one score and 12 years since Rowan accomplished the feat, so it begs a question: what in the wide, wide world of sports is going on here? Four head coaches who have won D-III baseball titles in the last five years try to answer that question.

The coaches mentioned the numbers game as a major hindrance to sustained success. Kean head coach Neil Ioviero's team won the 2007 national title, and he has a ready-made line when he has the ears of major leaguers and scouts on the banquet circuit.

“I jokingly say when you guys go to spring training, you only have to be one of 30 teams. In our division we’re trying to be the best of almost 400.”

Trinity (Conn.) head coach Bill Decker, winner of the 2008 national title, sees quality among the quantity.

“I think there are a lot of good Division III schools out there,” Decker said. “I think that’s why it’s so special to even try to get to a regional. In this day and age, it’s very difficult.”

Regionals are increasingly ultra-competitive. If a team wins that, like Kean did last season despite losing the regional opener, there are other considerations that often go overlooked, Ioviero said. Last year Kean traveled at 3 a.m. to get to the World Series, had the early practice time and played the early game the next day. The Cougars went 0-2 in Appleton last year.

“There was a period of a week maybe where our kids were up really, really early, staying up late – their bodies breaking down,” Ioviero said. “You get there and you’re excited that you’re there and you go on adrenaline for so long.”

Marietta head coach Brian Brewer thinks parity in the division is the result of amped up recruiting efforts, but he also cites luck as a major factor in winning a title like his teams did in 2006 and 2011.

“It’s just how the journey unfolds,” Brewer said. “But you have to get a little lucky, certainly, to win one. And to get lucky to win back-to-back years, you’re asking a little much sometimes.

“You know, baseball is baseball. The best team certainly does not always win. You can have one of those days where you go out and just hit line drives at somebody and it’s just one of those days.”

Illinois Wesleyan started 2010 with a 14-17 record. But after gaining entry as the bottom seed at the conference and regional tournaments, and by many accounts the longest odds at the World Series, history will forever say head coach Dennis Martel’s Titans won the 2010 national title.

“Baseball is the one sport where maybe the best team doesn’t always win,” Martel said. “Were we the best team? No. But we played by the rules. And they said if you win your league, you get an automatic bid.

“They always say the little guy can play in baseball, where the little guy is not really going to play in football and basketball. So, you never know. That’s probably what makes it so fun. But it also makes it difficult to repeat because of all those things.”

The central baseball axiom is that good pitching beats good hitting. It doesn’t matter what name is on the jersey, and that makes winning one tournament difficult, let alone two with regionals or three if your conference has a postseason tournament that you need to win.

“Even if you’re the No. 1 seed and you have a good [pitcher], they might have a good one,” Brewer said. “And we all know what stud arms can do. Teams play better behind them and obviously they’re good to begin with. So, you go into that losers’ bracket that first round of either the regional tournament or the World Series, and it’s pretty tough to come out of that.”

Ioviero, Decker, Martel and Brewer recounted why their teams became national champions and why they didn’t equal Rowan’s feat of 1978-79 the next season.

Ioviero’s teams play a certain style. It’s not a style unique to Kean, but you know it when you see it. It’s predicated on pitching, defense, speed and keeping games under control. The Cougars’ brand of ball is sometimes tested, like this season on a trip to southern California where some games against talented offensive teams got away from them. Kean doesn’t always win pitcher’s duels, but the style has proven successful come tournament time, when pitchers typically control the first day or two of regionals and the World Series.

“One or two things are going to take place at that point,” Ioviero said. “You’re either going to have more pitching to keep running out there to give you more of an advantage, which I think is a part of what we have, or you going to have tremendous hitters to withstand the good pitching that’s left and just put up lots and lots of runs.”

In 2007 Kean pitchers held the advantage over teams with tremendous hitters. Ioviero used just six pitchers to win four games and the title that year.

“In the World Series the last couple of years," Ioviero said, "we’ve let the score get out of our hands where we can’t control seven, eight, nine runs. We’re not set up to play like that, but in 2007 the score was always down, we got very timely hitting, our defense was good and that’s what I think put us over the top.

“Everybody’s usually lacking something or else everybody would win. My thing I always say is ‘Whatever weakness you have, at some point someone will exploit it at the right time.’ If you have a weak lineup, you’re going to run into a pitcher that will shut you down and you can’t do anything about it. Your weaknesses will show at some point. Usually the team that wins it is playing all phases of the game perfectly.”

After the 2007 Walnut and Bronze, Ioviero’s 2008 team was without two All-America pitchers, a Gold Glove shortstop and a record-setting first baseman among others. Compounding that, there were a few injuries. Like always in collegiate sports, it was a different team the next year.

“It’s just not the same group in that locker room most of the time,” Ioviero said. “You have to start with a new identity.”

Then again it’s sometimes hard for returning players to shake their indelible identity as an NCAA champion.

“I think the big thing is you don’t want them to get complacent because you can’t prepare for what’s ahead – I don’t really care what anyone says,” Ioviero said. “In our state we had a proclamation from the governor. We went to the governor’s mansion. You have all kinds of dinners and you’re getting recognized on websites, newspapers and local cable stations. A lot of stuff goes with winning it.

“I’m so happy that we at least had the opportunity to win one because you don’t realize how hard this is until you get there. The first year you win you’re like, ‘Wow, we can get back here and we’ll just keep doing this, we’ll keep doing' … but man, it gets harder and harder. You don’t even realize what you did the first time around. But at least we got one. They can’t take that away. Now we’ll just have to try to get two at some point.”

Trinity (Conn.) went on what Decker calls a “little run” to secure its 2008 championship. Chances are anyone who calls going undefeated into the season’s last day and finishing 45-1 a little run likes to keep things simple.

“One thing I try to do over the years is take everything one day at a time,” Decker said. “Obviously we all have to prepare for the next day and our futures, but just really concentrate on the task at hand. That was really the cornerstone for what we did that year. Play or practice today and move on and see if we can continue to have some consistency and do the same thing tomorrow.”

That consistency brought the Bantams back to Appleton in 2009, but a repeat championship proved elusive.

“Going back to our situation where we had our little run there,” Decker said, “in ’07 we went to regionals with a young team and in ‘08 made that run. In ’09 we went back to Appleton and we just didn’t play well out there. It’s a war; it’s a battle.”

Heading into 2009 Trinity lost the services of a future minor league pitcher, an invaluable relief pitcher and a two-way player among others from its championship roster. In fact, the Bantams used just four pitchers to win the 2008 tournament, and three of them were gone the next season.

“We really didn’t talk about [repeating],” Decker said. “I think every year is different. We had guys back from that ’08 championship team, but every year the chemistry is different.

“We had some guys back, but the dynamics change every year.”

Martel’s national championship at Illinois Wesleyan is the clichéd Hollywood sports story. A team overcomes long odds to win the title. Cue music. Roll credits. Or is it?

“Probably more than anything, we finally got everybody healthy,” said Martel, whose team had six comebacks in its nine wins after the conference tournament. “Before the conference tournament I painted out a scenario where I saw it could happen.

“Part of the reason is at the first game of the conference tournament and the first game of the regional, we’ve got the best pitcher around. We’re going to win. And our No. 2 was an All-American in 2008 coming back from Tommy John. So, I thought the biggest thing was we had pitching and we had some power.”

Of course that “best pitcher around” was Jason Pankau and the pitcher returning from injury was Brent Kulavic. The Titans began the conference tournament with a 19-19 record. Pankau and Kulavic combined to go 7-0 in the postseason and Illinois Wesleyan ended the year at 31-21.

“It’s just that thing: you let a bad team hang around long enough, they’re going to get you in the end,” Martel said. “Not that we were bad, but we weren’t good through the middle of the year.

“I tell everybody it was 19 days from the first game of the conference tournament to the national championship game, and everything we did was right. Everything we touched turned into gold. It was just a magical run that we went on.”

Magical Run II: The Sequel wasn’t meant to be in 2011, although Illinois Wesleyan finished third at the regional and lost, 7-6, to Buena Vista on what Martel called “a bad-hop single.” Just getting back to regionals was a relief for Martel.

“I actually told our team last year that I didn’t want to read, ‘The 2011 pairings are out and, by the way, the 2010 national champion Illinois Wesleyan did not make the field,’” Martel said. “But I was pretty happy. We made the tournament, we won our league, we finished third in the regional. So, I felt pretty good.

“I just wanted to make the regional and, by golly, we were pretty close [to winning it]. But I didn’t think we had the horses to even come close to repeating.”

Marietta eked out a one-run, 11-inning win over Otterbein in the 2006 regional final. Once in Appleton, the Pioneers got past UW-Stevens Point’s Jordan Zimmermann in the first game and romped from there on the way to its first national title in 20 years. That Marietta club featured two pitchers and a first baseman who went on to pro baseball, including current Diamondbacks farmhand Mike DeMark. The 2007 team returned to Appleton but went two-and-out.

“We were not nearly as good of a team in ’07 as we were in ’06,” Brewer said. “I think we overachieved, honestly, just a little bit just by getting back to the World Series in ‘07. So, you have to be realistic. I think our ’07 club did a fantastic job getting as far as they did, but we didn’t feel we were a national championship club at that time. We were just short on arms and not being as athletic defensively.”

If you didn’t hear, Marietta steamrolled through last season to win the program’s D-III record fifth national title. The Pioneers tied the division record with 14 shutouts, won by an average of six runs per game and ended the season with a 47-4 record. Each Marietta pitcher who tossed more than 19 innings last year had an ERA at or below 1.70, so the recipe for success had just four common ingredients.

“Pitching. Pitching, pitching, pitching,” Brewer said. “You’re only as good as the guys on the bump. I think we’re a pretty special club defensively, and I think we’re pretty fun and exciting offensively. But if you don’t have two guys that are top-of-the-line guys at the front of your rotation, and two more that are quality Division-III starters, you don’t have a shot. You just don’t.

“Offensively, we were a good team. And it’s not to take anything away from our offense because I think we were pretty strong. But our success certainly started with the guys we were running out there on the bump.”

Is 2012 finally the year that Rowan is not the answer to the trivia question? D3baseball.com poll voters seemed to think so as Marietta was the unanimous preseason No. 1 team in the country. The Pioneers have lost some games and the top ranking already this season, creating some doubt.

So, the million dollar question: can Marietta repeat?

“I think so. Absolutely,” Brewer said. “At some point we’re going to have to get a little bit lucky in this journey, but we’re just going to have to work hard enough and prepare well enough to where if we do get that call, bounce or hop, then we end up celebrating back-to-back national championships. But it’s certainly a long way off, and we’re not going to get there by talking about it.”

That doesn’t mean Brewer’s colleagues can’t talk about it.

“I’d like to be Marietta,” Martel said, “because if anybody in the last few years had a chance to repeat, Brian Brewer’s team does.” 

Minors spotlight:
The following are D-III alumni who will play at a higher level than they did at the end of last season, according to rosters as of April 8.

Triple-A: Grove City pitcher Erik Arnesen (Nationals).

Double-A: Linfield infielder Kelson Brown (Pirates), Trinity-TX/Chapman infielder Ryan Cavan (Giants), FDU-Florham pitcher Ryan Flannery (Yankees), Whittier pitcher Tom Vessella (Giants), Chapman pitcher Kurt Yacko (Rockies).

Advanced-A: Keystone first baseman Yazy Arbelo (Diamondbacks), UW Oshkosh pitcher Ryan Demmin (Nationals), Keystone infielder Eric Groff (Diamondbacks), Pomona-Pitzer first baseman Drew Hedman (Red Sox), Pomona-Pitzer infielder James Kang (Red Sox), Denison pitcher Aidan Lucas (Cardinals).

Single-A: Oneonta State pitcher Dave Filak (Braves), UW-Stevens Point outfielder Cody Koback (Red Sox), Neumann outfielder Gary Mitchell (Angels), Frostburg State pitcher Greg Ross (Braves), Marietta pitcher Mark Williams (Brewers).

Next week: The beginning of a conversation with the chairman.