Wayne Graham on one in all his signature gradual walks to the mound (Picture by Kendall Rogers)
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Although he didn’t have the win whole of Augie Garrido, the nationwide titles of Rod Dedeaux, or the staggering longevity of Mike Martin, there’s an argument to be made that former Rice head coach Wayne Graham is the best head coach in faculty baseball historical past.
However I can’t actually be an goal arbiter of such issues, as a result of I partially owe my profession to Coach Graham in a roundabout manner.
Rising up in Houston, one facet of my household was a Rice household, with two uncles and two cousins who had been proud college graduates. One among my earliest collegiate sports activities reminiscences was watching Rice get trounced in soccer by Air Drive in entrance of a comparatively sparse crowd at Rice Stadium in 1997.
The turnout at that sport was proof of a few issues: the profile of Rice, a extremely tutorial, costly personal college with a small enrollment and lots of alumni who had been as more likely to be working abroad as they had been to be working in Houston, and a protracted, lengthy historical past of shedding.
Rice soccer went from 1961 to 2005 with out making a bowl sport. The one Rice head coach for the reason that Nineteen Sixties to depart the job with a successful report is Todd Graham, who left after one 7-6 season.
The lads’s basketball staff has solely made 4 NCAA Event appearances in its historical past. Three of these got here in 1954 or earlier, and the most recent was in 1970. Ladies’s basketball has had newer success, with 4 NCAA Event appearances this century, however its 2000 journey to the tourney was its first.
Put one other manner, when Graham, affectionately referred to as the OG (initially used as a solution to differentiate him from Todd Graham throughout his yr at Rice) bought the Owls to the Males’s School World Collection for the primary time in 1997, the soccer staff hadn’t been to a bowl sport in 36 years, the lads’s basketball staff hadn’t been to the NCAA Event in 27 years and the ladies’s basketball staff had by no means been to the NCAA Event.
It was inside this backdrop of futility that Graham turned this system right into a juggernaut that gained a nationwide title in 2003, went to Omaha six different occasions, and produced MLB participant after MLB participant, starting with Jose Cruz, Jr., all the best way to Evan Kravetz, who simply made his massive league debut final week.
And I’m right here to inform you that I used to be enamored with this system as a preteen and teenager. It allowed me to put on my Rice gear with satisfaction, not simply because the staff was good, however the Rice model turned cool. Anybody who performed journey baseball in Texas throughout Rice’s peak beneath Graham absolutely recollects the staggering variety of journey baseball organizations that started utilizing outdated English lettering throughout this time.
But additionally, Rice was my intro to school baseball and I fell in love with the game. I cherished {that a} college like that would turn out to be a power by merely making the proper teaching rent and committing assets to this system. Alongside the best way, I found different faculties that had been comparatively nameless to anybody who wasn’t a university baseball fan, like Cal State Fullerton and Lengthy Seashore State — additionally had been regulars deep into the postseason.
I additionally cherished the quirks of the game that made it distinctive—the three-game collection each weekend, the midweek video games that each program treats considerably in a different way, the regional format (which on the time was even crazier than the present format) and the truth that its championship was held each season in Omaha, Nebraska.
With out that zeal, I don’t do that for a dwelling, and with out Wayne Graham deciding to tackle the large constructing job that was Rice baseball, that zeal would possibly by no means have come to the floor.
I began writing faculty baseball proper as Graham’s tenure at Rice was winding down, however I did have a brush with masking his groups after I briefly moved again to Houston in 2016 and was writing as a facet gig for a now-defunct faculty baseball weblog.
You gained’t be shocked to listen to that Graham was old skool in his method to postgame interviews. Moderately than rush by means of it on the sector, within the dugout or in an interview room, he invited folks into his workplace to speak. My first time masking a sport at Rice, me and one other reporter who wrote for a small publication tentatively went right down to his workplace, considerably anticipating to need to sheepishly ask for a while after the “actual” reporters had been accomplished, however Graham waved us in, and I took a seat subsequent to my now-colleague Kendall Rogers. He didn’t do this as a favor to us—it was merely a part of his course of—but it surely made me really feel like I belonged at a time after I actually didn’t.
I by no means had an opportunity to inform him my story, however that’s most likely for the higher. He didn’t strike me as a very sentimental kind, particularly not with the media, and I don’t assume he would have identified the best way to react to that info anyway.
Within the coming weeks and days, Graham’s profession might be recounted each in tangible methods, like wins and large leaguers, and intangible methods, just like the fringy gamers he developed into guys who bought a crack at professional baseball and the alternatives he supplied for lots of of gamers to get a Rice training whereas they gained an entire bunch of video games.
The late Invoice Walton was keen on utilizing the phrase “thanks for my life” when speaking with those that he felt had impacted him positively, each in massive and small methods, and I believe that matches right here.
Small position although he may need performed, thanks for my life, Coach Graham.
