I caught up with Rick Jones on the phone Friday afternoon before he was inducted into the Tulane Hall of Fame. As always, he had plenty to say, although we stayed away from anything about the current team (at least on the record) because he admitted he does not know Travis Jewett well and is so close to Andy Cannizaro and Jake Gautreau at Mississippi State.
I've said several times that Jones is the greatest coach in Tulane history in any sport if you take his entire record into account. Here's what he had to say:
What is the feeling like to be going in the Tulane Hall of Fame?
“Obviously it’s a great honor, and it really reflects on the players and the support staff I had for all those years. Some of the great assistants I had, I was very fortunate to have a lot of support from the administration and the coaches and I had a lot of great players over the years. A lot of them already are in the Hall of Fame and some more will go in in the years to come. It’s an honor to be associated with them.”
You took over what had been a good program under Joe Brockhoff and turned it into a great program. What was the hardest part in the process?
“Well, the first club I had in ’94 had all coach Brockhoff’s guys, and they embraced us. I really thank coach Brockhoff and coach (Milt) Retief because they made that transition for me a lot easier with those players. We had 41 wins that year and went to the NCAA tournament when it was only a 48-team field. That sort of set the tone, and then I had Brian Cleary, who went on to be the head coach of Cincinnati, and Jim Schlossnagle, and we embarked on a national recruiting plan because obviously (LSU) coach (Skip) Bertman had a corner on the market in the state of Louisiana. We went national and signed 19 guys that year and it was the first ranked recruiting class that Tulane had ever had. That gave us a springboard to being good enough long enough where all of a sudden the guys like Michael Aubry or Nick Bourgeois would want to come to Tulane. Then we started getting some in-state players that were blue chip guys, but we had to be good enough long enough.”
You made two regionals in your first four years, then it was nine straight from 1998 to 2006. How much pride do you take in that?
“Obviously it’s something we look back on with a lot of pride, and we were able to again, I go back to I had Schlossnagle for eight years and Mark Kingston for seven, so that’s 15 years of two guys, one’s now the head coach at South Carolina and the other one has obviously one of the elite programs at TCU. We were able to do some things. When I came from Georgia Tech—I had been the recruiting coordinator there—and coach (Jim) Morris and I left within six weeks of each other. He went to Miami and I came to Tulane, but we left a school that was No. 1 in the preseason and national runner-up. I knew everybody in the country as far as having been the recruiting coordinator. I knew all the better players and also I knew who were really the good assistant coaches were, the guys that I really wanted to work with and work for me if I had a chance to be a head coach. It was nine years (of making regionals in a row), but tat one year we won the conference regular season and were left out (or it would have been 11 in a row).
“The point is that I had some really good people working for me and we were able to establish a consistent base that allowed us to attract some of the better players not only in the state of Louisiana but throughout the country and when you start talking about guys like a Brian Bogusevic or a Micah Owings, that allowed us to go from regional to national prominence.”
The Holy Grail in college baseball is getting to Omaha, and you did it twice. That 2001 year, beating LSU at Zephyr Field for the super regional, what did that mean? It was something that has not happened in any sport at Tulane very often.
“I’ll say this tonight in my address, and I’ve had time to write it down. I’ll go a little bit longer than they want me to because there are so many people I want to thank but we had so many teams that I’m really fond of, and I’m not going to single them out but if somebody asks me something that will really make me break out in a big smile, it would be when the ball settled in Matt Groth's glove on June 3 at Zephyr Field. I think that still ranks as one of the greater sports events in the state of Louisiana. When you think about all the storylines—playing LSU, coach Bertman’s last game, Zephyr Field had just been built and the crowds. We had to have the state police move the crowds just to get us off the buses. There were probably about 5,000 people sitting in the parking lot watching it on television, and it’s still the highest TV viewership for people who couldn’t watch who did watch it. It’s one of those things I’ll always remember.
“All I can think about is the night before, after we won game 2, we lost the first one in extra innings and won game 2, we were in the old Fairmont Hotel, now it’s the Roosevelt, and I’m in suite and I couldn’t sleep. I just kept pacing the floor thinking tomorrow will change forever or we go back to where we were. It was one of those things that really put our program in a different perspective.”
When you lost the opening game of the super regional in heartbreaking fashion, a lot of fans went into that here-we-go-again mode of coming up short against LSU. Did that make winning the next two games even sweeter?
“Actually, we hit for the cycle in game 2 with the first four guys. (Jon) Kaplan homered and then Andy (Cannizaro) hit a double and then (James) Jurries hit a triple and (Jake) Gautreau singled. But I’ve got to be honest with you. When the ball went up in the air and it’s 7-1 us and they’ve got runners on and Matt Groth looked like he sort of lost it in the sun a little bit. Schloss was sitting in the back seat, and he played for me at Elon so I’d known him since he was a high school senior, and he said, ‘We’re going to do this, coach.’ All of a sudden I’m watching Roth and thinking the sun’s in his eyes and the ball’s going to drop and they are going to have a comeback with two outs. It’s not supposed to be. It wasn’t the way it was written up I guess, but it was a very, very special moment.
“’05 was more relief than anything else because we were the No. 1 team and were supposed to be there. In ’01, with the breakthrough and everything that goes with that, I had people an hour and a half, two hours after the game still crying. When the game was over, coach Bertman talked to our team. He asked me, and I said coach, I was going to ask you if you would talk to the team, and he did that. So that took a while. We did the victory laps, all those things and then we go underneath and it was coach Bertman’s last game, so I sat outside for about an hour while he did his press conference, and then I go in and do my press conference and then Pete Finney wanted to do a 1-on-1 with me, so we’re talking about over three hours after the game. The team is long gone and I’m in uniform. I walk out the back in Zephyr Field and I don’t have a ride back to Tulane, and there are some Tulane guys still hanging out drinking a beer. They yelled, ‘Coach.’ I said, can you guys maybe take me back to campus? I sat in the back of a pickup truck in uniform, and it was probably the best ride of my life. Seriously.”
That 2005 year, when you were preseason No. 1, stayed there a long time and were the No. 1 seed in the College World Series, how special was that?
“I’ll be honest with you. Being ranked No. 1 in the preseason and staying there for 21 weeks and being the No. 1 seed, but you know what, the No. 1 seed has not won (the CWS) since 1999 (Miami), so I guess it was a curse. I was listening the other day and the No. 1 team in football hasn’t won in a number of years, so I don’t know if you want to be the No. 1 seed. But that was a great year, a special year. Both of those years, in ’01 and ’05, we won 56 games. That’s hard to do. And in ’05 we didn’t lose a game to an in-state opponent. That really is hard to do with how good baseball is in our state.”
I've said several times that Jones is the greatest coach in Tulane history in any sport if you take his entire record into account. Here's what he had to say:
What is the feeling like to be going in the Tulane Hall of Fame?
“Obviously it’s a great honor, and it really reflects on the players and the support staff I had for all those years. Some of the great assistants I had, I was very fortunate to have a lot of support from the administration and the coaches and I had a lot of great players over the years. A lot of them already are in the Hall of Fame and some more will go in in the years to come. It’s an honor to be associated with them.”
You took over what had been a good program under Joe Brockhoff and turned it into a great program. What was the hardest part in the process?
“Well, the first club I had in ’94 had all coach Brockhoff’s guys, and they embraced us. I really thank coach Brockhoff and coach (Milt) Retief because they made that transition for me a lot easier with those players. We had 41 wins that year and went to the NCAA tournament when it was only a 48-team field. That sort of set the tone, and then I had Brian Cleary, who went on to be the head coach of Cincinnati, and Jim Schlossnagle, and we embarked on a national recruiting plan because obviously (LSU) coach (Skip) Bertman had a corner on the market in the state of Louisiana. We went national and signed 19 guys that year and it was the first ranked recruiting class that Tulane had ever had. That gave us a springboard to being good enough long enough where all of a sudden the guys like Michael Aubry or Nick Bourgeois would want to come to Tulane. Then we started getting some in-state players that were blue chip guys, but we had to be good enough long enough.”
You made two regionals in your first four years, then it was nine straight from 1998 to 2006. How much pride do you take in that?
“Obviously it’s something we look back on with a lot of pride, and we were able to again, I go back to I had Schlossnagle for eight years and Mark Kingston for seven, so that’s 15 years of two guys, one’s now the head coach at South Carolina and the other one has obviously one of the elite programs at TCU. We were able to do some things. When I came from Georgia Tech—I had been the recruiting coordinator there—and coach (Jim) Morris and I left within six weeks of each other. He went to Miami and I came to Tulane, but we left a school that was No. 1 in the preseason and national runner-up. I knew everybody in the country as far as having been the recruiting coordinator. I knew all the better players and also I knew who were really the good assistant coaches were, the guys that I really wanted to work with and work for me if I had a chance to be a head coach. It was nine years (of making regionals in a row), but tat one year we won the conference regular season and were left out (or it would have been 11 in a row).
“The point is that I had some really good people working for me and we were able to establish a consistent base that allowed us to attract some of the better players not only in the state of Louisiana but throughout the country and when you start talking about guys like a Brian Bogusevic or a Micah Owings, that allowed us to go from regional to national prominence.”
The Holy Grail in college baseball is getting to Omaha, and you did it twice. That 2001 year, beating LSU at Zephyr Field for the super regional, what did that mean? It was something that has not happened in any sport at Tulane very often.
“I’ll say this tonight in my address, and I’ve had time to write it down. I’ll go a little bit longer than they want me to because there are so many people I want to thank but we had so many teams that I’m really fond of, and I’m not going to single them out but if somebody asks me something that will really make me break out in a big smile, it would be when the ball settled in Matt Groth's glove on June 3 at Zephyr Field. I think that still ranks as one of the greater sports events in the state of Louisiana. When you think about all the storylines—playing LSU, coach Bertman’s last game, Zephyr Field had just been built and the crowds. We had to have the state police move the crowds just to get us off the buses. There were probably about 5,000 people sitting in the parking lot watching it on television, and it’s still the highest TV viewership for people who couldn’t watch who did watch it. It’s one of those things I’ll always remember.
“All I can think about is the night before, after we won game 2, we lost the first one in extra innings and won game 2, we were in the old Fairmont Hotel, now it’s the Roosevelt, and I’m in suite and I couldn’t sleep. I just kept pacing the floor thinking tomorrow will change forever or we go back to where we were. It was one of those things that really put our program in a different perspective.”
When you lost the opening game of the super regional in heartbreaking fashion, a lot of fans went into that here-we-go-again mode of coming up short against LSU. Did that make winning the next two games even sweeter?
“Actually, we hit for the cycle in game 2 with the first four guys. (Jon) Kaplan homered and then Andy (Cannizaro) hit a double and then (James) Jurries hit a triple and (Jake) Gautreau singled. But I’ve got to be honest with you. When the ball went up in the air and it’s 7-1 us and they’ve got runners on and Matt Groth looked like he sort of lost it in the sun a little bit. Schloss was sitting in the back seat, and he played for me at Elon so I’d known him since he was a high school senior, and he said, ‘We’re going to do this, coach.’ All of a sudden I’m watching Roth and thinking the sun’s in his eyes and the ball’s going to drop and they are going to have a comeback with two outs. It’s not supposed to be. It wasn’t the way it was written up I guess, but it was a very, very special moment.
“’05 was more relief than anything else because we were the No. 1 team and were supposed to be there. In ’01, with the breakthrough and everything that goes with that, I had people an hour and a half, two hours after the game still crying. When the game was over, coach Bertman talked to our team. He asked me, and I said coach, I was going to ask you if you would talk to the team, and he did that. So that took a while. We did the victory laps, all those things and then we go underneath and it was coach Bertman’s last game, so I sat outside for about an hour while he did his press conference, and then I go in and do my press conference and then Pete Finney wanted to do a 1-on-1 with me, so we’re talking about over three hours after the game. The team is long gone and I’m in uniform. I walk out the back in Zephyr Field and I don’t have a ride back to Tulane, and there are some Tulane guys still hanging out drinking a beer. They yelled, ‘Coach.’ I said, can you guys maybe take me back to campus? I sat in the back of a pickup truck in uniform, and it was probably the best ride of my life. Seriously.”
That 2005 year, when you were preseason No. 1, stayed there a long time and were the No. 1 seed in the College World Series, how special was that?
“I’ll be honest with you. Being ranked No. 1 in the preseason and staying there for 21 weeks and being the No. 1 seed, but you know what, the No. 1 seed has not won (the CWS) since 1999 (Miami), so I guess it was a curse. I was listening the other day and the No. 1 team in football hasn’t won in a number of years, so I don’t know if you want to be the No. 1 seed. But that was a great year, a special year. Both of those years, in ’01 and ’05, we won 56 games. That’s hard to do. And in ’05 we didn’t lose a game to an in-state opponent. That really is hard to do with how good baseball is in our state.”