“It’s fun to hear people talking about Indiana baseball. It gives you a lot of personal pride,” said eighth-year IU coach Tracy Smith, the head man at Miami from 1997-2005. “We’re going to do our best to take advantage of this opportunity.”
Indiana (48-14) will open against Louisville (51-12) at 8 p.m. Saturday at TD Ameritrade Park in Omaha, Neb. The Hoosiers took 2 of 3 games from the Cardinals during the regular season.
IU is the first Big Ten school to qualify for the CWS since Michigan in 1984. Indiana swept Florida State (10-9 and 11-6) in last weekend’s NCAA Super Regional in Tallahassee, Fla.
Smith is 242-220 with the Hoosiers. He was 317-220-1 at Miami and took the RedHawks to the NCAA tournament in 2000 and 2005.
“Those were fun times,” Smith said. “I loved my time in Oxford. A lot of good friends and family are still there, but it almost seems like another life.”
Miami hasn’t won a Mid-American Conference title since he departed for Bloomington, though Smith believes the RedHawks will get back to a championship level.
“It’s too good a school and too good a program,” he said. “You’ve got to be lucky sometimes when you’re a school in the north in that conference. Quite frankly, that’s why I left. You could do everything right, but if you weren’t lucky on one weekend and didn’t win the conference tournament, it didn’t matter how good a year you had, you weren’t going (to the NCAA tournament).”
Indiana has five Cincinnati-area players on its roster — sophomore catcher Kyle Schwarber (Middletown), senior shortstop Michael Basil (St. Xavier), junior pitcher Brian Korte (Elder), sophomore pitcher Kyle Hart (Sycamore) and redshirt sophomore outfielder Tim O’Conner (Elder).
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