Houston Baptist head coach, Astros great Lance Berkman joins TexAgs Radio

In his first season as head coach of the Houston Baptist Huskies, Lance Berkman is already making waves in college baseball circles. With HBU set to face Texas A&M on Tuesday night at Olsen, Berkman joined TexAgs Radio to discuss his early returns as a college coach.

Key notes from Lance Berkman interview

• We’re off to a bit of a rough start, but we’re learning as we go with this being our first year. This part of the year is all about evaluating as you head into conference play. You’re sorting out your lineup and rotation right now.
   
• We got to win. Houston Baptist has not had a winning culture in any sport, maybe ever. Our volleyball team has had success, and there have been years here and there where the basketball team had success. We have to turn the expectation level around and start winning some games.
   
• Jim Schlossnagle was great with me in the past. His pitching coach and recruiting coordinator at TCU was Kirk Saarloos, a former teammate of mine. They took a program that wasn’t a top-tier program and turned them into a perennial College World Series team. I spent some time with them, and I wanted to gain as much information as possible about what made a successful college coach. Schlossnagle was very gracious with his time and let me shadow him for a day.
   
• There is no question about who my daughter is rooting for tonight. Even if I weren’t at HBU, my daughter is a 2%er. Her loyalties are squarely with her dad, and she’s dating one of our players, which is an interesting situation. I know she’ll be rooting for HBU tonight despite being a student at Texas A&M.
   
• I have an affinity for animals, and it has been that way my entire life. When I was in college, I had a hedgehog for a pet. We had an opossum for a while too. I raised her and bottlefeed her. I thought the opossum would have gotten used to me, but when we let her out of the cage for the first time, that was the last time we saw him.
   
• It’s a great opportunity at HBU, but also, there is a lot of risk. We might belly-flop it. It’s exciting in ways but terrifying in ways. You really don’t know what you don’t know. I’ve already seen a few things that we have to adjust. The good news is that baseball is consistent at every level, and what loses little league games are usually the same things that lose big league games. Your pitching and your defense have to be solid. We’re also trying to develop our guys to get the most out of them, and there is another level we have to get to. We haven’t played very good defense, and that’s on us. We’re going back to the drawing board there, and that’s just one example. The goal is to build a nationally relevant program with a winning culture.
   
• The baseball part of everything is great, but there is a lot of recruiting that comes with the job. One of the toughest parts is talent identification. You have to make a decision on a kid at 14, 15 or 16 years old, and MLB scouts miss on first-round draft picks all the time. That’s a huge challenge. What is an art to me is being able to project talent, and the most successful guys are great at it. I know A&M has committed several freshmen in high school. It’s hard to know what a 14-year-old will do when they finally get to you. It’s such a challenge.
   
• If you had to pick one city in America where you could only recruit in a 60-mile radius, Houston is that city. LSU comes and gets players here. So do A&M, Texas, Tech, Baylor and so many others. Houston is the base for so many programs. There are a ton of players in this area, and it’s easy to get to see them. For a guy like Schlossnagle, he might be driving an hour or so to see guys that aren’t at Bryan or College Station. For us, it’s just 20 minutes to any number of high school games. There are some real advantages of being in Houston, and if we can carve out a niche, that is where we can make a name for ourselves.
   
• It’s kind of embarrassing, but I gave myself the nickname “The Big Puma.” I went on a radio show, and they asked me if I had a nickname. At the time, people were calling me “Fat Elvis,” and I didn’t particularly care for it. They asked me if I could give myself one, what it would be. I said “Puma” because I was sleek, fast, powerful and could sneak up on you. I didn’t anticipate people to run with it like they did.
   
• Rutgers might be a top-15 program by the end of the year. Coming in your first year, you feel like you will get some serious momentum, but we have scheduled ourselves into a tough start. The only game we added was Rice. If you want to call it arrogance, we also scheduled Michigan State and Louisiana Tech. There are no breaks for the Huskies this year, and it is a very difficult schedule. It could get ugly, and a big challenge for us will be to keep these guys positive as they play some tough teams.
   
• I don’t know much about A&M. We haven’t scouted them much. We have a brief scouting report on the guy that’s going to start tonight, and they have a lot of new players because A&M was very active in the transfer portal. We did not do a lot of advanced scouting on the Aggies.