Last night I had the pleasure to attend an event and hear Audie Garrido speak. Nearly five decades of college coaching and the winningest record in NCAA history and you still can see that twinkle in his eye when he talks about his players. Three from his from his first collegiate team ever were present. He wasn't the legend back then, just Coach Garrido in his first NCAA job. No million dollar salary, no multi million dollar budgets and fancy uniforms.
"Baseball is a game of opportunity" ,"Baseball is a metaphor for life", "Baseball is about runs scored, not hits". Those were some of the takeaways. He talked about when CSU Fullerton first played at powerhouse USC. They drove themselves to Dedeaux Field already in uniform. The person incharge of the music asked Augie what their fight song was. Augie told them he was not sure if they had one, he told them the team did like a Doobie Brothers song called China Grove. He said when the Titans took the field they played "It's a Small World". CSUF won 3-1 and he was pretty sure it's a small was never played there again.
5 National Championships, 15 trips to the CWS and collegiate record of 1975-951-9.
His final message was that in almost 50 years of coaching only 122 players made it to the bigs or earned living playing baseball after college. Short for most, longer for others. That's less than 1% of players he coached. Many, many of his players have made a better living from the experiences they learned because they baseball.
Pretty cool!