Scott Nasby, head baseball coach of the Drury University Panthers, has been a constant on the team that was revived in 2006. In the past six seasons, he has led the Panthers to four NCAA-II tournaments and won two conference championships.
Recently, he talked with the Scoop about recruiting, handing out bricks, and turning goals into expectations for the team’s seventh season.
Q: Coach Nasby, how long have you been head coach at Drury?
A: This is my seventh season. Before that, I was an assistant for four and a GA for two. So when we started our program in 2006, in the fall, I was a graduate assistant. Mark Stratton was our head coach, he was also my high school coach, I was his assistant for the first six years and then he stepped aside in 2012, and I took over in the winter before the ’13 season.
Q: This is your third season playing your home games in Ozark [at US Baseball Park]. How has that stadium with all its amenities, helped in recruiting?
A: Yeah, the turf is the biggest thing, I’m not sure the seating capacity is a draw; the video board is kind of a cool thing, but I think it’s mainly having a turf field. We can play after it rains, we can practice there when we need to, and it gives us one of the nicest D-II parks in the country. I mean, if it rains an inch an hour, we only have to give it 30 minutes [to be dry enough to play on].
Q: When recruiting, what is your typical recruiting area and what type of person or player grabs your attention?
A: Since we started, Stratton started our three basic fundamentals of being a Drury Panther, that’s one, being a good person. That’s doing the right things for the right reasons because that’s just who you are. That’s involving yourself in the community because you want to make a difference not because you have to. Two, you’ve got to be a good student. It’s a tough school, it’s an expensive school, so the better student you are, the better chance you have to get academic scholarships. And then three, you’ve got to be able to play. We expect to compete for a national title, we expect to compete at the top of the Great Lakes Valley Conference (GLVC) every year, so to be able to do that, you’ve got to be able to play. So those are three things, but we make sure to go in that order of 1-2-3.
Our recruiting area is typically St. Louis, Kansas City, Tulsa, Little Rock, Fayetteville — that kind of 3½ – to four-hour window (from Springfield) is what we go for. Not to say (that’s all) — we have some Texas kids, we have a couple of Florida kids, we have a kid from California, we have some kids from Lincoln, Nebraska. So we can branch out for sure, but we try to recruit locally as much as we can.
Q: What is your gut feeling leading into your seventh season and this team?
A: We’ve won the West (Division) two years in a row. There’s no East and West this year so winning the division, in the regular season, would be a goal of ours. There’s never been one division, so I’d say it’s definitely a lofty goal with the teams that we have on our schedule.
Controlling our home turf will be important. We have five home series in a row, and if we can have some success against those teams — because four of those five teams are regional and World Series type teams – I think we’ll have a pretty good idea of where we’re at, for sure. But our expectation is to get to the regional. Our goal is to win it; we’ve never won it. Those are always our goals, things we’ve never accomplished before. But the expectation is to win the GLVC, win the tournament, and do the same things the guys that had laid bricks before you have done.
Q: I’ve heard some of the players talk about building the program “brick by brick.” Can you explain this idea?
A: We talk about it as the foundation of our program. It’s the bricks that were laid by the guys before us, sacrifices those guys had in terms of being in the indoor [facility] and in the weight room. So we started it as a way to kind of honor those guys in the past. The last four years we’ve handed out bricks at the end of the game and they sign them, and we put them on our wall. We try to get as many bricks as we can throughout the year and leave a good foundation for the next group of guys.
Q: What are your expectations and your goals for this team and for future teams?
A: The expectation is for our guys to repeat what the guys before them have done. We had a saying a couple years back, we want to “Make our goals expectations.” So our goal is to get to the World Series, our goal is to win a regional. Well, I’d like for next year that to be an expectation for us. That’s just something we do over and over. Expectations of our guys being good students, being good people and being good players — those are the expectations, they’re not goals — you know, that’s just what is going to happen. So the expectation of winning the GLVC, being one of the better teams in the region — those are our expectations; those aren’t the goals for us each year, that’s just what you’re here to do. And whether we can do that or not is up to the guys, in terms of how much time they want to put in, how much time they put in in the off-hours and the focus they can put in on the field because we definitely have enough talent to be a World Series caliber team. It’s just about doing that when we step between the lines.
