Division II Coaching Carousel

Continuing with our season preview posts, here’s a quick rundown of the coaching carousel in Division II. (You can check out yesterday’s Division I post here.) As a disclaimer, I’m going off athletic websites that overworked SIDs haven’t had the time to update in some cases, so if I missed anyone or got anything wrong, let me know in the comments. Enjoy!

About a year ago, the big news in D2 was the departure of Southern New Hampshire head coach Scott Loiseau for an assistant job at Oklahoma. After one season on the Sooners’ staff, he’ll be back in Manchester for 2016. Under interim coaches Pat Austin and Chris Shank (who’ll stay on as assistants), the Penmen did just fine in 2015, going 31-14 and making another NCAA Tournament appearance. That said, they’ll definitely be happy to see the most successful coach in program history return. SNHU had never made an NCAA Tournament before Loiseau’s arrival in 2009, but his 2015 seniors graduated without ever having missed one. The Northeast-10 will be as competitive as ever, of course, but this is a big boost for the program moving forward.

Welcome Back + Division I Coaching Carousel

Welcome back! Appreciate all of you returning in the midst of football season. Incredibly enough, we’re less than a month from first pitch (kudos to Bentley for scheduling some January games in Florida), so I figured I should start getting some offseason roundup/season preview pieces up on here. No promises on the amount of posts I’ll do, but I’ll keep them coming until teams start playing outside up north— we’ll need plenty of reading material when the mild weather inevitably turns into a Day After Tomorrow scene as soon as we try to go outdoors. Anyways, enjoy, and let me know if there’s anything else you’d like to see me spotlight in the run-up to the season.

In Division I, at least, only a handful of programs head into 2016 with new faces on the coaching staff. ­None of our 18 D1 programs made a head coaching change. (By comparison, four coaches were starting their first full season last year.) Eight teams returned full staffs, and three more added only a new volunteer. College baseball isn’t known for the same volatility as football or basketball in this department, but even then, it was a pretty quiet offseason.