The Crimson Hawks fell just short of the College World Series’ championship round.
Baseball’s Turnaround Sparks Championship Run
By Bob Fulton
The greatest season in IUP baseball history followed on the heels of the absolute worst.
In a jaw-dropping about-face that saw a once-downtrodden program rise to national prominence, coach Steve Kline led the Crimson Hawks to a school-record 41 victories and a berth in the NCAA Division II College World Series, where his team finished third after beating both the defending national champion and the top seed.
Only three years before, IUP had won two games. That is not a misprint.
“It’s hard to believe how quickly the program turned around,” said pitcher Mark Edeburn, a fifth-year senior who suffered through that dreadful 2021 season. “You never hear of that in college baseball. It’s hard to pick up the pieces and turn things around so quickly. When the new coaching staff came in, it was just culture shock, and it was exactly what we needed after that 2-35 year.”
So what induced Kline—a baseball lifer who spent 11 seasons in the major leagues as a relief pitcher and who collected three World Series rings as a coach in the San Francisco Giants organization—to accept the offer of a seemingly dead-end job from Athletics Director Todd Garzarelli M’22, a childhood friend who shares central Pennsylvania roots?
“I just took a leap of faith,” Kline told Wayne Cavadi of NCAA.com during the Crimson Hawks’ prolonged stay in Cary, North Carolina, for the World Series. “He told me what I was walking into, and I like challenges like that.”
Team members called attention to being the fifth seed after they won the Atlantic Super Regional.
Progress came with the suddenness of a lightning strike. IUP posted a 27-22 record in Kline’s first season, an incredible 25-win improvement from a 2021 campaign that, to be fair, was derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic and social-distancing protocols. The Crimson Hawks finished 25-29 in Kline’s second season and posted two victories in the Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference tournament—IUP’s first postseason wins since 2011.
This year, the Hawks soared to unprecedented heights, falling just short of the World Series’ championship round. Their eight NCAA tournament wins—six more than all previous IUP teams combined had recorded—validated Kline’s decision to bring in the type of players he prefers. Not necessarily the most talented or the flashiest. Just the kind who care more about winning than about personal ambitions.
“Coach Kline is a little bit different in recruiting style. He wants multisport athletes on purpose, knowing that they know how to compete in different situations,” said junior third baseman Peyton Johnson. “Guys that honestly hate losing more than they love winning.”
Kline also ratcheted up the intensity during practices. He emphasized winning even during workouts, establishing habits that carried over to game days.
Coach Steve Kline
“When he came in, everything changed,” said second baseman and 2021 team member Harrison Pontoli, who as a fifth-year senior last spring led the Crimson Hawks in home runs (7), runs (58), hits (68), and slugging percentage (.460). “Everything was about winning. If you didn’t win, then pay out. That’s what we have on the backs of our [practice] jerseys—‘It pays to be a winner.’ If your team loses in a scrimmage, you have to pay out. You have to run sprints or something else to pay out.”
“Everything,” Edeburn added, “is centered around us never being OK with losing.”
So the Crimson Hawks entered 2024 prepared to win . . . and promptly dropped their first three games while surrendering 47 runs against Pembroke (NC). And yet Kline saw a glimmer of hope during IUP’s brief southern sojourn.
“The scores [15-6, 22-3, 10-5] were not an indication of how we played,” he said. “We were actually winning those games up until the fifth or sixth inning. We put our younger kids in, the first time they’d ever pitched in college. You don’t want to leave your starters out there for too long that early in the season. Our young players just had to understand what college baseball is all about. And they grew up.”
The Crimson Hawks quickly regrouped, winning 13 of their next 14 games after returning north. A pivotal point in the season came in mid-April when IUP took three of four from a Seton Hill team that would win the PSAC West title. The Crimson Hawks realized then that they were a force to be reckoned with.
“The year before, they had swept us in four games,” said Kline, who was named the Atlantic Region Coach of the Year by the American Baseball Coaches Association. “Beating them three out of four provided a big boost. I think our guys started to believe they could beat anybody.”
IUP kept winning and earned an at-large berth in the Atlantic Regional, the program’s first NCAA tournament appearance in 34 years. The Crimson Hawks went 3-0 in their half of the regional bracket against West Chester, the PSAC champion, and Charleston (W.Va.), winning a 2-1 clincher against Charleston in dramatic fashion when sophomore left fielder Ricardo Aponte belted a 10th-inning homer.
“We had numerous chances to win that game,” Kline said. “We were in, I think, the ninth inning and loaded the bases, nobody out, and we didn’t score. We had the bases loaded a couple times and didn’t get them in. But we didn’t panic or lose our composure. Usually, if something like that happens, players will hang their heads. Our guys didn’t. It was like they believed we were going to win, no matter what.”
The Crimson Hawks then eliminated Seton Hill in the best-of-three Atlantic Super Regional, despite losing the opener. They won the second game 9-8 when junior catcher Davin Landers slugged a three-run homer in the eighth inning. They then secured the school’s first-ever College World Series berth with a come-from-behind 7-4 victory in the deciding game. Sophomore designated hitter Elijah Dunn delivered the go-ahead RBI double in the sixth inning, and freshman reliever Bryce Devan—one of the young pitchers rocked at Pembroke three months earlier—retired the final 10 batters to punch IUP’s ticket to Cary.
Returning to North Carolina, where they’d launched the 2024 season with three consecutive defeats, the Crimson Hawks stumbled again, losing their World Series opener to Point Loma (Calif.), 2-1. With their backs to the wall in the double-elimination tournament, Kline’s resilient crew rebounded with a 4-3 win over top-seeded Central Missouri, plating two runs in the eighth on an RBI single by senior designated hitter Andrew Sicinski and a sacrifice fly by junior first baseman Brady Yard. Devan sealed the victory by pitching a scoreless ninth.
Two days later, junior Jake Black threw eight innings of two-hit ball, and Devan recorded another save as IUP won a rematch against Point Loma, 1-0, the lone run coming on Dunn’s RBI single in the first. The Crimson Hawks then extended their storybook season by defeating defending champion Angelo State (Texas), 10-8. Dunn homered and doubled, fifth-year senior right fielder Blaise Zeiders also went deep, and Edeburn picked up his team-leading eighth win of the season
Only three schools remained alive at that point. But, faced with an opportunity to reach the championship round, the Crimson Hawks fell flat, losing 7-3 to Angelo State. Three errors, eight bases on balls, and five hit batsmen contributed to IUP’s downfall. The Rams, who eventually finished second to Tampa, scored four runs in the second inning despite being limited to only one hit.
“We played our worst game in a month,” Kline said. “Too many errors and too many walks. We put ourselves in a tough spot. We were one game away from the championship [round]. It was right in front of us. We know we could’ve played better. But we played hard throughout the tournament. I thought we did a really good job of representing IUP.”
The players and coaches who brought the Crimson Hawks tantalizingly close to a national championship were responsible for altering the trajectory of IUP baseball, lifting the program out of an abyss to heights that would have seemed unimaginable in 2021. In the veritable blink of an eye, they took the Hawks from total irrelevance to national prominence.
“This historic season, I’ll remember it forever,” Pontoli said. “And I’m glad we could—especially Mark and I, who were here for that 2-35 season—help turn this program in the right direction. It’s just amazing to see how far we’ve come.”