Heller, Iowa baseball focused on sustaining success

IOWA CITY — When a program sees success — especially that which it hasn't in decades — oftentimes sustaining that success is far more difficult than attaining it once.

Such is the task ahead of Rick Heller and the Iowa baseball team, which went 41-18 last season, marking the first 40-win season since 1985. A second-place finish in the Big Ten, a top-20 national ranking, the first NCAA Tournament berth since 1990 and first tournament game win since 1972 were all superlatives that once existed only as pipe dreams around Duane Banks Field.

With expectations come pressure, and the Hawkeyes haven't faced anything like this in quite some time.

'Sustaining is not easy, because you play in a great league where everybody is trying to win,' Heller said at his team's Media Day on Thursday. 'Everybody has good resources, and maybe three or four teams are going to be the older team this year. You've got to find a way to win with younger players, newer players and hopefully your development happens sooner than later.'

Heller put great emphasis on development as the genesis for what Iowa baseball has become, as well as what it will be.

The Hawkeyes have plenty of experience back this season, returning 51.5 percent of their RBIs, 46.4 percent of their runs and 45.1 percent of their hits. They also get a huge boost in returners Tyler Peyton, Calvin Matthews and Nick Roscetti — each named to the Big Ten Players to Watch list for 2016. All that said, Iowa also has a large amount of youth with 17 of the 35 players on the roster being underclassmen and 11 of which being freshmen.

Development of the latter is key, yes, but it's the rate at which the players develop that Heller focuses on specifically. The quicker the young guys come along, the easier it will be to back up what the Hawkeyes did in 2015.

'The biggest challenge with sustaining is that when your development program takes time to develop. It takes time to develop baseball players if you're doing it the way I consider the right way,' Heller said. 'When you lose guys or lose guys to the draft, there's going to be some time in between, and you just hope your culture is good enough and that your guys are tough enough to go out and fight through it, overachieve. That's the thing we talk about a lot on our team. At the end of the year when we look in the mirror, did we overachieve or not? I can live with anything win or loss-wise if I know the guys really did that.'

A fixture in moving everything forward, too, is leaving 2015 in 2015. Heller and his players said getting hung up on matching exactly what Iowa did last season is losing sight of the task at hand.

They have Peyton back — something Heller said he thought was impossible — to be on the mound Friday nights and anchor their lineup after he hit .337 with 31 RBIs in a third team all-American season. Peyton turned down talks of a seventh-round draft deal to return, something he said prompted him to think, 'Did I really just do that?' before ultimately deciding one more year was best for his development. It's a decision Heller called, 'a mature decision and a very unselfish decision.'

So with what they have back and the nucleus Heller and his staff have formed, expectations certainly are still high.

Yes, they want to win 40 games again. Yes, they want to win a Big Ten title. And yes, they want to go to Omaha. But they don't want all that simply because they either had it or almost had it last year.

'That's the past. We're trying to do what we're trying to do. Hopefully we can continue to build off that season,' Roscetti said. 'We learned to keep fighting. We were in a lot of close games, and learning the guy behind you will step up is a really big thing.

'We're just going to try to do what we know how to do — play the game hard, and hopefully by playing the game hard, success will come with it.'

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