If TCU’s Jim Schlossnagle and Houston’s Todd Whitting aren’t at the plate to exchange lineups Friday for the opener in the Shriners College Classic, don’t worry.
They’re not lost.
They may just be waiting for Luke Bryan to play it again, rather than face off for the first time in eight years.
“I cannot stand playing against friends,” Schlossnagle said. He tried to smile, but barely could. “This is the only time we’ll ever do it unless it’s in the postseason.”
Friday’s 3 p.m. meeting between the Horned Frogs and Cougars at Minute Maid Park is courtesy of the event organizers, the first of three games for each team in Houston this weekend. TCU will play Texas A&M on Saturday and Rice on Sunday. Houston will meet Texas State on Saturday and Texas A&M on Sunday.
“We’ll go hit a late lunch Friday and let the assistants coach it,” Whitting said.
That and Thursday night sound like more fun.
“He’s going to get to experience the Houston rodeo,” Whitting said. “Luke Bryan’s in concert. It’ll be great to catch up, show him what the city of Houston and the Houston rodeo is all about.”
Alas, the better bet is that the friends will see each other on the diamond as scheduled.
It’s a chance for two of the architects of TCU’s College World Series era to meet for the first time since 2011. That was Whitting’s first season as head coach at UH, and TCU won a three-game series in Houston as part of the Mountain West Conference schedule.
Are we sure this game is actually still on?
“When you have a great relationship with somebody and you get into a competitive environment, it’s not real comfortable because things get heated during a ballgame,” Whitting said. “At the end of the day, we’re all friends, and baseball doesn’t define us, and that game’s not going to define our season or our career. But you still want to win the game — you’re competitive. It’s basically just an uncomfortable situation when you play friends.”
Whitting spent seven seasons in Fort Worth, leading the recruiting efforts that landed players, such as Matt Purke, who formed the base of the Frogs’ first Omaha squad in 2010.
“He’s at the core of building this place to its first College World Series team,” Schlossnagle said.
The next year, Whitting was back at UH as head coach at his alma mater, where he had played and been an assistant before joining Schlossnagle in 2005.
He remembers asking himself — will people wonder why he left a strong Houston program for a place with only a modest track record?
“I tell people all the time that I left Houston to hopefully prepare myself to be the head coach there one day,” Whitting said. “It’s not very often that a plan works out to a T like that one did. We got to Omaha in 2010, and this job comes open, so it all just really fell into place.”
When TCU hired Schlossnagle for the 2004 season, it coincided with a commitment to baseball that coaches around the country noticed. Schlossnagle had spent two seasons as head coach at UNLV. When he got to Fort Worth, one of his first calls was to Whitting, whom he knew from their days of going head-to-head on the recruiting trail as Conference USA assistants, Schlossnagle at Tulane and Whitting at Houston.
Schlossnagle didn’t have to sell TCU much.
“It was a place that all of us, because we’d been around college baseball, knew could be a special place once the commitment was made by the university to be great,” Whitting said. “TCU stepped up by building Lupton Stadium and allowing us to have the resources to go out and identify great players and get them on campus. It was a very collaborative effort. We had a great staff there with Coach Schlossnagle, myself, Randy Mazey, Matt Siegel, Derek Matlock and Ryan Schotzberger, who’s an assistant with me now.”
TCU and Houston are both off to strong starts. The Frogs are 5-2 and No. 18 in the D1baseball.com poll. Houston is 4-3 and coming off two consecutive American Athletic Conference regular season championships.
“We’re both competitive people. I think that’s why he hired me,” Whitting said. “When I left in 2010, we had basically three head coaches on that staff. Randy ended up going to West Virginia and has done a great job there. Coach Schloss has obviously built TCU into one of the top programs in the country, and we’ve had a pretty good run here at Houston. I was fortunate to be around those guys to learn how they did things. My time at TCU was seven or eight of the best years of my life and career.”
Thursday night in Houston is a thank you.
Friday, they’ll have to kick the dust up.
