UNO Baseball Coach Bob Herold

Shortly before the 2007 baseball season began, I wrote an article about a college baseball coach for my local Christian newspaper and I thought you might enjoy reading about how he's making an impact for Christ.

Here's the article:

Bob Herold, the head baseball coach at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO), had an opportunity to teach his players a lesson shortly before the team’s annual banquet recently, for which many former UNO players from the 1960’s came back, and he didn’t hesitate to take advantage of it.

“I told them,” Herold said ‘Today guys, we are going to have a lot of guys tell stories here about baseball from days of yore. There may even be a thread of truth in some of them if you look deep enough. You know how stories are embellished, right? And guys change, and that guy was worse, and that guy was better—usually we try to put ourselves in a favorable light—the Bible puts it in the same light every single time. The Bible was true the day it was written and it’s still true.’”

Herold, who is entering his eighth year as the coach of the Mavericks, knows how vital a coach can be in an athlete’s life. “A coach can build something into a guy’s life, whether it is a knowledge of baseball, or the chance to talk about integrity and character, or spiritual issues. And I’ll hit them with something like this, ‘Hey boys, bad company corrupts good character. You guys are out where you’re not supposed to be and I guarantee that bad things are going to happen. We love you guys, and we care about you, and if the only thing we teach you is how to hit a breaking ball, or throw a breaking ball, then we failed miserably. We want everything in your life to be as good as it can be.’”

When the Mavericks are on the road, Herold, or one of his coaches, leads devotions for players who are interested in attending. Somewhere between five and seven players (out of 38 on their current roster) typically attend. He makes it known up front that attending won’t help them get into the line up, but it will give them the chance to think about something more important than baseball or even academics.

Such leadership and teaching does not necessarily go hand-in-hand with on-field success, and Herold is quick to say he doesn’t talk to his players about winning, but instead about being properly prepared to play as well as possible. With that said, such preparation has allowed the Mavericks to make some noise in the North Central Conference with Herold at the helm. Going into the 2007 season, the Mavericks were 218-147-2 under Herold, including an impressive 45-14 record in 2006, during which UNO made it to the NCAA II Central regional tournament.

Herold brought a wealth of experience with him to UNO. He played baseball professionally in the Kansas City Royals’ organization. He’s been an assistant coach at the University of Louisville and at Creighton. And he managed for eight seasons in the Royals’ farm system—including a stint in 1999 as the hitting coach for the Omaha Golden Spikes (now known as the Omaha Royals).

All of that experience, combined with his 30-year walk with the Lord, puts him in a position to help players who are struggling, whether they know it or not, to become men—and maybe even Christians.

“When a guy is struggling with something that is bothering him, whether it’s spiritual or whatever the case may be, then he thinks it through,” Herold said. “Then he makes a decision based on what he thinks. I’m okay with that. The Word gives us a lot of examples of guys who battle through that kind of stuff. Life isn’t a bowl of cherries. It’s not supposed be. But struggle causes us to ask ourselves who we are relying on.”