How Kansas Baseball Used Junior College Transfers To Build A Top 25 Program

At a school defined by basketball prestige and a football program on the rise, baseball sat somewhere in between—visible, but hardly prioritized. Kansas wasn’t in the NIL arms race. It didn’t have all the bells and whistles. And Fitzgerald, in his first Power Four head coaching job, wasn’t interested in pretending it did.

There would be no shortcuts. No dramatic flips of the transfer portal’s elite. If Kansas was going to rise, it would have to do so on the backs of players no one else saw coming.

“It was very clear that we weren’t going to be able to do this conventionally,” Fitzgerald said. “We had to be different.”

That clarity—equal parts warning and rallying cry—set the tone.

So Fitzgerald turned inward, back toward the version of the game that had forged him. Back to the fields with uneven grass and no lights and buses that broke down. Back to junior college.

He wasn’t alone. His staff—recruiting coordinator Jon Coyne, pitching coach Brandon Scott and hitting coach Tyler Hancock—shared that same DNA. All of them knew what that world offered: maturity, hunger, perspective. It wasn’t just a recruiting strategy. It was a culture.

So the foundation was laid. Not with stars, but with the unheralded. Not with potential, but with purpose.

Two years later, Kansas has quietly authored one of the more remarkable, if underreported, turnarounds in college baseball thanks in part to the most junior college transfers in Division I: 19 players stitched together by grit, hunger and belief.

The plan, at first glance, looked improvised. Players departed en masse, leaving gaping holes on the depth chart. Fitzgerald and his staff had to build a team—not over time, but right away. 

That urgency could’ve produced panic. Instead, it produced alignment.

“When Fitz asked me, ‘If you were the recruiting coordinator at Kansas, how would you do it?’ I told him: JUCO kids,” Coyne said. “And he goes, ‘Good, because I just took the job five minutes ago. Want to come with?’”

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When Jon Coyne runs through the Rolodex of junior college coaches in his head, it’s not just names and numbers—it’s fingerprints. He knows what kind of players each program produces. How they train. How they carry themselves. And what kind of habits they bring with them.

Kurt Russell at Western Oklahoma State?

“Super tough, super gritty,” Coyne said of Russell’s players. “They’re going to be on time. They’re never going to be late to the bus. They’re going to work so hard. And they’re going to say ‘yes, sir, no sir’ and ‘thank you.’ They’re the best, and they’re good players too.”

And Todd Inglehart with 900 career wins and counting at Arizona’s Cochise College?

“He’s one of the best coaches I’ve ever seen at any level coaching the game,” Coyne said. “Maybe one of the best pitch callers and in-game managers I’ve seen at any level. I played against him when he was coaching at Cochise. Discipline. His players are disciplined and mature.”

Kansas bets on that pedigree.

“The baseball is pure,” Coyne said. “The coaches care. The players are competitive.”

And, just as importantly, they’re grateful.

“If you talk to some of the best high school guys out there, some will tell you they’re getting offers of like $100,000 if you commit right now,” Coyne said. “Then you talk to the JUCO guy and he’s like, ‘Dude, you guys got lights? You have turf?’ And I just sit there like, ‘Dude, I know. Lights. Field turf.’ JUCO guys, that’s just us.”

That mentality has helped shape one of the most unique roster constructions in college baseball. 

Of the 39 players on Kansas’ 2025 roster, 30 are in at least their third year at the college level. Only three are true freshmen. As many as 14 are in their final year of eligibility, barring any last-minute rulings from the NCAA that might restore a JUCO season to their clocks.

The approach demands a high tolerance for roster turnover. But Kansas has embraced that.

“If you go out there and start shooting a bunch of 3s early in the game, you’re kind of committed to shooting 3s for the rest of the game,” Fitzgerald said, likening his team’s recruiting makeup to basketball scoring theory. “Recruiting the way we do is shooting from the distance. The reward is huge, but so is the risk. We’re fortunate that we’re making a lot of shots right now.”

Home run leader Jackson Hauge was a steal from Division II Minnesota State Mankato. Batting average leader Brady Ballinger, who ranks second in homers, came from the College of Southern Nevada. And stolen base leader Derek Cerda? One of the Western Oklahoma State guys Coyne talked about.

In total, five of Kansas’ nine regular lineup spots are filled by players who didn’t come from Division I. Six of the 13 pitchers who’ve thrown at least 10 innings this year fit the same profile.

And it’s working.

As of April 7, Kansas holds a 27-6 overall record and a 9-3 mark in Big 12 play—both program bests at that point in the season. The Jayhawks rank in the top 15 nationally in scoring, home runs, on-base percentage and slugging. They are among the top 45 in ERA and up to No. 19 in Baseball America’s Top 25 rankings, their highest mark in years.

From 50,000 feet, Kansas’ success might seem surprising. To the people in it, though, it’s anything but.

“The portal has allowed people to stay older,” Coyne said. “If we were talking recruiting six years ago or whenever the portal really opened, then it’s a different ballgame. But the ballgame now, you can stay old if you want. The mechanics of recruiting now have changed. When you make your roster old, you stay old. Generally, you have to replace experience with experience.”

The data backs it up. In today’s game, age isn’t just an advantage—it’s often the difference.

Players who were in their final year of eligibility in 2024 accounted for 37.8% of Division I at-bats, while freshmen and redshirt freshmen trailed them markedly at just 12.6%. Older players widely outperformed their younger counterparts in every category at the plate, too.

Class	Avg.	OBP	AB/HR	RBI
Freshman	.262	.369	38.4	10.4
Sophomore	.277	.379	29.2	18.2
Junior	.282	.386	28.7	20.9
Senior	.286	.390	27.6	25.2

The same can be said on the mound.

Class	ERA	K/9	BB/9
Freshman	6.95	8.19	5.72
Sophomore	6.20	8.47	4.90
Junior	6.14	8.57	4.81
Senior	5.97	8.28	4.45

Simply put, Kansas has bought into the math. And it believes that math gives the program a chance, even if there isn’t a large sample size of teams who have successfully navigated college athletics this way given the newness of the strategy and the forces that have made it a necessity for some.

“We’re buying into physical and mental maturity and the notion that, basically, our older player who’s been through some things and has experience can beat a team’s younger player who might have higher long-term upside but needs time to get to it,” Fitzgerald said. “We have a bunch of dudes who are hungry and who know what it takes already to win.”

Kansas has chased players who have seen the bottom, worked through it and were eager for one more chance to prove they belonged. Because the Jayhawks’ coaches spoke that language, they knew how to find it.

“Brandon played in it, Tyler played in it, Ryan Holland played in it,” Coyne said. “I played and coached in it. We already had that blood. We knew what it produced.”

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They don’t have a motto printed on T-shirts or a mantra painted across the clubhouse wall. But ask anyone inside Kansas’ dugout what makes this team work, and they’ll give you the same answer.

Humility, unity and simplicity.

“I tell them all the time, if you want to wear different color shoelaces and get cool tattoos and put your native country’s flag on your glove, go for it,” Fitzgerald said. “But you have to be a great—you have to be an unbelievable teammate. Not an average teammate, not a good teammate. Like, you have to be an unbelievable teammate.”

There are no five-million-rule handbooks. Just that lone expectation: Think more about your teammates than you think about yourself. Treat practice like it matters. Honor the moment you’re in. The rest is noise.

“We’re pretty simple, man,” Fitzgerald said. “We’re straightforward. You’d be incredibly disappointed at our lack of creativity.”

That might sound self-deprecating, but it’s not. It’s the opposite. In a sport driven by chaos—one pitch, one bounce, one call changing everything—the Jayhawks have rooted themselves in the one thing they can control—each other.

“We keep it really centered on the humility they show toward one another,” Fitzgerald said. “And I think that starts with my staff. They’re just the best. There’s kind of a shared like-mindedness of, hey, we’re all moving in the same direction together.”

It’s not chemistry for chemistry’s sake. It’s survival. Because the blueprint Kansas is utilizing requires instant buy-in. There’s no time to gel by May. It has to happen now.

And it has.

Coyne believes players would tell you the coaching staff feels like best friends and that that sense of alignment, of unbreakable trust, trickles down.

“You can’t fake it,” Coyne said. “Players will sense it. Parents will sense it. If there’s division on the staff, they’ll read it in two seconds.”

At Kansas, those cracks don’t exist. Not publicly or privately. There are hard conversations, yes, but always for the right reasons.

“We’re hand to hand, shoulder to shoulder, the whole time,” Coyne said. “That’s how we’ve done it. That’s how we’ll keep doing it.”

For Fitzgerald, the win-loss record doesn’t define this season. Not even whether or not the Jayhawks make the field of 64 will do that, even with the team tracking toward one of its best years in program history. 

What matters more is that the program is moving forward, not just in rankings, but in identity.

“My goal every year is that our team somehow overachieves,” Fitzgerald said. “I think it’s the greatest thing you can ever do with a team—get more out of your team than maybe you had in the tank to begin with.”

So when a walk-off win unfolds, Fitzgerald isn’t sprinting to the plate. He’s standing still, in the dugout, watching it all unfold. Taking in the unspoken moments that define what Kansas baseball has become.

“I have incredible joy watching them experience that together,” he said.