Baseball: Robichaux’s resume – One more entry wanted

Tim Buckley, The Advertiser, May 28, 2016

 

Coach Tony Robichaux, still chasing a national title in his 22nd season at UL, argues a call during a game against UL Monroe earlier this month at M.L. "Tigue" Moore Field.(Photo: SCOTT CLAUSE/THE ADVERTISER)

 

SAN MARCOS, Texas – Tony Robichaux went to 11 NCAA Regionals, four Super Regionals and one College World Series in his first 21 seasons as the head baseball coach at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

He has won six Sun Belt Conference regular-season championships and three Sun Belt Tournament titles.

And his Ragin’ Cajuns, who beat Arkansas State 17-10 Saturday, will play Georgia Southern on Sunday afternoon for another SBC tourney title-game appearance.

There is, however, a void that Robichaux — now in is third decade as a college head coach — longs to fill.

“You know,” he said, “I’ve won everything so far: conference championship, conference tournament championship — I’ve won a lot of things. Over a thousand wins.”

One thousand, one hundred and 77 after Saturday, in fact, including eight seasons at McNeese State.

“But the one thing I do not have on my resume,” Robichaux said, “is a national championship.”

That’s something Robichaux yearns to fix, ideally this year.

The No. 17-ranked Cajuns are expected to claim a fourth straight Regional bid when the 64-team NCAA Tournament field is announced Monday, but that won’t be nearly enough to satisfy their coach’s craving.

Robichaux isn’t shy at all about sharing the fact that so-far elusive title would mean so much to him, and he believes he knows what it will take to get one.

It starts with being tested in whatever Regional UL happens to play in later this week.

He’s not looking to avoid anyone or anything, even if means hitting the road like UL had to do when it exited early from Baton Rouge in 2013 and when it won at Houston in 2015.

“I’m after a national championship,” Robichaux said, “and it’s the one thing I’ve never won.

“How are you gonna get that by going through an easy Regional? I mean, we’ve got to learn to become the best at what we do — and there’s only one way to do that, and that’s to play the best.”

In 2014, UL hosted a Regional that it won, but lost to Ole Miss in a best-two-of-three Super Regional that it also hosted.

In 2015, after winning in Houston, the Cajuns were bounced by LSU from the Baton Rouge Super Regional.

Super Regionals are the last tickets punched by eight teams that advance to the College World Series in Omaha, Nebraska, which UL got to in 2000 by winning a Super Regional at then-No. 1 South Carolina.

It’s not just the path to a national championship, though, that is critical. So too are the people traveling it.

“To do it, you’re gonna need men,” Robichaux said. “It’s not about where you’re ranked, or what you are. You don’t have to be ranked No. 1 to be No. 1.

“There’s two different type of players, in any sport. One likes to get into the arena for the attention it’s gonna bring him. And then one likes to get in the arena because he gets to just flat-out throw down and compete.

“I’m real big on the second guy,” the Cajun coach added. “I don’t really get along with the first kind of guy. … I want to just get in and throw down.”

Based largely on a 42-23 record in 2015, and players returning including pitchers Gunner Leger and Dylan Moore along with second baseman Stefan Trosclair and centerfielder Kyle Clement, UL was ranked in all five of college baseball’s major national polls before the 2016 season began — including as high as No. 6 according to Collegiate Baseball.

The Cajuns were in and out of the Top 25 as the season progressed, but going into the Sun Belt Tournament they were back in all five — including as high as 17 according to the National College Baseball Writers Association and the USA Today coaches’ poll.

The only ranking that matters to Robichaux, however, is the one that comes at the end. And the Cajun coach really does want it to be No. 1 for UL, because it would mean he finally has that national championship he’s been chasing for so long.

So what’s important to him is not how the Cajuns return to the College World Series, but that they do, and what they do once they’re there.

“You can win many different ways,” Robichaux said. “There are many different ways to get to Omaha, you know? You can take different routes.

“And every team has to find their own route. That’s what’s so tough about this business. People will judge a team against another team, and all that kind of stuff, and it’s not good to do, man.

“If you look at where we were ranked at the beginning of the year, that was given to us,” the Cajun coach added. “That wasn’t us.”

UL, however, won its final six games of the regular season and claimed a share of the Sun Belt title along with South Alabama.

“We’re starting to become ‘us,’” Robichaux said, “and that’s what we need to do.

“Our ranking at the end of the year,” he added, “is gonna be way more important than our ranking at the beginning of the year.”