Iowa Baseball headed to the Terre Haute Regional

On3 imageby:Kyle Huesmann05/29/23

HuesmannKyle

Just a day after making a run to the Big Ten Tournament Championship game in Omaha, the Iowa Baseball team gathered in the Feller Club Room at Carver-Hawkeye Arena to watch the NCAA Tournament selection show. For the first time since 2017, the Hawkeyes gathered knowing that their name would be one of the 64 announced.

“It feels great. I’m really happy for this group. They took it out of the committe’s hands and that’s what we set out to do,” said head coach Rick Heller. “This fall was, what can we do to make sure that we’re still playing in June…there is part of me that is thinking aobut those last two teams that didn’t get the call and felt like they should have. We’ll be playing for those guys too.”

“The anxiousness was more about just knowing where you’re going to go,” said Brennen Dorighi. “Hopefully we can make it a little bit like a home setting with some Hawkeye fans, which would be huge. It doesn’t really matter where we go, I think once we get there, we can just play baseball and get excited for that.”

Iowa is headed the Terre Haute Regional hosted by Indiana State. The Sycamores finished the season with a 42-15 record, including a 24-3 mark in Missouri Valley Conference play. They defeated Evansville in the MVC Tournament to earn the autobid to the NCAA Tournament. The Hawkeyes defeated ISU in the season opener in the Snowbird Classic down in Florida.

It will a homecoming for Coach Rick Heller, who coached at Indiana State from 2010-2013 and won 131 games in four seasons. He made an NCAA Tournament appearance with the Sycamores in 2012.

“Nobody likes to play against their friends and people who you care about. I love Terre Haute and I have so many good friends there,” said Heller. “It’s going to be a little weird, but when the lights come on, you just compete and play hard and let the chips fall where they may.”

The Wright State Raiders are the four seed in the regional and earned the automatic bid out of the Horizon League. They finished with a 39-21 record, including a 22-8 mark in conference play. The Raiders defeated Oakland in the Horzion championship game.

The North Carolina Tar Heels are the three seed in the regional and will face the Hawkeyes in the first round of the regional. UNC finished the season with a 35-22 record, including a 14-14 record in ACC play. They advanced to the ACC Tournament semifinals and earned an at-large berth to the NCAA Tournament.

“As soon as we’re done here (with the show), we’ll go over and start rolling on our stuff. The analytics crew, our managers, they will get rolling on all of the stuff they can dig up for us and then we’ll also start planning for the week,” said Heller. “I’m guessing we’ll go down Thursday morning and they’ll send us a practice time and we’ll adjust from there.”

The Hawkeyes will be making their sixth NCAA Tournament appearance with their last trip coming back in 2017 after they earned the automatic bid for winning the NCAA Tournament.

This will be Iowa’s third tournament appearance since Rick Heller took over the program in 2014. The Hawkeyes went 41-18 in 2015 and advanced to the Springfield Regional finale, where they fell to Missouri State. In 2017, after earning the conference’s automatic bid, Iowa appeared in the Houston Regional, where they upset the #15 Houston Cougars before dropping their next two games.

This season, Iowa enters the NCAA Tournament with a 42-14 record, including an 18-9 record against Big Ten opponents. The Hawkeyes finished in third place in the Big Ten standings behind Indiana and Maryland, who are both in the tournament field. Heller’s squad owns a 7-8 record against teams in the tournament, including a 2-0 mark against regional hosts. Iowa finished the season with a 19-11 record away from home and a 9-9 record in true road games.

Iowa is led by a pitching staff that ranks 2nd in hits allowed per nine innings, 5th in strikeouts per nine innings and 11th in the country in ERA. The offense is led by 1B Brennen Dorighi, who is batting .340 on the season with a team-leading 13 home runs. As a whole, the Hawkeyes average 8.3 runs per game and are batting .298 as a team.

HawkeyeReport will have expanded coverage of this week’s NCAA Tournament, including a full preview of the regional and more.

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