It hasn’t been that uncommon in the 21 years Kevin Cooney has been head coach of FAU baseball for there to be more players in uniform on both teams than fans in attendance.
Crowds at Owls’ home games have rarely been tremendous, save for a few marquee matchups over the years: Miami, North Carolina, Notre Dame.
There are a handful of fans that are incredibly loyal. And as Cooney was being honored before the second-to-last home game he would ever coach for FAU, he took the opportunity to say thank you, without abandoning his ever-present sense of humor.
“I’d like to thank the fans – all 35 of you – for showing up today,” Cooney quipped. “Good thing we printed 1,000 of those commemorative tickets. My son will have about 900 of them for wallpaper in his new room.”
Those tickets, even in their excess, did not begin to approach the amount of hours Cooney has dedicated to FAU baseball over the past two decades. He coached four future major leaguers, more than 73 future professionals and more than 300 players overall. He won more than 700 games as head coach at FAU.
But he didn’t just coach baseball strategy and fundamentals. Cooney has made sure that life lessons were taught – and learned as well.
“Every kid needs to hear the right voice,” he said. “Everything bad and good I’ll take. Thank you to all the parents – I hope I didn’t disappoint you.”
His beyond-baseball messages can be subtle, but they are important. Take, for instance, the small number 4,000 scribbled in white marker just above the brim of his navy blue FAU baseball cap. The number doesn’t represent wins or games coached; it represents the number of troops dead in Iraq.
“We have a war going on and nobody realizes it. Back in the old days everybody sacrificed when there was a war going on. Now, nobody sacrifices except the families of the people fighting the war. For me this is a way to remind my kids of that,” he said in the moments following a 20-3 victory over Arkansas State that snapped a long losing streak by FAU baseball standards. The Owls had lost four conference games in a row.
“Coach is heading out after this year and I feel like we need to get back on track,” said senior pitcher Mike Obradovich. “We were doing well this season, [then] kind of stumbled and lost some games but we are getting back on track.”
Since Cooney arrived from Division III Montclair State University in New Jersey, his alma mater, the FAU baseball program has morphed into something completely different than before he was hired. After winning the Division III World Series title with the Montclair State Red Hawks, Cooney became the coach of the Division II FAU Blue Wave baseball team. From that time on, he has driven the program through a move to Division I, a name change, playoff triumphs and defeats, and about 10,000 innings of baseball.
At the time of his arrival, Cooney took over an infant program which was just seven years old and playing at the Division II level. In 1993, he guided FAU baseball to its second NCAA Division II regional. In 1994, FAU competed at the Division I level for the first time.
In 1999, FAU baseball, still known as the Blue Wave at the time, had its finest season ever. They garnered national attention with a 54-9 record, a top-10 ranking, and tied the University of Texas for the nation’s longest-ever winning streak at 34 games.
But all the success has come with disappointment and heartache. FAU has been tantalizingly close to the College World Series several times, but has never been able to push through the NCAA Super Regionals to make it to Omaha, Nebraska. A baseball facility and stadium worthy of their success has never been built.
A few times, those Regional postseason defeats have come at the home of the Miami Hurricanes: Mark Light Stadium in Coral Gables. A natural inferiority complex toward Miami was worsened by losing to the multi-time national champion Hurricanes whenever a big opportunity for postseason advancement presented itself.
“That has been a bit of a house of horrors for us down there,” Cooney said.
This year, the Owls defeated the ‘Canes in Coral Gables in a regular season game, but also lost to them at home, in crushing fashion, in front of one of the largest crowds ever to watch an FAU baseball game in Boca Raton.
In 2008, a strong beginning portion to the season and the win over Miami had the Owls primed for a big season. Then came the announcement by Cooney of his eventual retirement. After that, the team went 3-7 leading up to the ceremony honoring their coach on May 10.
“I don’t think coach’s retirement had anything to do with it,” said senior catcher Alex Silversmith, on the weekend of his final home games, during a season that saw the Owls scratch together a 29-25-1 record. “We are just trying to get ready for the tournament and win as many games as we can.”
The final outcome to this season unfolded in the postseason, which began on May 21, as the Owls tried to win the Sun Belt championship. Their run, and Cooney’s FAU career, concluded against Western Kentucky on May 25 with a 5-4 loss – just one game short of playing of the championship game.
The plan for the Owls in tournament play was to have the pitching staff finally healthy enough to support a dominating offense. The problem this season has been that no matter how many runs the Owls have scored, opponents are often able to score even more against the shaky and sore-armed FAU pitching staff.
Despite the on-the-field issues that plagued the Owls this season, a small band of the most loyal fans continued to support the team at almost every home game. They cheered the players and heckled the umpires and opposing coaches. They sang along to the Bruce Springsteen (a native New Jerseyan just like Cooney) tunes that blasted over the loud speakers game after game, and have year after year.
“Our 12 fans that come to all of our games, they have been coming for a long time,” said Cooney partly in jest and partly in truth. “This one guy Mike, we call him Miami Mike. I’m running out to coach third base one night and I hear, ‘heyyyy Cedar Grove’. He was from the same home town I’m from. I’m thinking who the hell knows, [or] has even heard of Cedar Grove. It was him and he used to sit down on that hill with my wife and a bunch of people, but they kicked him off. He is a little obnoxious. Mike has been here for at least 18 years.”
After the May 12 game, Mike and the other diehards posed with Cooney for a final on-field snapshot. It was just one more final in a long list of finals the Owls’ coach has faced recently.
“Every day has been emotional. The thing I like doing the most, since I was a little kid, is putting on a baseball uniform and there aren’t that many more chances to do it,” said the baseball lifer, who is giving up coaching, possibly to become a sod farmer and to spend more time as a family man than as a baseball man. Cooney and his son Luke, 8, daughter Maggie, 10, and wife MaryBeth are moving to Tennessee in August. He also has two grown-up sons, Jim, 28, and Jeff, 23.
“It is hard to know that I’m not going to be here, but it is also nice to know. I thank God every day that I am going out the way I want to go out,” Cooney said. “There are a lot of people in sports that don’t get to choose how they do that. And while we aren’t having the season that we wanted to have, it still has a chance to be very special.”
Cooney recognizes the accomplishments of his career at FAU, but also that he can’t keep doing it forever.
“As I told my middle son Jeff, who wasn’t happy with my decision: You’d rather have people say nice things about your dad when he’s leaving than that he stayed too long at the party.”
For those associated with FAU baseball over the past two decades, the party sure was fun while it lasted.
