Asher Gibbons
Staff Writer
This summer, the Mocs baseball team introduced new Head Coach Rick O’Dette. Previously, O’Dette served as the head coach of St. Leo University and St. Joseph’s College of Indiana. His long tenured coaching career spans about 24 years, but O’Dette has been around collegiate baseball since 1996– including his days in both college and the pros.
O’Dette has a plethora of personal coaching achievements including a record of more than 700 career wins at the Division II level, NCBWA South Region Coach of the Year and SSC Coach of the Year. Additionally, he’s coached 25 All-SSC honorees, nine All-South regional award winners, and two NCBWA/D2CCA All-Americans.
According to St. Leo Athletics, “O’Dette was a 15th round pick of the Boston Red Sox in the 1997 MLB First-Year Player Draft, and played at four different levels within the Red Sox organization.” There, he learned the difference between college and the pros. The most valuable tool he learned was discipline.
“It’s not like college where it’s very, very structured,” O’Dette said. “As a player at the pro level, it’s your career. So you’re not going to be forced to do anything you don’t want to do. So you have to be disciplined and structured to be successful.”
Championship aspirations are always the ultimate goal, but O’Dette says the number one goal is a little different. Because of the change in coaching, the goal is to establish a new culture within the team, determining the understanding of work ethic and the expectations of the new staff.
According to the coach, even more importantly than that is, “if guys have buy-in and not just individual buy-in, but a team buy-in. I think once we do that, that’s the start of getting everything on track and making sure that guys understand … It starts with how we prepare every day.”
The X factor this season is going to that “buy-in team piece.” A buy-in is defined as the acceptance of and willingness to actively support and participate in something.
“I think it’s the intangible of sacrificing yourself for the betterment of the whole and I think if we can do that, we’ve got a really good start,” O’Dette said.
The players have eight hours every week as a team, which is divided into four hours of instruction and four hours of weight room work. Thus far, the main obstacle the team has is the change– change in setting for the new staff, change in understanding and change in expectations for the team are of the most notable.
“It’s very structured, but it’s also an environment that I think guys like to play in. You know, it is a structured piece, but we let them be them. It’s a blue-collar approach where we’re going to prepare, like our practices are going to be more difficult, hopefully, than the games if we did what we’re supposed to as coaches.”
The inspiration for O’Dette as a native Chicagoan– specifically from Southside– influenced his toughness and blue collar work ethic.. Such values are instilled in his coaching.
Two former staff from his time at St Leo University, Coach Mitchell Wydetic and Coach Tony Caldwell, followed him to FSC. O’Dette sees them as vital for the upcoming season.
“You’re only as good as your players and you’re only as good as your staff. And the loyalty that those guys have shown in the work ethic that they put in, I don’t think people understand how much they do,” O’Dette said.
In addition to the new staff, the returning players from last season are the most eye-opening this offseason, according to O’Dette.
“Our returners that have come back have been working extremely hard and … are very willing to learn and obviously communicate and buy in,” O’Dette said.
But ultimately, he hopes his players understand how much he and his coaching staff cares for them as people.
“I would say that they understand that we actually care for them as a person and understand that we want to win extremely bad[ly], but I think the ultimate conversation is how much they’ve enjoyed being here, how much we’ve enjoyed being around them and vice versa,” O’Dette said.
