Jordy Bahl, OU’s ace pitcher, is coming to Lincoln.
I have mixed feelings about this. Nebraska wasn’t good enough for her when she graduated from HS. Now she wants to “come home”. I realize she’s an exceptional talent but…,
Greg Zimmerman, UNL '75
Overland Park, Kansas
Of course this is great for the Husker program. It is a little bit of a head scratcher, though. It is a little unusual that the best player in the nation would leave a power house team just to come home. This move will undoubtedly make the Huskers better but I doubt if it will put the team on a national championship level. She didn’t do it alone at Oklahoma.
In baseball and softball on any level one player almost never puts the team at a higher level. There are many examples but one is the Angels have had MLB’s best player, Mike Trout, for several years now and they struggle to even have a winning record and no post season play. Now they have added Ohtani lately and still can’t finish with a winning record much less the post season.
I am not trying to put down the Husker program. I would say the same thing about any situation where the best player in a college sport and the team is a national power to see that player transfer. In the case of Bahl, I am sure there were other opportunities for her to transfer before now. I may be wrong but it would seem, like most things, there is more to the story.
From a Husker viewpoint it is great to have her. As I said, she should make the team better.
I disagree.
She committed to Nebraska as a high school freshman. Then the coaching situation at Nebraska blew up. The coach was Ravell and it looked like she would be fired. She went to another “stable” program.
But now she wants to come home. She is from Nebraska. Her family has many ties here and her boyfriend plays for the Cornhusker’s baseball team.
Lots of good reasons and a chance to come home is a good thing.
In a message dated 6/15/2023 3:01:48 PM Eastern Standard Time, listmgr@lists.tssi.com writes:
I’ve never been a big fan of the ‘Nebraska HS athletes need to stay in Nebraska’ theory of recruiting management. Do those those who espouse that also think the best HS athletes in New Jersey should only go to Rutgers or Princeton?
Players need to make their decisions based on what they feel is best for them, that includes playing goals, academic goals, post-college career goals and personal goals. And all of those goals are likely to change over time. Transfers are facilitated with the new transfer portal rules, and that helps correct a long-standing issue in college sports, player-athletes are not indentured servants, in the past they’ve been treated that way, if not worse.
As noted upthread, there was a lot of upheaval in the Nebraska softball program a few years ago, and it is hard to blame someone for looking elsewhere during that. And the idea of an 8th or 9th grade student-athlete knowing for sure where to go for college is, well, ludicrous. I’m sure I didn’t have a clue in 9th grade what I wanted to study in college, much less where. We’ve got a 16 year old granddaughter, she’s just starting to think about her college options.
So Scott frost shouldn’t have been accepted back home from Stanford? (I’m not referring his coaching stint)
As memory serves me, there were those who resented Scott Frost’s ‘coming home’ as a player, and that included some of his teammates.
These days there are so many transfers of ‘big name’ athletes that I’m not sure a transfer like Frost from Stanford to Nebraska would make much of a media splash.