Kansas is the merriest band of juco bandits in col…

THE UNLIKELIEST POWERHOUSE in college baseball features a lineup with eight junior college transfers and a ninth from Division II Minnesota Crookston. When Dan Fitzgerald arrived at the University of Kansas three years ago to take over a program defined by its perpetual mediocrity, he did not intend to build around the overlooked and underappreciated. It just came naturally.

From 2012 to 2016, when Fitzgerald was helping turn Dallas Baptist into an implausible winner as recruiting coordinator, he called Jon Coyne every Monday between lunch with his wife and picking up his kids at school. Coyne was a Texas juco assistant during that time, and the conversations with Fitzgerald were information tsunamis, with Coyne a font of knowledge on the state of two-year college ball in Texas.

Fitzgerald, earlier than most, saw the coming evolution of baseball with clarity. Pitchers were throwing harder, and hitters needed physicality and maturity to keep pace, and as tantalizing as the idea of bringing in raw freshmen and developing them into productive upperclassmen was to Fitzgerald, winning now sounded better. It’s a philosophy that has rooted itself as much at KU as it did at DBU. There is nothing flashy about the Jayhawks, aside from the shine coming off their Big 12 regular-season championship trophy.

FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 1949!!!!!

KU BASEBALL WINS A REGULAR SEASON CONFERENCE CHAMPIONSHIP 🏆 pic.twitter.com/dVcoYjp1b2

— Kansas Baseball (@KUBaseball) May 16, 2026

In a universe of seven-figure NIL deals, KU is the merriest band of juco bandits in college baseball. Of the team’s 34 players, 23 have played junior college ball. Survivors of 10-hour bus rides, armed with stories of cricket-filled sinks and the other joys juco ball brings, the Jayhawks enter the Big 12 tournament this week (Thursday at 3:30 p.m. ET, ESPNU) fresh off the school’s first conference title since 1949, intent on hosting an NCAA regional for the first time in program history.

The turnaround coincided with the arrival of Fitzgerald and his subsequent hiring of Coyne as recruiting coordinator to modernize a dusty program. Within months of coming to Lawrence in June 2022, they had booked the No. 1-ranked juco recruiting class in the country, according to Perfect Game. They did it again in 2023. And 2024. And once more last year. And now it is manifesting itself in a way long considered impossible in Lawrence.

“All we do is get up and think about where can we find good players and how we coach them,” Fitzgerald said. “So if there’s anything else in life that is needed of us — like, need me to hang something on the wall — probably not going to happen. Certainly can’t wire anything electrically. This is literally all we do.”

What they do is different from every Power 4 team in the country — and, based on Fitzgerald’s background, not entirely surprising. Juco ball holds a special place in Fitzgerald’s heart. His first full-time coaching job was as an assistant at North Iowa Area Community College in 2003. He moved to Division II Flagler, where he spent two seasons before joining Des Moines Area Community College in 2007. He was named head coach a year after that and went 249-73 over the next five seasons.

Dallas Baptist marked his first foray into Division I, and there he caught the eye of Jay Johnson, who two weeks after taking over as head coach at LSU in June 2021 poached Fitzgerald from DBU as his recruiting coordinator. Fitzgerald’s first group of commitments was headlined by Konnor Griffin, who today is starting shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates in what would have been his junior year in college. Between DBU and LSU, Fitzgerald’s persuasiveness earned him a reputation as college baseball’s Mariano Rivera-caliber closer.

Replicating that at Kansas was an entirely different story. Power 4 teams historically have not constructed their rosters around juco players, typically signing one or two a year. With a limited NIL budget and facilities that don’t stack up to what other top-tier teams offer, Kansas would zag where everyone else zigged. Fitzgerald understood that only special sorts of freshmen warrant significant playing time, so if he wanted to win, he would lean into more mature players that prioritized at-bats and innings and winning over money and perks.

It’s how, last year, it landed first baseman Brady Ballinger. Unrecruited out of a Las Vegas high school, Ballinger enrolled at the College of Southern Nevada, he said, because “it was that or go to a trade school.” Kansas was the only team to seriously court Ballinger, seeing swing tweaks that might unlock his production. Almost immediately Kansas coaches asked the 6-foot-2, 225-pound Ballinger to move his hand position and add a leg kick to improve his timing, then start trying to hit the ball in the air more. In 58 games as the Jayhawks’ first baseman last year, Ballinger hit .353/.490/.670 with 16 home runs, 56 RBIs and 71 runs, and today he serves as Kansas’ cleanup hitter.

“Fitz is really good at bringing guys in and on Day 1 he’s going to tell you exactly what he’s going to expect of you,” Ballinger said. “There’s no surprises. Everything’s pretty upfront: ‘Here’s what’s going to happen, here’s how everything’s going to go and you’re either on board or we’re going to leave you behind.’ And his coaching style really helps with juco players just trying to acclimate.”

KU becoming a haven for the best juco players makes sense considering the success of two-year colleges in the state. Johnson County Community College has been the best juco team in the country this season, winning 41 games in a row at one point. Dozens of players in the Kansas Jayhawk Community College Conference are set to play Division I ball next year — including Cowley County catcher Holden Groebl at Kansas.

Fitzgerald and Coyne don’t limit their juco recruiting to a small radius, of course. They regularly land players from legacy juco programs such as LSU Eunice, from which they plucked their leadoff hitter and best player this season, shortstop Tyson LeBlanc. The depth of Coyne’s research into the players he recruits runs deep, and he got a leg up on others by avoiding a common mistake: mispronouncing LeBlanc’s last name. (It is pronounced Luh-BLAHn, with the C silent and the N soft.) LeBlanc noticed. He also noticed that KU gathered video and player-tracking data and used it to give a comprehensive assessment of his game, including a player comparison to former San Diego Padres shortstop Khalil Greene, whose power-first game indeed resembles LeBlanc’s.

He committed soon after his in-person visit, leaving behind Eunice, where, he said, “the baseball field is paradise and then the outskirts are crawfish fields, drive-through daiquiri shops and Walmart. We have a Tractor Supply. One Mexican restaurant that’s the hotspot. If you’ve got 10 bucks in your bank account, that’s where you’re spending your 10 bucks.” Lawrence felt like Valhalla comparatively.

And that, as much as anything, is what Fitzgerald and Coyne love about juco players. It’s not just that they’re appreciative of the amenities. It’s that they’ve proved they can excel in trying situations. At Eunice, LeBlanc said, the team didn’t have an athletic trainer his freshman year, so players did their own cupping therapy and electrical nerve stimulation. There’s a level of self-sufficiency and purpose with them helping to lessen the stigma bigger programs have with juco transfers.

It’s how a team that was picked to finish fifth in the Big 12 and doesn’t necessarily have the statistics of a first-place unit wins a championship. Other programs can go wild in the transfer portal. Kansas will happily do what it knows best and keep winning.

Success compounds in college baseball, especially when the foundational players find themselves in professional ball. LeBlanc and Ballinger are expected to be drafted this July. Others could be as well. And consistent years of drafted players take the penciling of a narrative — a program on the upswing — and etch it in ink.

It’s starting to dry now, to firmly lock in KU as a force to be reckoned with in college baseball. Like UConn has done with Division III standouts, the Jayhawks’ identity is rooted in their willingness to tread where other programs are too proud or pompous. It’s a formula, and it works, and by now Kansas knows how to navigate the potential pitfalls.

“Everyone on your team is all of a sudden good when you get to a level like the Big 12 where you look up and say, ‘Holy buckets, every at-bat that I have in the fall is against the best guy that I faced last year,'” Fitzgerald said. “When you do that, you really start to get an appreciation for how many good baseball players there are.”

There are plenty. The best get drafted out of high school. The tier after that commits in hopes of forging that same path three years down the road. And then there are the 99.9%, the thousands who have excellence within and simply take a more tortuous path to find it — the overlooked and underappreciated. Or, as they’re otherwise known, the exact sorts of players the University of Kansas would love to have.