Baseball rival is also model for UNLV team

By Brian Hilderbrand

Thursday, March 20, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Buddy Gouldsmith makes no bones about the fact that he would like to mold his UNLV baseball program after one established 33 years ago at a little state university carved out of a Southern California orange grove.

For the past three decades, Cal State Fullerton has been a model Division I baseball program, winning four NCAA championships and 22 conference championships, sending 45 players to the major leagues and producing 70 All-Americans. Amazingly, the Titans have never had a losing season in the 33 years they have competed at the Division I level.

For the third time since he took over as the Rebels’ head coach before the 2004 season, Gouldsmith will take his Rebels into Goodwin Field on the Fullerton campus this weekend for a three-game series against the traditional college power.

Fullerton is not sitting atop the college baseball polls this season — the Titans are 9-8 and ranked 25th in the USA Today/ESPN coaches’ poll — so what does Gouldsmith have to gain by playing a program he routinely competes against on the recruiting trail? The answer is simple: If you want to join them, you must beat them. Or at least play them.

“The recruiting factor is so big that you have to play a great schedule, and part of that is playing against teams like Fullerton and Arizona,” Gouldsmith said, ticking off two of the Rebels’ opponents this month.

“If that’s who you aspire to be, you have to beat those types of teams sometime and if you don’t have the experience of playing them, then a lot of times your team can be intimidated and can get overwhelmed by the atmosphere.”

The atmosphere at 3,500-seat Goodwin Field figures to be unlike anything the Rebels have faced since, well, they played there in 2006. The Titans are averaging 2,082 fans a game through six home games this season; the Rebels are averaging 424 fans through 12 home games.

This will be Gouldsmith’s third trip to Fullerton as the Rebels’ head coach. UNLV is 0-6 at Goodwin Field and 2-10 against the Titans since 2004. Although the Rebels have taken their lumps against Fullerton, Gouldsmith said it still is important to continue the series.

“The tradition of their program is one that we aspire to create here and I think it’s important to see not just their program, but to see what the competition is against them and how you measure up. So it’s a great challenge for us,” he said. “We have had, although limited, some success against them over the past five or six years and I think we gain great confidence when we’re able to play with them and beat them. I think that’s certainly helped us.”

The Rebels, off to a 9-8 start, are 2-1 in the Mountain West Conference after taking two of three at New Mexico this weekend. The good news for Gouldsmith is that the Rebels’ offense has been explosive, hitting at a .329 clip and averaging nearly eight runs a game. The bad news is that the Rebels’ defense and pitching haven’t been nearly as consistent as the offense, as their 5.62 staff earned-run average suggests.

“We’re probably a couple of games off the pace that we would have hoped to be on,” Gouldsmith said. “If we were sitting here after 17 games and we were 11-6, I’d feel very, very good about where we’re at.

“At 9-8, we’re not overly concerned but just wish that we would have established more consistency. Had we done that, I think we could very well be sitting here at 11-6.”

But there still is plenty of time for a team to get on a roll and make a serious run in the postseason — Cal State Fullerton proved that in 2004. After struggling to a 15-16 start that season, the Titans won 32 of their next 38 games and captured their fourth national championship.

Now that is a program worthy of emulating.