Ep. 46 | Mike Deegan, Denison University

What You'll Learn in This Episode

Host Ross Hawley sits down with Mike Deegan, head baseball coach at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. Deegan is in his 13th season at Denison, coming off a Super Regional appearance, and the episode catches him days before an opening weekend in Greensboro, North Carolina. He played for Don Schaly at Marietta College, the all-time winningest coach in Division III baseball, and later coached there under Brian Brewer during a run of three national championships.

More than 20 years into the job, he says he still feels the excitement of game one. The conversation covers how transfers actually look at the Division III level, the shared purpose behind every decision his staff makes, what he listens for in a recruit and a recruit's parents, and the hardest 20 minutes of his week: posting the travel roster.

The highlights:

• Why transfer traffic at Denison looks nothing like the churn at bigger programs
• The shared purpose that drives the program: compete for a national championship and provide an elite student-athlete experience
• What makes a school sticky enough that a national player of the year comes back
• Where the top of Division III actually sits compared with mid-major Division I
• What loving the game looks like in a recruit, beyond velocity and exit velocity
• The empathy behind posting a travel roster, and why it is only a data point
• Leadership as awareness of yourself first, then of everyone around you
• Advice for parents: the sooner you let go of the big-league assumption, the better

Opening Weekend, 13 Seasons In

Denison opens on the road with a storm in the forecast, and Deegan is not pretending to be calm about it. He has been doing this for more than two decades and says he has never once dreaded going to work. Preseason rankings have the team high, and the program has been knocking on the door for several years, but he frames the season the same way he frames everything: how good can this particular group become? In a short small-college season, momentum is everything.

He is honest that the roster he has is talented, and just as honest that he cannot promise anyone an at bat. What he can promise is that the staff keeps showing up for players who keep showing up.

Transfers, Grad Years, and Where Division III Really Sits

Denison has four or five transfers on the roster, but they are traditional ones: a player whose first school was not the right academic fit and who needed somewhere else to go. The bigger competitive wrinkle is the other direction. Denison has no graduate program, so players who finish their degrees with eligibility left have gone on to Michigan State, Georgetown, William and Mary, a Division II program, and Maryland. Deegan enjoys following them and still calls those extra years a real competitive loss.

He also pushes back, carefully, on how people talk about the level. Division III has 382 teams, so the range is enormous, but he argues the top 35 or so play baseball comparable to mid-major Division I, and he points at a Clemson leadoff hitter who started at a Division III school as evidence it is not just a small-college coach talking. His opening weekend alone includes Lynchburg, Christopher Newport, and Cortland State.

"I always tell people they can go get a better baseball experience somewhere and they can go get a better academic experience somewhere. But when you combine those two, that's what makes our program and our university a bit sticky."

A Shared Purpose That Keeps Players Home

The staff's shared purpose is stated plainly: compete for a national championship and provide an elite student-athlete experience. Deegan knows it sounds bold, and he uses it to drive nearly every decision. He does not think the two halves are mutually exclusive, and he thinks that combination is why the program keeps its players.

Last year's national player of the year, who followed it up by winning player of the year in a summer collegiate league, is still on the roster. Deegan credits the degree and the way the staff cares for players, not any promise about playing time. He is also clear about the line he will not cross in recruiting: Denison will not sell itself as a stepping stone. One family this year said their son would come for a year and see how it went, and he appreciated the honesty enough to go a different direction. He will never hold a player back from a better financial opportunity, but the goal is to run the place so well that leaving is hard.

Thirteen Years in One Place

Deegan says 13 years does not feel like 13 years. Some of the reason is professional: the university keeps trending up, and a president who understands athletics tells him to go be as great as he can be rather than treating ambition as a knock on the academics. Most of the reason is personal. He is a father of four, Granville is a village-sized community 25 minutes from Columbus, and he explored opportunities early on and decided he already had what he wanted.

Love the Game and It Loves You Back

What he tells every player comes down to investment, and to patience about when that investment pays. A month of hard work does not entitle anyone to a shot, and the return almost never arrives on the player's schedule.

"If you just keep working and invest, the game will give you back so much. But it doesn't happen on your time. If you just love it, it'll love you back."

So loving the game is something he recruits for. He borrows a framework from a JJ Redick and LeBron James podcast conversation about what separates good players from great ones once you remove talent, size, and athleticism: love of the process, and knowledge and history of the game. He is not disqualifying a player who does not know who Rickey Henderson was, but a player who watches the game and can talk about it stands out. So does baseball IQ, which he says shows up in the way a player moves and goes about his business.

"Everybody's throwing 88 to 92 in a training environment and everybody's flashing exit velocities. Show me someone who loves this thing enough to fail and get up and do it again, and that person's got a chance of being fulfilled playing college baseball."

The Hardest Part of the Job

What he loves most now is watching a well-built practice come to life: a plan with big rocks and little rocks, managers and players moving, systems running, the staff iterating on how to reach people. What he dreads is the travel roster, because he knows every player left off has to call home and answer questions on campus all week.

His message to those players is that this is one data point on one weekend, not a life sentence. He also refuses to soften the other half of it: if a program says out loud that it is competing for a national championship, that means excellent players surrounding you and decisions made on what is best for the team. He tries to hold both things at once, caring deeply about people while moving a team toward excellence.

The same logic carries into how he talks about failure, which most recruited freshmen have not met yet. Good players, coaches, and leaders lean into what they control; everyone else talks about what they do not. He applies it to himself, too, with bad weather and interrupted travel in front of him that week.

"That list of what you can control is usually way longer than you ever think it is. People just don't want to stare that reality in the face."

Leadership Starts With Awareness

The first word leadership brings to mind for Deegan is awareness: of yourself, then of others. He thinks that is where coaches get it wrong, imitating a coach they played for or someone they saw on television instead of doing the harder work of figuring out who they are at their best. He gets there by writing and by training, which clears his head enough to read other people well. From there, leadership is communicating a shared vision, showing every person in the organization how they matter to it, and deciding where his own energy actually moves the group.

That lesson came the hard way. He played for Schaly and coached for Brewer, two enormously successful men who are nothing like him, and Brewer told him when he hired him that he only needed to be Mike Deegan. It took years to understand what that meant. He points at Pete Carroll and Bill Belichick as proof that opposite temperaments both win, and says the sooner a young coach stops performing someone else's version of the job, the more he will enjoy his players and the bigger his impact will be. With four kids at home, he is also candid that his routines are less systematic than they used to be, so he spends his attention on the few things that move the whole program rather than agonizing over one swing path.

What Denison Looks For

The filter starts with academics. If the GPA and test scores are not a match, the rest is wasted effort, no matter how much the staff likes the player. Then comes the skill set. Then come the separators, which is why his assistants identify players and Deegan meets every one of them on campus.

He is listening for whether a player cares about others more than himself, whether he can commit to a program rather than a team, and whether he loves the game as much as the staff does, because almost none of these players will play professionally and they are going to train like it matters anyway. He listens to parents as carefully as players, mostly for whether they can release the experience to their son. A question he considers a bad sign is a parent asking where he sees their kid, because everyone else on the roster is working right now and he has no idea yet who is going to spend the summer getting better.

Advice for Parents and Young Coaches

For parents: Deegan's first piece of advice sounds harsh and is not meant that way. A big-league player is a unicorn, and if you happen to have one, you will not need to say a word.

"The sooner you realize your kid won't play in the big leagues, the better. Just support them, let them learn and grow through this game, and give them every resource possible."

He has watched parents scream at 10- and 11-year-olds over strikeouts when the expectation was perfection in a game that will not deliver it, sometimes with a teenager behind the plate calling the pitches. A friend of his who works in youth development argues the game is barely even being played until 15 or 16, when players can actually take three steps and square up a throw or shape a pitch. So keep the love alive instead: a minor league game, time around the older high school players, room to fail. What makes him sad is good athletes who quit early because the pushing got heavier than the fun. His own son is 15, and his advice to everyone, himself included, is to chill out.

For coaches: Learn, constantly. The coaches who do this at the highest level read a lot, study a lot, and put themselves in rooms where good minds are talking baseball and leadership. He gets real energy from it, treats it as a competitive advantage, and says the deeper he goes the more he realizes how much he still does not know. It also shapes who he trusts: he is drawn to people humble enough to credit others, not the ones who hand you a resume.

Why Baseball

He was probably a better high school basketball player than a baseball player, but a six-foot guard runs out of runway, and his dad loved baseball, which made it a natural pull. He worked at Coca-Cola after graduating and did not know he wanted to coach. Now 46, he says he loves the game more than he did at 16 or 26 and hopes to love it more at 66, the way any good relationship strengthens over time. He has real respect for the older generation of coaches whose love affair with the game came from being immersed in it February through October rather than from research papers, and for the newer methods too.

Off the field he is a 1990s hip-hop and R&B guy who will drop a verse in the dugout and leave his players wondering what just happened. Tupac is his favorite of all time, with Talib Kweli and Jay-Z close behind for pure lyricism, and John Mellencamp speaks to the small town he came from. His closing word to listeners is simple: stay in the game and do it for the right reasons.

Episode Timestamps

Tap any timestamp to jump the player straight to that moment.

• 0:00 — Introduction
• 1:02 — A 13th season at Denison after a Super Regional run
• 1:57 — Recruiting and transfers at the Division III level
• 4:41 — Shared purpose: a national championship and a great degree
• 6:23 — Recruiting players who want all four years in one place
• 8:26 — Thirteen years at Denison, and why Granville is home
• 10:52 — Division III finally getting its due
• 13:32 — The college baseball experience at every level
• 15:13 — What loving the game actually looks like in a player
• 17:19 — The most satisfying part of coaching
• 18:48 — The hardest part of the job: posting the travel roster
• 21:45 — Facing failure and adversity for the first time
• 23:46 — Leadership starts with awareness of yourself
• 30:03 — Coaching as yourself, not as your mentors
• 31:58 — What it takes to get recruited at Denison
• 35:16 — Advice for parents: chill out
• 40:34 — Advice for young coaches: keep learning
• 44:20 — Music: 90s hip hop, Tupac, and Talib Kweli
• 46:30 — Why baseball
• 48:32 — Final word: stay in the game for the right reasons

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Mike Deegan is the head baseball coach at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. Subscribe to the Baseball Forward Podcast for more conversations with the players, coaches, and leaders elevating the next generation of the game.