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The Two Reasons Josh Holliday Will Be a Long-Term Success In Stillwater

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My high school baseball coach’s name was David Denny. He won a national championship as a player at Texas in the 1980s and went on to have an extremely successful career coaching high school baseball in the Houston area including the Kingwood High School team I played on.

Nobody wants to hear about the glory days so I’ll get right to the point. His competitive advantage was that he understood that successful organizations are built on trust. It’s tough to get through an article about Josh Holliday (or Mike Gundy for that matter) these days without reading about the importance of trust.

“I’ve given these kids a lot of rope for this to be their team and trusted them with a lot of responsibility to do the right thing,” Holliday told the Oklahoman last week. “And they’ve not let me down. I think our program is built on trust.”

Holliday gets it.

“It starts with the kids,” Holliday continued to the Oklahoman even after losing two straight to Arizona. “And I think it starts when two or three of them fall in love with Oklahoma State, and then it starts with a group, maybe a particular group of recruits, that comes in and you start to get some leadership from those kids.”

Love and trust. It sounds more like the extension of a college romance into the real world than the proper foundation for a college baseball team, but Holliday is not wrong here.

When I was a walk-on under Frank Anderson (more glory days talk!) love for Stillwater and OSU were what I thought I would find. But the reality I encountered could not have been farther from these principals. It’s true that a handful of players loved OSU, but the majority of them didn’t care if they were playing for OSU, Miami or Cal State Fullerton. They just wanted to get to The Show. That was one of the shortcomings of Anderson’s teams Holliday seems to have rectified.

Maybe those things don’t matter, but I think they do. So does Holliday.

“Many of you who follow college baseball closely, you didn’t give us a shot,” Holliday told Go Pokes. “And rightfully so. There were times this year we weren’t very good. But we finished good. And we finished because of these kids and their hearts. And they showed you down the stretch they were made of the right stuff, as we thought we were early.

“It was a journey. And these guys know now you can get through anything if you’ve got strong relationships and care for one another. And the way they played the last 20 games showed the true colors of these kids. I’m very proud of them and I’m proud that they’re here at the College World Series where we can thank them appropriately and say goodbye to them.”

So that’s why Josh Holliday is building a long-term product that will see immense success. Recruiting the right guys is one thing. Playing the right players is another. Hitting philosophies and pitching theories are great. But a love for that interlocking OS and trust of the dude sitting next to you on the bus can cover up a multitude of shortcomings and make good teams great ones and great ones national champions.

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