By Chris Cook
LongwoodLancers.com

When Ryan Mau was hired to take over as head coach of the Longwood baseball program in July, 2014, he and the Lancers both faced a unique challenge. It was one the university's storied baseball program hadn't encountered in nearly 40 years, not since former head coach Buddy Bolding, the namesake of Longwood's baseball stadium, began his legendary 35-year coaching career in Farmville prior to the 1978 season.
 
For the first time since Bolding was named head coach of the then-upstart Longwood baseball program, the Lancers would be coached by an outsider.
 
As only the third head coach in the history of the program, Mau would be charged with filling the boat-sized shoes of Bolding, who built the program from the ground up and compiled a 953-544-4 record during his 35 seasons at the helm. Nearly every player on the team Mau inherited had been recruited by Bolding, a beloved coach and mentor who had a penchant for fostering strong loyalty among his players that lasted well beyond their playing days.
 
"That first year, there were 30 players here, and I didn't recruit a single one. I had never seen a single one play, catch, throw, hit or anything," said Mau, whom athletics director Troy Austin hired away from Navy where he was the top assistant coach from 2011-14. "Walking in and knowing that they all signed up for a different coaching staff, that some of them had already gone through two coaching changes at that point, it was a challenge. I didn't know how quickly and how eagerly they would buy into something different."
 
Now on the cusp of opening his third season as Longwood's head baseball coach, Mau has made believers out of his players and Longwood fans alike.
 
The Lancers head into 2017 buoyed by a breakthrough 2016 campaign that featured 32 wins, the most since Longwood received full Division I certification on Sept. 1, 2007, as well as a tied-for-second Big South finish and a trip to the Big South Championship semifinals. That success, and that of the back end of the 2015 season, has expedited Mau's endeavor to infuse his brand of baseball with that of a historically strong Longwood program.
 
"We had to change expectations and implement our vision of where this program could go, and where it was going to go," Mau said. "Getting the players to buy in, that was the challenge."
 
Most members of that 2015 team had already played under two head coaches, first under Bolding, who retired after the 2013 season, and then under former Lancer and Bolding's long-time assistant coach Brian McCullough, who stepped in as interim head coach for the 2014 season. That they would be playing under their third head coach in as many seasons, let alone one who came from outside the program, created a great deal of uncertainty in the locker room, according to former infielder and 2016 graduate C.J. Roth, a junior on Mau's first Longwood team.
 
"It caught a lot of guys off guard at first just because we had coach Bolding here for so long," Roth said. "We all knew change was coming. When you look at coach Mau's resume, you realize it's going to be a lot stricter and more ordered, very cut-and-dry, black-and-white."
 
But even with that uncertainty, what Mau inherited was a team of players, like Roth, record-setting pitcher Aaron Myers and Boston Red Sox draft pick Kyri Washington, who bought into Longwood baseball's historic success and who shared a vision to bring that success into the Division I era. As a coach who had spent nine of his first 12 years as a college coach at military institutions VMI and Navy, Mau's methods would be different, as would his expectations for what Longwood baseball would become, both on the field and behind the scenes.
 
"It was definitely a culture shock for a lot of our guys," Roth said. "Being a military kid, it was easier for me to make the transition because I was used to a more structured background. But we all knew when Coach Mau came in, he was trying to change a culture. When that happens, you have clashes here and there, but for the most part, those first couple practices were just getting to know each other. From there it became about changing the mindset, becoming a team, working towards a common goal instead of individual personal goals."
 
Throughout that introductory period, Mau revealed his overarching goal to be the same as Bolding's before him: To build Longwood baseball into a championship-caliber Division I program, and to do it while developing people, not just baseball players. That task would not be easy for a Lancer program that failed to make the Big South Tournament in 2014 and that had finished in the bottom three in its first two years in the conference.
 
It took Mau just two-thirds of a season to make believers out of the Lancers.
 
"For me, it goes back to a stretch toward the end of that first year," Roth said. "We had to win a lot of games to get into the [Big South Tournament], and when we pulled off the run we did, a lot of us looked around and said, 'We have something going for us.'"
 
That run Roth refers to was over the final two weekends of the 2015 season in which the Lancers – fighting for one of the last two spots in the eight-team Big South Championship field – won two of their final three Big South series to clinch the No. 8 seed in the conference tournament. The Lancers took two of three games against UNC Asheville and Gardner-Webb – both series on the road – and then went on to play spoiler in the Big South Tournament, upsetting No. 4 seed Liberty 4-3 in an elimination game.
 
That late-season surge gave Mau a tremendous push in his efforts to get his team to buy in to his vision, and set the stage for the monumental 2016 season that followed.
 
"When you come in and play the way we did early on last season with a lot of walk-offs, a lot of hard-fought games, you start to see where we can go," said Roth, who captained the team as a senior in 2016. "We took down Coastal Carolina on a Friday night. That's something we haven't done since joining the Big South."
 
Mau's culture shift showed itself not only in the number of games Longwood won in 2016 but in the way the Lancers won those games. Of Longwood's 32 wins, 17 came after their opponent put the first run on the board. The Lancers were 11-4 in one-run games, 4-1 in extra innings and 23-1 when they took a lead into the sixth inning.
 
And in a fitting nod to the coach who laid the foundation that Mau is now building on, the Lancers went 21-7 at home in Buddy Bolding Stadium, winning 18 of those games in comeback fashion.
 
"We talk about adversity, and our game provides a ton of it," Mau said. "The guys learn to expect adversity, and to embrace it, to link arms and stay together. They did that so many times last season, coming back from situations where there wasn't a lot of hope from our spectators that we were going to have a chance. The fight was in all those guys, and that's because they believe in each other."
 
After that monumental campaign, expectations are running high in Longwood's clubhouse in 2017. With a group of five position players and nearly every impact arm returning from last season's squad, Mau now has what he calls his deepest squad since taking over the program. Headlining that group are infielder Alex Lewis, who broke out to hit .369 with 45 RBI as a junior, shortstop Michael Osinski, who hit .429 over his final 18 games last year, and Sammy Miller, a converted outfielder who will anchor the top of the lineup after logging 19 steals and reaching base at a .390 clip last season.
 
More importantly, the Lancers are now believers.
 
"The neat thing is, this locker room has believers in it now," Mau said. "Instead of hopers, hoping we'll have a good year, now we believe we'll have a good year. Everything we've put into place, as far as how we go about our days on the field, in the classroom and the community, it has laid out our standards for this program. These guys have bought in and delivered. Because of that, because they've seen real results from the process, and they believe in it. They believe this is our year."
 
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