Can O Corn: DMACC Head Coach Nic Mishler
November 1, 2024
The Can O Corn Podcast is a show about all things Iowa baseball hosted by Rob Allison and Parker Hageman. This week, we talk shop with Nic Mishler, head coach of the DMACC Bears.
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What's it like when you get some of these freshmen from high school on campus and they get introduced to some of the JUCO life?
This year we have 30 new faces and most of them are freshmen. It's good. I think it's as expected, they get sped up a little bit. Even the guys from higher class baseball there, it's just a different speed.
And then you have the sophomores that have been through it and they move faster, they process information faster. And for a lot of them, and this is not a knock on high school coaches or anything, we're doing stuff different. Their bodies become sore because they start lifting and they're not performing and they want to impress their new teammates, that sort of thing.
And I think it's pretty common that they may struggle a little bit. But we have a lot of Iowa kids, a lot of Midwest kids, they're tough kids and they adapt fairly fast, sometimes not as fast as I'd like, but it's good. I joke with my buddies at the four-year level that just let me take care of these freshmen and get them ready for you so you don't have to deal with freshmen anymore.
I like helping them through those early days of college and figuring out the classroom and all those things that I definitely needed help with when I went to junior college. So it's good. I enjoy it.
What's the look and feel of your roster? Is DMACC Des Moines-centric or kind of how do you piece that roster together? What are you guys looking for?
The easiest way is to explain it is my recruiting model was I wanted to win our area first. I think that's important. I think there's a lot of really good baseball.
I came from the four-year level and recruited a lot of the JCs around here, but didn't maybe understand how good the high school was. And in Des Moines, there's a lot of really good players. So kind of try to target that hour to two-hour radius around us and then expand throughout the rest of the state and try to win those guys first.
And then obviously, we've had a lot of success in Minnesota and Nebraska. We have quite a few North Dakota kids this year. I'm from Indiana, so we'll have some Indiana guys, have one committed from Indiana for next year.
Just start trying to hammer out our area. We're on the road, as I'm sure you know, pretty much every day when we can. And just trying to get as many good players in our area to stay home and then kind of work out from there.
With the NCAA recruiting rule changes how has the intake and then also moving the guys on, has that changed?
The interest this fall still has been, and I guess the amount of Division I schools and four-year schools I've seen out, has been just as much or more than any other year, quite honestly.
For whatever reason, I feel like a lot of our guys commit in the spring or summer. I think we had 15 total guys commit to Division I schools last year, and I think we only had three at this point in the fall or that committed in the fall. So for whatever reason, I think that our guys tend to commit a little bit later, get interest a little bit later, which is fine by all means.
I think, early on, the top-end guys seem to be getting the same attention that they would normally get. The conversations I've been having with a lot of guys are that they're probably going to continue to recruit JUCOs pretty heavily. I think you're going to see more and more, you're starting to see it on social media and stuff already, of kids that were committed, that are not committed anymore. And those guys are most likely going to end up at a JC, and the JCs are already flooded with talent, I think, more than they were before COVID. And it's going to continue to get more and more talented, where they're going to be forced to have to continue to recruit our kids that are going to be 21 on campus, as opposed to the 18-year-old that normally was going to one of those schools as a freshman, and then either making it or going into the portal.
With the rule changes, has it changed anything you do in regards to recruiting high school kids? Has it changed your calendar of when you start reaching out to guys? Has the type of guy changed for you? Are you able to tap into maybe a different talent subset? How has it affected you in regards to ultimately bringing players into DMACC?
I would probably answer like eight different times, eight different ways this fall, because I feel like every week, usually I'm pretty set in my ways, just how I was taught. And when it comes to recruiting and everything, we have a plan and we usually stick to it. However, I would say we've been way more patient this fall.
The guys that we know fit our mold and would be guys we want, even if some of these guys that are committed start to decommit, we're going after those guys. We've got some, we haven't got some. But I do think that we've definitely been more patient in what we're doing.
We've probably offered some walk-on type opportunities to some guys that maybe in the past we would have given money. There's guys that we're on right now that are Senior Future Game guys that have zero Division I offers and throwing 93 miles an hour. It blows my mind. So I think it has changed from the type of ability that is still available, especially on the pitching side of things.
I would definitely say we've been more patient, if anything. Our mold or I guess the kind of guy that's had success at DMACC and that we typically get, I think those are still the guys that we're getting to say yes to us. Whether they are the guy that's a little more flashy or the guy that's maybe a little more blue collar and kind of had to beat the bushes down to find, those seem to be kind of in our sweet spot.