On this week’s episode of the ALL BEEF NO FILLER podcast, we are joined by Jon Olsen, head coach of the McCook Community College Indians. Olsen has been a head coach in the junior college world for over 20 years and he shares his experience in recruiting and developing players to help move them into the next level. 

You can read a sample of the interview below or listen to the entire episode on our website, Apple Podcast or Spotify. 

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You talked about all those competition dates in your fall schedule. Are you doing that because you want to get more competition and play good teams or is that where the schools are recruiting your guys or probably a combination of both? 

It's a hit on the head, a combination of both.

It's where the (4-year) schools are. They were in every place that we played and there's some other places, too, that we want to try and get into as well with those. But everywhere that we listed or that we mentioned, there were multiple Division 1, Division 2 schools there.

But we also want to play better, too. Play better competition. I was a head coach in Kansas at a junior college down there before I came to McCook. I think this is my 24th year as a head coach in junior college baseball. It's greatly changed, especially the fall. When I first was in it, it was, okay, we're gonna go over here and we're gonna play 21 innings and we're gonna just play as much as we possibly can, never have an umpire, never have a scoreboard on, you know, all those things.

And that was fine. Now when we're going to these places and the scoreboard is on and teams get excited and there's umpires and it's just a little bit different. So I think the old days were good in terms of, hey, we're gonna go play 21, 28 innings. I would hear stories about junior college coaches in Kansas that would go on a Saturday and play 28 innings, spend the night in the other team's gym and then play another 28 innings the next night and stuff like that.

Now it's let's go somewhere and play a showcase and play two seven inning games and keep score and be excited to win and things like that. I think there's value in both. I think just going out and playing other people. One of the things I liked about 28 innings or 21 innings was you got a pitcher [who would] go out and give up a four or five spot and [you would] throw him right back out the next inning to see how he responded and see how he did.

You're not gonna do that in those other situations now. That's okay, too. But we were able to play some really good junior college programs, which I think will help us down the line in the spring.

From your 24 years of experience, talk about the recruiting side of things. 

That's greatly changed, too. I could just tell you just timeline-wise, when I started we couldn't sign an incoming kid until January 15th. January 15th was our deadline to start signing guys. And now it's November 1st. So that's a two and a half month timeframe where we moved it up.

And even when we could start, when I was signing guys, when we were signing guys in Kansas, we were waiting till the spring. We were signing our first guys for the upcoming year come April, May. Some of the best players I ever signed were in July. We had an All-American one year I signed in August. So that timeline has greatly changed because now it's moved up. And if you don't have commits right now, if you don't sign the guys on November 1st, I call it kind of that first base. We want to have that base of recruits in here, of good players that we've seen over the previous year. 

We've got 16, 17, 18 guys that could be back with the big freshman group. So we're gonna sign a few guys here on November 1st, but then we obviously want to save some for later.

The landscape has now greatly changed. Division I's are recruiting differently, which trickles downs to us. There's gonna be new roster limitations, which is going to trickle down to us. The last five, six years, there's been so much different stuff. It is different, but at the end of the day, you still want to go look for good players and get good players and then we want to try and move guys on as well.

For us, we've been through a lot, junior college baseball-wise. We've been through a lot, starting with COVID and then in the transfer portal era, that has just really changed a little bit of how junior college kids are looked at sometimes. If you got a good junior college player, they're going somewhere.

Is there anything at all that you guys use tech-wise to develop your players? Or what is your kind of style at McCook Community College to develop guys and get them better?

This is something that's at the forefront of everything, development. I have a philosophy and I just simply call it a hybrid philosophy.

We have to be 50-50 development off the field, development with exit velocity, development with pitching velocity, development with getting stronger, being a better athlete, versus development of being able to do that within the white lines. 

When I was first introduced to a bunch of development stuff, we had an assistant here probably six or seven years ago now. His name was Pat Robles and he now works at Tread out in North Carolina. He was here for a year and a half and he left to go work in the player development system for the Philadelphia Phillies. He got hired by the Phillies out of here and that was when a lot of pro teams really started the first wave of trying to hire a lot of data-driven guys. He is extremely knowledgeable on the development side and we took a fall off.

We didn't play any fall games. He just had an onboard process and really worked with the pitchers and helped with the position players. And he was here for a year and a half and it was eye-opening to me.

We have a strength and conditioning coach that we use. And he does a great job programming our guys. I would say for us at McCook, the base of our development program or our development is the weight room. We have got to get in and get stronger. That's the biggest piece for us. So I tell people for 24 years, the weight room has been one of the biggest pieces that we've had. We've always been trying to do development for our guys. Now it's just looked at a little bit differently. So now the weight room is a huge piece of it. I feel like we do a really good job there. 

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