Mark Patton: UCSB Baseball Coach Rides Out Emotional Roller Coaster of Many Wins, One Huge Loss

UC Santa Barbara baseball coach Andrew Checketts is living “A Tale of Two Seasons.”

It is the best of times, it is the worst of times.

His Gauchos have been riding high in the Big West Conference pennant race the last month. Their 12th-straight league victory on Sunday — a 12-3 rout of UC San Diego — kept them in first place in the league standings.

D1 Baseball has taken notice. Its NCAA Tournament projections released this week listed UCSB as one of the probable 16 regional hosts for next month’s NCAA Tournament.

But UCSB has never traversed so many obstacles in the road to Omaha and the College World Series.

Charles Dickens would have scripted this as “the spring of hope” following the Gauchos’ “winter of despair.”

They sputtered at the start with injuries to numerous key players, by the detour that the California Coastal Commission mandated for their field renovations … and by a death in the family.

“I wish I could say it was more enjoyable,” Checketts said of his 13th season at UCSB. “It’s been a lot of stuff rolled up into about seven or eight months, both professionally and personally.”

He was tragically blindsided by the unexpected death of his father, Gordon Checketts, during the early innings of a March 12 home contest against UNLV.

The game was canceled while emergency personnel attempted to revive him.

The coach’s father was a vibrant, 78-year-old outdoorsman who still had charge of a thriving accounting business back in Oregon.

But most of all, he was a loving and devoted family man who had shared his love of baseball with his sons by coaching their Little League teams.

Andrew Checketts is still sorting through the emotional and professional wreckage.

“Nobody wants to lose their dad … Nobody wants to go through it,” Checketts told Noozhawk. “The setting was a bit traumatic for everybody.

“We’re still on the mend, picking up the pieces and getting Mom settled. My dad still had his business going.”

Checketts turned the team over to associate head coach Matt Fonteno for the league-opening series against Long Beach State while he handled family matters back home.

One of the most daunting tasks was to notify 200 of his father’s clients that they needed to file extensions on their tax returns. Thirty of those were corporate returns.

“There were off-the-field distractions, for sure,” Checketts said.

“I get a lot from people, like, ‘Ah, the field must be a nice getaway,’” he added. “Well, not really. It’s stressful.

“It’s not like you’re going to the field and hanging out on an island, sitting on a beach and relaxing. It’s super-high stress.

“All that is very trying, figuring out where to focus your attention.”

Ill Logistics

Checketts would be forgiven for quoting Dickens in his feelings about the months leading up to this season: “It was the age foolishness … the epoch of incredulity … the season of darkness.”

UCSB had skinned the grass off Caesar Uyesaka Stadium last August while anticipating the California Coastal Commission’s rubber-stamp approval of its new, eco-friendly, drought-tolerant artificial surface.

But the California Sierra Club chose to launch a new front in its war against microplastics by targeting all artificial turf fields.

It persuaded the Coastal Commission to remove UCSB’s $2.8 million project from its consent calendar of September and put it under a microscope for the next three months.

The commissioners sided with the Sierra Club in mid-December, giving its approval of UCSB’s project only if it used natural grass.

The pivot away from artificial turf kept the Gauchos homeless for six months until a new grass field and drainage system could be completed. A rainy winter delayed their home opener to March 8.

They had to scramble for practice sites for half a year. Westmont College, Santa Barbara City College and several local high schools helped them out, but they often had to settle for fields with no baseball diamond.

They played their first 11 games on the road — eight of which had been originally scheduled for Caesar Uyesaka Stadium.

Checketts said it felt like he was “under water for eight months.”

UCSB, which was ranked No. 17 in D1 Baseball’s preseason poll, fell out of the ratings entirely after posting records of 17-10 overall and 5-4 in the Big West during the first seven weeks of the season.

The Gaucho coach, however, kept the atmosphere upbeat at Uyesaka Stadium.

“I told them, ‘I know it feels like the sky is falling, but we have everything out in front of us right now,’” Checketts said. “I talked to them about it just from an encouraging standpoint of, ‘Let’s not lose our minds here.’

“‘We’ve got a good team, a talented team, and we’ve done all that with the distractions of the field, the coach’s dad dying behind home plate, playing on the road …

“‘We’ve had some stuff to deal with here, so forgive yourselves a little bit and get focused back on the things we can control.’”

The Gauchos took that message and have been running hot with it ever since.

The weekend’s three victories over UC San Diego — their fourth-straight sweep of a league series — boosted their records to 31-12 overall and 17-4 in the Big West.

Cal Poly (17-7) and ninth-ranked UC Irvine (15-6) are their closest pursuers with nine games remaining in the conference race.

The RPI (rating percentage index), a computerized ranking of all college baseball teams, pegged UCSB at No. 16 following Sunday’s win.

“Give credit to the kids for hanging in there,” Checketts said. “It looked bleak for a while … We had some ups and some downs.

“They’ve handled some of that adversity, dealing with the field and getting off to a slow start while dealing with some injuries. They all continued to work through it.

“We’ve played better the last couple of weeks, starting on the mound.”

Hurtful Start

The season’s first shock came in South Carolina during the opener at Campbell University when all-league catcher Aaron Parker injured his knee while sliding into a base.

He missed three weeks of play and was relegated to designated-hitter’s duty for several more.

Parker rejuvenated UCSB upon his return. He leads the team in batting average (.382) and is tied with second baseman Nick Oakley for most runs batted in (38) despite having missed 10 games.

He is just starting to get his speed back on the basepath.

“A real bonus would be for him to be running at 100% because he’s a legitimate base-stealing threat,” Checketts said.

Left-handed Hudson Barrett, UCSB’s top relief pitcher and a freshman All-American last year, became the next major casualty. He was lost for the season when he tore an elbow ligament during the second-week series at Sacramento State.

His injured elbow quickly turned the bullpen into the Gauchos’ Achilles heel. They became most dependent upon a pair of true freshmen, Jackson Flora and Cole Tryba.

Checketts eventually made one of the toughest decisions of this season by moving first-team all-leaguer Matt Ager out of the starting rotation to give himself an experienced reliever.

“Matt had thrown out of the pen successfully earlier in his career, so the transition wasn’t difficult for him,” he explained.

“He has the right personality for it. He’s handled it like a pro.”

Ager, who struggled at the start of this season with a strained oblique muscle, has found his stride as UCSB’s closer with a team-best six saves.

The Gauchos’ three weekend starters have been the backbone of their resurgence.

Ryan Gallagher (6-1 record, 2.64 earned run average) missed all of last season with an elbow injury after earning Freshman All-America honors in 2022.

Checketts moved him into Ager’s Friday spot in the rotation and Gallagher rewarded him with a two-hit shutout at UC Davis on April 19.

“He’s got a lot of pride,” Checketts said. “He wants to be good. He wants to be the guy.

“When we rolled him out at the beginning and said he was going to throw on Tuesdays, he was pretty ticked at me for a couple of weeks.”

Checketts needled him after his shutout at Davis.

“I got next to him and told him, ‘Hey, really good job … Next week we’re going to have you throw long relief on Tuesday,’” he said. “He kind of smiled.”

Fellow starters Mike Gutierrez (8-0, 3.00 ERA) and Tyler Bremner (9-0, 2.51 ERA) have also given Checketts plenty to smile about.

“I feel better about where we are on the mound,” he said. “We’re throwing the ball in the zone much better.

“In conference games, we lead the conference in ERA. Our walk totals aren’t leading the country but they’re much more reasonable, shaving off a walk to a walk-and-a-half a game.”

Moving Parts

He was forced to make other adjustments when third baseman Zander Darby and shortstop Corey Nunez suffered early season injuries.

Their replacements both proved up to the challenge.

Junior Justin Trimble has hit eight home runs since moving into the hot corner and freshman Jonathan Mendez has flashed a steady glove in the middle of UCSB’s infield.

“Trim is a real advanced defender,” Checketts said. “And we really liked Mendez when we got him.

“We thought he’d be the shortstop of the future when Nunez moved on. We just didn’t realize that it was going to happen this soon. He’s been really solid.”

The Gauchos’ senior leadership has come from the right side of the infield with second baseman Oakley (.297) and first baseman Brendan Durfee (.343, nine homers, and a team-best 41 runs scored).

Durfee, who rotates with Parker at catcher and Darby at first, transferred to UCSB this year from Division III Cal Lutheran University after Fonteno noticed him tearing up the California Collegiate League’s summer circuit.

“We thought we had a functional defender who could run a game back there at catcher and maybe contribute a little bit offensively,” Checketts said. “We didn’t realize how good he was going to be offensively.

“He’s mature and he’s got really good feel in the clubhouse. The guys really respect him.”

The outfield also got a boost the last month when All-Big West outfielder Ivan Brethowr (.286 and a team-best 10 homers) mended from an early season injury.

Jonah Sebring, a fleet defender in centerfield, also returned from an all-league season last year. Juniors LeTrey McCollum and Reiss Calvin have provided versatility and speed off the bench.

Checketts’ biggest move in the outfield was to finally give junior Jessada Brown a chance after two seasons on the bench. He gave him a start in the Sacramento State series and has kept him in the lineup ever since.

Brown has batted .343 with seven homers. He saved Saturday’s 6-3 victory over UC San Diego by robbing the Tritons of a grand-slam home run during the eighth inning with a leaping catch at the left-field fence.

The Grass Is Greener

The Gauchos have even adjusted nicely to the new surface. They are the only team in the country with an undefeated home record, going 20-0 so far at Caesar Uyesaka Stadium.

It bodes well if they do get to play host to a four-team regional.

“I think the big test was that Hawai‘i weekend,” Checketts said, referring to UCSB’s three-game sweep during the rainy weekend of April 12-14.

The field wouldn’t have been playable until at least Monday without the new drainage system.

The Gauchos would have been forced to play a Monday doubleheader and a third game might not have ever been played.

“Doubleheaders are hard to sweep,” Checketts said. “Maybe I’m being overly dramatic, but that was the reality of the field remaining in good shape.”

The issues with the 30-year-old stadium do have him rethinking his focus the last few years.

“I’m sure at some point I’ll be able to reflect on all this,” he said. “As you can imagine, working in a UC system, there’s a lot of minutia and stuff that really doesn’t lead to winning baseball games.

“I’ve had a tendency to worry about some of that stuff that probably doesn’t affect the product on the field, whether that’s the facility or the dugout padding or the bathroom situation.

“Once my dad passed away, I was like, ‘I’m just not going to deal with that stuff … Some of that is just going to have to wait.’”

It hit home for him six weeks after his father’s death when he boarded the team bus for a Tuesday, nonconference game at Loyola Marymount.

Donegal Fergus, his former associate head coach at UCSB, remained his neighbor in Goleta even after taking the Lions’ head coaching position this season.

“We had a bus full of girls — our daughters are all tight,” Checketts said. “We had coach Fonteno’s daughter, my daughter, two of coach Ferg’s daughters …

“Besides the game part of it, it was fun.”

The Gauchos lost 9-4. But in a season such as this, sometimes a little fun is what the soul most requires.