West Virginia baseball set a record on Thursday when they beat Cincinnati in the Big 12 Quarterfinals, as the Mountaineers picked up win No. 41 on the season, the most any WVU team has compiled in a single season.
The Mountaineers beat Cincinnati 10-3 on Thursday, winning their first game in almost two weeks, as No. 40 was hard to break for a while.
Head coach Steve Sabins acknowledged the significance of this mark, as over the last half decade or so, he's seen firsthand the ascension of Mountaineer baseball.
"It means a lot because I've been here for 10 years. And so this wasn't the case. This wasn't the standard. This wasn't the expectation for about 10 years," Sabins said.
West Virginia will be making their third NCAA Regional appearance in as many seasons this year, and they won their first-ever regional last season in 2024.
"When I first got here in 2016, we hadn't been to a regional in 20 years. So to go from not making a regional in 20 years to potentially, not potentially, to making three regionals in a row and having first rounders and playing in supers and setting program records, that's an exciting thing and it's something that a lot of people have worked really hard for a long time," Sabins said.
Sabins is in his first season as head coach of West Virginia, taking over for former head coach Randy Mazey. Sabins worked with Mazey to help lay the foundation for what he's hoping to continue to build on going forward.
"The fans, the players, the alumni, Coach Mazey, our staff, these guys have been at it for so long, outworking so many individuals to make this happen," Sabins said.
Sabins also understands how hard it is to win at this high of a level, but how much harder it is to win at a place like West Virginia, which doesn't have access to the best players or the best weather to be considered a traditional baseball school.
Thursday's game was played at Globe Life Field in Arlington, part of the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington Metropolitan area. That area has over 8 million people, compared to under 2 million in the entire state of West Virginia.
"West Virginia is a small rural state with 1.8 million people in it. There's more people in this city than there are in our state. And so there ain't five star recruits falling off trees in West Virginia. You have to recruit really tough kids, you have to develop, you have to get them better, and you have to set a standard that nobody wavers on. And so over a decade, that's why we're here. We didn't have a good team and some good kids, we had a lot of people work for a straight decade to be in this position," Sabins said.
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