The Colorado Buffaloes club baseball team had one major goal entering this offseason. Find a coach.
They played 11 games this past fall, led by senior president Andrew Garcia and junior vice president Nathan Hoffman. Without a single coaching staff member, they assembled a winning record and scrapped together a dangerous batting lineup from top to bottom.
With the fall ball season ending in October, Garcia and Hoffman took on the challenge head-on.
“After that (fall ball) we were just trying to network,” Garcia said. “We reached out to a lot of past teams we played for, past coaches we know, but didn’t get a lot of traction there.”
After a couple of months with little momentum, the CU Club Baseball Instagram account published a graphic in a Hail Mary effort saying, “Coach Needed!” This post blew up and made its way to a popular college football Instagram account, where it was featured in a post around a comment saying, “Deion Sanders has the chance to do the funniest thing ever.”
“From there, all hell broke loose,” Garcia said about the days following the post. “There were hundreds of DMs, tons of emails that both Nate and I were getting. We ended up narrowing it down to people that were actual coaches and lived in the state of Colorado.”
A couple of weeks later, they were able to get three coaches for the 2025 season. The Buffaloes introduced Mark Goodman as the new head coach, Raul Villarreal as a defense and pitching coach, and Matthew Hunter, a CU alum, as the new hitting coach.
Goodman, the new skipper, has plenty of experience coaching college baseball. He was previously the pitching coach for the Colorado School of Mines D2 team and also helped out with the Rocky Mountain Vibes, an independent team apart of the Pioneer Baseball League.
The two assistants have good experience as well, with Villarreal having played all his life and Hunter being a sharp-minded hitting coach.
Once the Buffs finally settled the coaching debacle, it was time to truly focus on getting better and preparing themselves for the rapidly approaching season. They’ve been participating in winter workouts all offseason and even joined an indoor winter baseball league.
“We do that at the Sports Stable in Superior,” Garcia said about the winter league. “There are a couple college teams, [a] couple men’s league teams, but it’s basically a simulated game.”
These games are part-real and part-imitation baseball. There is only an infield in the complex where the teams have live at-bats, and if a ball gets hit into the outfield, the players all look over to a prompter that determines the outcome.
While the team was practicing hard a couple of nights a week in the winter, commotion about the upcoming season began with the NCBA Now Instagram account. Although it is more fan-oriented than the official National Club Baseball Association account, it was still active all winter with rankings and speculations for the imminent Spring.
On Dec. 2, NCBA Now released its own Division 1 rankings, highlighted by the no-brainer back-to-back champion Penn State. The surprise was the 6–5 Buffaloes, who received the No. 15 ranking in the country. Division rival Colorado State was ranked 11th as they house the best pitcher in the NCBA, Chase Brickley.
Colorado received one other significant award from the NCBA Now account, honoring Nathan Hoffman as a preseason all-American outfielder. The recognition is well-deserved, as Hoffman slashed a .454 average and 1.056 OPS in the fall, all highlighted by not striking out once in his 27 plate appearances.
“It was kind of mixed emotions,” Garcia said about the honors. “Although the NCBA Now is more of a fan account, they do have a lot of knowledge about the league, but then we were left out of the top 20 in the official NBCA rankings.”
The official NCBA account released its own Division 1 Top 20 Poll, with Colorado being the second team left out in votes. The 20th-ranked team, Boston College, received 46 votes while the first team out, Cincinnati, got 41. The Buffs tallied 36, which leads their division above teams like Colorado State (26) and Metro State (12).
“I think it honestly puts us in a good position,” Garcia said. “I think for the younger guys it takes off the pressure. Being a sleeping giant is exactly where we want to be.”
Along with finding a coach, increasing the production of the Buffs pitching was high on the to-do list this winter. They did so successfully with the pitching-minded Goodman hire as well as having guys come back to the team that didn’t play in the fall to get some time on the mound.
“You can expect a lot of wins,” Garcia said on what’s coming from Buffaloes baseball in 2025. “We got a lot of guys that are really excited to play. We got new guys, we got returners, but the main thing from last year to this year is chemistry. We have a really close team right now, full of guys that just love to compete.”
The Buffs begin their season against a giant, No. 4 Texas A&M. It’s part of a non-conference round-robin competition with Texas and Iowa. After that, they will likely play a couple of series back home at Scott Carpenter Park against familiar foes.
They have a real chance of winning the Mid-American West Division this year, with Colorado State posing the biggest threat. The division is welcoming in Metro State as well, who the Buffs lost a series to this fall.
Stay up to date with everything club baseball this spring at skobuffssports.com.
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