Sports
Longtime UMBC Baseball Coach Retires
Head baseball coach John Jancuska, UMBC's longest tenured coach, is stepping down after 673 career victories and five NCAA tournament appearances.
After a 34-year run highlighted by 673 victories, five NCAA Tournament appearances and four-time conference Coach of the Year honors, UMBC head baseball coach John Jancuska is calling it a career.
Resigning for personal reasons, Jancuska has been the face of UMBC baseball for a generation and will remain involved with the school’s athletic department as he is signed on to teach physical education courses in the fall of 2011.
“For a 23-year old to get the opportunity to achieve his dream of being a head baseball coach, it was an incredible blessing,” said Jancuska, who was inducted into the UMBC Athletic’s Hall of Fame in 2010. “And to be able to watch it grow, not only the athletic program, but the university has been a tremendous gift.
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“I am very thankful and it has been so rewarding to educate young men through baseball for so long. We have had a lot of success and to have done it in a way where we stayed true to the mission of the student-athlete concept with the highest level of sportsmanship and integrity- never getting away from the importance of that is a good thing.”
Over the course of Jancuska’s tenure, he produced 19 seasons with 20-plus victories, in addition to 39 All-Region players, five All-Americans, four Academic All-Americans and 21 professional baseball players.
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Jancuska coached to a 673-719-6 record in his 1,398 total games coached, a .483 overall win percentage (excluding the six ties), quite an overall ledger considering he turned around a team still in its beginning stages as a program—all while he was all of 23 years old as a first-time head coach.
In only his first season, Jancuska led the Retrievers to an NCAA Tournament regional appearance (for Division II) in 1978, followed by tournament appearances in 1979 and 1986.
When the school moved to Division I in 1987, it took Jancuska only five years (1992) to guide his team to the NCAA Tournament, along with a 37-13 overall record. UMBC made its second Division I tournament trip in 2001 after winning the Northeast Conference Championship the same year.
Jancuska was a two-year starter and co-captain of his 1975 senior squad as a baseball player at the University of Delaware.
An announcement of Jancuska’s successor is expected shortly.