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College baseball players don't necessarily talk about reaching the College World Series; that's a mouthful. Instead, most of them say they dream of going to Omaha.
Because of the National Collegiate Athletic
Association (NCAA) Division I College World
Series (CWS), which has been played in Omaha
at Johnny Rosenblatt Stadium since 1950,
Omaha has become synonymous with the
sport, and no one wants to see the association
end. "When you look at it, how many events
are held in the same city for that long a time?"
said Dennis Poppe, the NCAA's director of
baseball and football operations. "The Masters,
the Kentucky Derby, the Indy 500. Sporting
events are moved around a lot nowadays.
For a city to have an association with the
same event for fifty years is a tremendous
accomplishment."
The eight-team CWS was a struggling three-year-old
event when it first came to Omaha in
1950 after two years in Kalamazoo, Michigan,
and one in Wichita, Kansas. (Future president
George Bush played for Yale in the first two
series in 1947 and 1948, losing to California
and Southern California in the three-game series.)
Rosenblatt Stadium was two years old at
the time but has since gone through numerous
renovations to stay modern, fan-friendly,
and profitable, keeping the series in Omaha. It
now seats 24,000 fans, and attendance for the
entire tournament regularly exceeds 200,000.
Many of the fans are regulars, season-ticket
holders who come back to Rosenblatt every
year for the CWS.
Another steady visitor is Louisiana State
University, which under coach Skip Bertman
has made eleven trips since 1986. The Tigers
and their many fans–easily identified by their
purple and gold Mardi Gras beads–have become
such Omaha regulars that visitors are as
likely to find red beans and rice at Rosenblatt as
they are red meat. LSU annually leads Division I
teams in attendance at more than 7,000 fans
per game, and its fans have seen the Tigers win
five CWS titles from 1991 to 2000. Texas, with
such famed coaches as Bibb Falk, Cliff Gustafson,
and Augie Garrido, has earned a record
twenty-eight CWS berths, but not even the
Longhorns can match Southern California for
series tradition. The Trojans rank second, with
twenty-one appearances, despite a sixteen-season
absence from 1979 to 1994. Southern
California has won the event twelve times,
more than twice as many as any other program.
Coach Rod Dedeaux is credited with
ten of those titles, though he was co-coach of
an eleventh crown, the 1948 team. Dedeaux's
teams won championships in 1951, 1955, 1958,
1960, 1961, 1963, 1964, 1966, and 1968, then
won five straight from 1970 to 1974 before one
last title in 1978. Coach Mike Gillespie, who
replaced Dedeaux after the 1984 season, took
usc back to Omaha in 1995 and won the cws
in 1998.
College World Series website.