After bringing home UCLA baseball’s first national title, coach John Savage added some more hardware to the trophy case.
Savage was named National Coach of the Year by the Collegiate Baseball Newspaper and is also among the seven finalists for CollegeBaseballInsider.com’s National Coach of the Year award.
In nine years as coach of UCLA baseball, his teams have reached the playoffs seven times and have made it to the College World Series three times. That stretch culminated with a national championship this year.
“Like Coach (Wooden) said, ‘It takes time.’ It takes time to build that sort of environment and attitude that you want in your players, and it doesn’t happen overnight,” Savage said about reaching the College World Series championship series.
Savage’s tenure at UCLA began in 2005, when the Bruins finished with a 15-41 record.
One year later, Savage led the Bruins to the NCAA regionals. After his first season, Savage has coached the Bruins to eight consecutive top-three finishes in the conference and seven playoff appearances.
This consistency of success has not gone unnoticed within the college baseball community.
Mississippi State coach John Cohen, who UCLA defeated in the College World Series championship series, described UCLA before the series as “very well-coached, managed very, very well.”
Much of this respect for Savage comes from his hands-on coaching approach during games. His micromanaging of each game allows the Bruins to exploit their opponents’ weaknesses, forcing the opposition into mistakes.
Savage is also known for having one of the nation’s most prepared and well-practiced teams each year.
The Bruins became a vacuum on defense under Savage, finishing with the sixth-best fielding percentage in the nation. To achieve this level of defensive strength, Savage conducted fielding practices at full speed, giving his players plenty of repetitions for any defensive scenario.
“We just practiced it from day one until today. … It’s just really details, a lot of details that we pay attention to,” said sophomore right fielder Eric Filia.
Outside of head coaching responsibilities, Savage also serves as the Bruins’ pitching coach, developing a pitching staff that held opposing hitters to a .222 batting average on the season. This year’s staff featured four pitchers who were chosen in the MLB draft. Two years ago, two of Savage’s pitchers, Gerrit Cole and Trevor Bauer, were drafted in the first three picks.
Beyond just his coaching ability, Savage is also widely considered one of the nation’s top recruiters. Just a week removed from winning UCLA baseball’s first national title, he was already back on the recruiting trail.
His philosophy when recruiting high school players is to build a team full of talented left-handed hitters. Because the dearth of quality lefty pitchers means many of them go pro straight out of high school, Savage tries to recruit a left-handed dominant offense, which has an advantage over the opposing right-handed pitchers.
Six of the nine Bruins who appeared in the starting lineup during their playoff run batted from the left side.
From his recruiting prowess to his player development, from his in-game tactics to pregame preparation, John Savage has built a championship program at UCLA.