Now the fun begins for Baseball

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Finding and signing Florida’s Class of 2009 baseball class had been one of the goals of head coach Kevin O’Sullivan and his staff since they arrived in Gainesville during the summer of 2007.

Now that they know one of the top-ranked recruiting classes in the country will show up on campus with minimal harm from the Major League Baseball Draft in June, it’s hard for the coaches to hide their excitement.

Full article at Gator Country for insiders.

The Gators might be able to consider themselves lucky with how well they came out after this last draft season.  Yeah we lost the supposed phenom left hander due to weird circumstances.  Kevin O’Sullivan considers himself lucky:

“Any time you get a lot of good players, you inevitably going to lose some,” O’Sullivan said. “I thought we came out pretty well. The guys who are coming to school are all really excited. They all really want to win a national championship. They’re certainly talented enough, but they’ve all got good work ethics. We’re all excited about their physical abilities, but I like the mental makeup of this group.”

I don’t know if the first year we should be aimed for a National Championship.  If we can make a run to Omaha, I’m all for it but I wouldn’t be disappointed if we fell short this year.  But I am really excited for what could be of this team in the 2nd and 3rd years of these young player’s college careers.

The building up for this class wasn’t something that started this year.  It began all the way back in 2007.  So coaches have seen these players develop over the past couple years and the anticipation is very high to see what these players do:

“I remember our first Labor Day camp, we had Brian Johnson coming to it,” O’Sullivan said.” We’ve been on these guys for a long, long time. That’s the thing with baseball recruiting. You get on them early, they commit, then sign in November. But you’ve got to keep recruiting them until they decide to come to campus or not. We got to know all of these kids real well.”

The talent that was in the class for the Gators was enough to rank it #1 in Baseball America’s eyes.  The predictions of these prospects signing with teams that selected the players were very high.  Most of the lower round picks chose to continue on with school first which could yield bigger bucks in the future for them.  I’m always for a kid finishing their education before going off to make money.

About Mat: Mat is the owner and founder of Title Town FL. He brings his web admin experience from several previous popular sports websites. With a fresh take on how websites should have news available, he makes it a fresh read on every page.

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