Jordan Bischel is doing Jordan Bischel things again.
No matter where the college baseball coach goes, reviving a program always follows.
This time the Green Bay Notre Dame and St. Norbert College graduate is doing it at the University of Cincinnati.
Bischel recently completed his third season with the Bearcats, leading them to a 38-22 record and a win in the NCAA Tournament for the second straight year.
“I don’t think there is another coach in the country that does what he does,” senior pitcher and utility player Christian Mitchelle recently told Cincinnati Enquirer reporter Scott Springer. “Just turns programs around. We came to Cincinnati, they were an average baseball team, and he totally turned it around.”
Mitchelle would know. He has seen Bischel do it twice, playing for him as a freshman at Central Michigan in 2023 and following him to Cincinnati when Bischel was hired by the school after the season.
Bischel took over a Bearcats team that had one winning season in 12 years.
They have posted winning records each year of the Bischel era and have won 30 or more games three straight seasons for the first time since pulling off the feat from 1999 to 2001.
The 38 victories this season were the most since winning 39 in 2008.
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This is not a fluke. He has been doing it his entire career.
Go back to 2015 when he was hired at NCAA Division II Northwood in Michigan, a school that had gone 18-27 the year before he arrived and almost two decades without winning more than 25 games in a season.
It accomplished that feat in all four of Bischel’s seasons, including winning 46 in 2017 and making its first DII tournament.
He left in 2018 for his first DI opportunity and again worked his magic at Central Michigan, a traditionally winning program but one coming off a losing season and without a DI tournament appearance in 23 years.
It won 47 games his first year, made the NCAAs and beat the University of Miami for its first tournament win in more than three decades.
He led the Chippewas to a 177-80 record during his five seasons, including two Mid-American Conference regular season championships, two tournament titles and three appearances in the NCAA Tournament.
It led to the biggest opportunity of his career at Cincinnati.
None of this is easy. Bischel just keeps making it look that way.
“It’s been rewarding, for sure,” Bischel said about his tenure at Cincinnati. “We don’t feel like we have reached the ceiling of where we can get. Just as an athletic program, we joined the Big 12 three years ago. That in itself is a big hill to climb, and then you tack on a new staff, certainly knew it was going to be pretty challenging.
“But I really believed in the upside here. It’s been fun to see kind of the roots take hold in terms of what our plan was and how we thought we could build it. Rewarding is the word I would use. Really believed what we could do here but had to get our hands dirty to get it done. It’s been fun to see we have been able to.”
Cincinnati fans have gotten to witness what has been termed “Bischel Ball” the last three years.
His teams play small ball with the best. His players draw walks and put down bunts. They hit-and-run. They are aggressive on the basepaths and put pressure on the defense.
The Bearcats ranked second in the 14-team Big 12 this season with 121 stolen bases. Their 87.1% success rate also ranked second, although the 90.9% by Kansas came on only 44 attempts.
Cincinnati ranked first in hit by pitches (91), fifth in on-base percentage (.402) and sixth in walks (281).
It might seem challenging to recruit players, or convince the ones already on the roster, to embrace that style when everybody loves power.
The Bearcats can do that, too, considering their 91 home runs were more than only Oklahoma State, Arizona State and Kansas.
“I think once guys see how much it can benefit not just the team but them individually, it gets a little easier to get that buy-in,” Bischel said. “When I say how does it benefit individually, you look at [former outfielder] Landyn Vidourek last year, who had incredible tools but was pretty unpolished.
“All of a sudden, some bunt hits and some stolen bases and some dynamic to how he was playing the game turned into a monster season.”
So much so that Vidourek was selected by the Los Angeles Dodgers in the third round last July, becoming the 52nd player in program history to be drafted and the fourth to be picked in the top 10 rounds since 2020.
Bischel doesn’t have an ego about playing his style of baseball. He believes it’s the coaching staff’s job to adapt to the talents on the roster.
If they have nine players in the lineup who can hit 20 home runs but can’t run a lick, so be it.
“But I do think it creates an opening to recruit a different type of player,” Bischel said. “Everybody is going to see a guy who has massive power coming out of high school or coming out of the transfer portal.
“If we want to beat the top teams in the country, we probably can’t just line up and do it the same way they are doing it. It’s probably less about how we recruit and more about it opens the door to a different type of player, because maybe they are a little undervalued or a little underrecruited.”
Jordan Bischel’s future remains in Ohio
Bischel said when he took the Cincinnati job that it was his final one, joking it would be either a firing or retiring with the school.
A couple years later, he still feels the same way. He loves the program. He and his wife, Katie, enjoy raising their three sons, Luke, Parker and Chase, in the community.
He even gets to keep coaching with another familiar local face in former longtime St. Norbert College baseball leader Tom Winske.
Winske stepped down after 20 years at SNC to join Bischel as a volunteer assistant at Central Michigan and then followed him to Cincinnati.
The two have known each other for decades after Winske coached Bischel with the Green Knights from 2000 to 2003.
“Our whole staff is good, but Tom more than anybody is able to really challenge me,” Bischel said. “He’s not afraid to tell me how he feels. I played for him. I coached for him. When he thinks we can do something better, he is going to tell me. We don’t always agree, and we have some pretty good arguments, but you don’t want yes-men surrounding you. You want people that make you better surrounding you, and he certainly fits that bill. He makes me a better coach, and he’s just an incredible teacher for our guys.”
All that love Bischel has for the program, his coaches, the players and the city is mutual.
The administration at Cincinnati saw more than enough after his first two seasons to sign him to a contract extension last August that will keep him with the team through 2031.
It has been a perfect match.
“It did mean a lot,” Bischel said about the extension. “One of the reasons it meant a lot is I actually didn’t know what this year was going to look like. We were pretty committed to going young. I knew I wanted to stay out of the portal and knew we had to go young to do that. This year, pretty regularly, seven of our starters were freshmen or sophomores.
“I didn’t know how we’d perform. I didn’t need a contract extension, but it certainly influenced them saying, ‘Hey, we have faith that the long-term vision is going to play out.’ … The administration has been incredibly supportive. They want to win. They want to get behind us. It’s just a great place to call home.”
This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Green Bay native Jordan Bischel thriving as University of Cincinnati’s baseball coach
Reporting by Scott Venci, Green Bay Press-Gazette / Green Bay Press-Gazette
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Scott Venci, Green Bay Press-Gazette | USA TODAY Network
