Head Baseball Coach Drew Maus is throwing a curveball at the baseball program. Maus has become popular for what many students have pegged as interesting rules and methods.
During the first week of school, various members of the baseball team could be seen heading across campus with their smartphones to take pictures with their class professors. Maus calls this initiative “Pics with Profs.”
With this initiative, Maus wanted Newman professors to realize that the baseball team appreciates what they do to make the university better.
“What happens after baseball is going to be dependent upon what they teach our individual athletes because those kids primarily aren’t going to go be professional baseball players. There might be 10% who go into coaching and everyone else is going to go do something in a professional manner,” he said. “I didn’t give them that degree. I didn’t help them learn what cytoplasm is and all that stuff they will learn from the teachers.”
Maus said that Pics with Profs helps show the professors who each individual on the team is.
“It lets the professors know that the baseball team right now is going to take their class seriously, their degree seriously and their education seriously, and that’s what I try to elaborate with trying to make our guys do that.”
Usually, Newman baseball players are recognizable by their blue Newman baseball caps. But along with the teacher selfies, the baseball team has adopted a “no hats indoors” policy.
“It’s a respect thing to me. You know in Japan and in China, you bow before you go into everyone else’s home. That doesn’t mean we have to be that way with everything but if you go into a teacher’s classroom, it’s their classroom. That’s not your bedroom. That’s not your living room,” he said. “To me taking off your hat in someone else’s professional atmosphere is the best way to show that respect.”
These off-the-field policies also extend to the team on the field.
“We have a dress policy at practice that you have to look a certain way. We have a facial hair policy. You do not have to be cleanly shaven, but you’re going to look good. You can have a beard but it’s got to be clean and trimmed.”
Maus said through these initiatives he is trying to not only train great baseball players but also great men.
“To me, it’s having respect for yourself as well as having respect for the other atmospheres and environments you to go into.”
Maus and his team created a handbook of the rules and regulations for the baseball team to abide by.
“The handbook is a mixture of expectations, which includes appearance, personal conduct, academic conduct and baseball conduct. We also have a goal of a GPA of 3.15 every semester,” he said.
Maus and his team call these rules the “standards of excellence.”
“Everything we try to do is be excellent,” he said. “To me, the handbook and the guidelines we have in the handbook are what I view needs to be done on a daily basis to be excellent.”
Maus said these standards of excellence play into the goals the team is trying to accomplish on and off the field, which is twofold.
“We have a Newman goal system where we want to be the most noticed athletic team her. We want to have the highest GPA at Newman. We want to attend the most sporting events at Newman, and we want to have the most community service hours of all the teams at Newman,” he said.
For Maus, striving for excellence at Newman doesn’t just stop at baseball.
“I want to make every facet of Newman University the best that it can be.”
