Liberty announced today that Head Coach Jim Toman has resigned to pursue other opportunities. Toman, the second winningest coach in Liberty history, went 329-205-1 during his 9 year career guiding the Flames to 2 NCAA Regional appearances and 1 Big South title.
Liberty struggled this year despite making an unexpected run in the Big South Tournament. This team was touted as a team with a ton of potential at the beginning of the year, but failed to live up to it’s expectations.
Toman has always been known as a fantastic recruiter, helping to build a University South Carolina baseball program that won a National Championship shortly after he left in 2007. Two of his 2017 signee’s were drafted in the first 3 rounds of the 2016 MLB Draft to further exemplify the type of players Toman was able to recruit.
Coach Toman struggled was with in game decision making and strategy. There were many games, especially this season, where the team looked lost and lacked an identity.
It’s likely that Toman will end up in another recruiting/assistant coaching position by the start of next season.
Thanks for the article, but in my opinion “game decision making and strategy” did not have much to do with the team’s performance this year. The Big South stats (http://scorebook.bigsouthsports.com/baseball/lgteams.htm) tell the tale. 3rd in team batting average, but second from last in team ERA. Their 5.35 team ERA was almost a full two points behind conference-leading Coastal. It’s tough to win a lot of games without better pitching than that. If they hadn’t hit so well this year, it would have gotten real ugly. Not to say that Toman couldn’t have managed the team better (there’s always room for improvement), but poor pitching was the problem that couldn’t be overcome this year.
Hey Mikey, I would not put the pitching struggles squarely on the pitching staff. I would say that for 3/4 of the season Toman left guys in the game too long and brought in the wrong guys in the wrong situations. I agree that if Liberty’s staff even had an ERA under 4 the 2016 season would have been drastically different. Toman generally struggled to put his players in the best position to succeed.