On July 6, Iowa baseball head coach Rick Heller announced that Desi Druschel, who has been the program’s director of baseball operations for the past three seasons, will be promoted to full-time pitching coach.

Druschel will work with a stellar staff that broke numerous records in the 2017 season and ended with a 4.39 team ERA.

Druschel will have the chance to build on this success with the 13 pitchers Iowa has on the roster for the 2018 season.

“We’re excited to have Desi as our new coach,” Heller said in a release. “He has been an integral member of our staff the past three seasons, and I am confident he’ll do an excellent job as an assistant and on the recruiting trail. Desi is as good as it gets on the player-development side.”

During his first season with Iowa, the Hawkeyes won 41 games (the second-most all-time) and earned an at-large berth in the NCAA regionals, the first since 1990. To top it off, Iowa finished in the national rankings at No. 20 for the first time in the program’s history.

His résumé before joining the Hawkeye staff is pretty impressive also.

He won 172 games, played in two NAIA Region VII Tournaments while ending with two conference runner-up and two third-place finishes as the head coach at Mount Mercy.

During his time at Iowa, he has been a part of numerous groundbreaking seasons, especially this past season. Iowa won its first-ever Big Ten Tournament Championship, advanced to a second regional in the past three seasons, and had four Hawkeyes drafted in this year’s MLB Draft.

“I am excited about the opportunity and am looking forward to growing what Iowa baseball has become in the past four years,” Druschel said in release. “Rick, Scott [Brickman], Marty [Sutherland], and the rest of the staff has put Iowa on the baseball map. We’re all looking forward to continuing the program’s growth.”

— Jess Westendorf