Believe it or not, there’s only 45 days left for NIU baseball coach Joe “Spanky” McFarland to get his gang ready for the 1991 season.

March 9th is the official date that McFarland will display his revival of an NIU baseball program that has been defunct for eight years.

On that Saturday, the Huskies will take on the University of Iowa, a perennial Top-20 club, in a tournament conducted by Saint Louis University. For now, the team is practicing in Chick Evans Field House for a “couple of hours” per night.

Stressed in this two-hour session is the basics of individual play. McFarland said the entire fall was donated to TEAM concepts, while the holiday break was directed to a continuing conditioning program.

“We spent the fall getting the team down to size,” McFarland said. “Obviously while we were outside we worked on team offense and team defense. Now, we are concentrating on individual play and their particular positions.”

The official start to the 1991 season comes on the heels of McFarland’s visit to the American Baseball Coaches Association Convention in New Orleans. Recent cutbacks by the NCAA was just one of the topics at this convention.

McFarland shared the general consensus that college baseball programs are getting shafted. According to the new NCAA rules, college baseball practices have been cut to 22 weeks, the number of games have been reduced to 56 and teams are only allowed to staff a total of three coaches.

McFarland stressed that baseball is the only intercollegiate sport that competes with the professionals for athletes. Thus, the more the NCAA cuts baseball in college, the more likely it will be that high school players choose to enter the professional ranks.

“What it does is two things,” McFarland said. “The quality of play goes down in college, and a lot of kids that should go to college won’t.”