Bieser leads OVC champions with hard work

Steve Bieser has led Southeast Missouri State's baseball team to two straight Ohio Valley Conference regular-season championships in his three years as head coach.

Bieser enters his fourth season as head coach with a record of 99-76, and 59-33 against OVC opponents.

Last season, the Redhawks made the OVC tournament for the 21st consecutive season, and reached the championship round for the first time since 2008.

Bieser took over for Mark Hogan, who retired in July of 2012 and will be inducted to the Redhawks Hall of Fame Feb. 20.

Under Bieser, Southeast has had two OVC Pitchers of the Year, Travis Hayes in 2014 and Joey Lucchesi in 2015. Matt Tellor earned OVC Player of the Year in 2014 and was drafted by the Atlanta Braves in the 10th round of the 2014 MLB Draft.

Bieser has coached multiple Southeast players who have been drafted by MLB teams, including pitchers Alex Winkelman to the Houston Astros and Shae Simmons to the Atlanta Braves along with Tellor.

Prior to being named head coach, Bieser was the Redhawks' pitching coach.

He graduated from Southeast in 1989 and was selected in the 32rd round of the MLB Draft by the Philadelphia Phillies. Bieser played for the New York Mets and Pittsburgh Pirates at the major league level for two years, primarily as a backup catcher, and spent 13 seasons playing professionally.

What brought you to Southeast?

Probably one of the biggest things that brought me to Southeast was the opportunity to coach college baseball.

Having been a graduate back in the late '80s at Southeast and playing baseball here, it's a place I have a lot of pride in and I really enjoyed the area when I was here going to school and playing baseball.

Just wanting to get involved with college baseball was probably the main attraction for me to get back here and coach Redhawks baseball.

Who were some of your biggest mentors?

Almost all coaches will talk about their previous coaches who they had. Mine started with the high-school level with Mark Sherry; he was probably the first guy that really got a hold of me and talked to me about the game of baseball.

As I left the high school ranks and went to junior college I played for a guy named Hal Loughary, and a lot of my coaching style comes basically from Hal and how he handles himself.

I was very fortunate to have been coached by some of the greatest minds in the game of professional baseball for 13 years. Bobby Valentine is someone at the big-league level, just the way he went about his business, and a lot of my minor-league coaches, too.

What you do is you take the good qualities from each of those people and then fill in the spaces with your own personality.

What kind of leadership qualities did you gain from them?

I would say that my style of leadership is a servant-style leadership, and that's something that I think you hear more of now. I think a great leader also is somebody that is very good at modeling what they want, and the best way to model is through serving others.

That's kind of my main focus, and my leadership style as the head coach here is serving the players, making sure they're improving, and giving them all that I've got every single day and not cutting any corners and making sure none of us are going out there and just going through the motions, that we're working to become better people and better players and really just bring our entire group together.

Our community motto is "committed to excellence," and you can't just be committed to excellence on the playing field, you have to be committed to excellence in every walk of life. We focus on three things here on the college level, and that's your academics, your baseball and also your social skills and social life. We all are focused on serving each other, and that makes our group come together as one as opposed to a bunch of individuals.

What current players display the leadership qualities you're looking for?

We've got a captain council that's voted on by the players, and those guys that get voted in each year are usually the guys that aren't caught up in themselves. They're the guys who are always looking to help others.

This year we have a pretty senior-loaded class ... Brandon Boggetto, Ryan Rippee, Scott Mitchell and Jacob Lawrence are all four seniors, and for the first time a sophomore, Trevor Ezell, was elected to that captain's council. That just shows you what kind of person he is -- being a really special talent and to be considered a leader in only his second year really speaks volumes to the type of person that he is.

What advice would you give to a young person about coaching?

The first thing I would tell somebody is to just be around the game and get around people, people that you respect that are playing, and find programs that are successful. See if you can get around with them and be exposed to that because it's all about seeing why things are working, and you want to be able to assimilate what your personality fits.

You don't want to be somebody that you're not, and I think sometimes at an early age someone can get caught up in trying to be like a certain coach or doing certain things that had success, but if it doesn't fit your personality you gotta find a way to make it work.

In our profession there are so many graduate assistants and interns, it's a long and hard road to get to where a person probably wants to end up, but you have to be willing to sacrifice some time and work for almost nothing to get around the right people. And if you can do that, then I think you can really help build what's going to work for you as a coach.

After winning back-to-back OVC regular-season championships, what does it take to maintain success?

Probably one of the best things I heard in my playing days was when I was with the Cardinals and Tony La Russa at big-league camp at spring training, and you're talking about some guys who've been in the league for 10 or 15 years, but to try to keep that edge you make certain everyone knows you gotta start from scratch every single year.

You don't just assume that because in our case you have a nearly entire lineup that's returning and you assume that everybody knows what's going on. But you have to scratch and claw, have to not take anything for granted and follow those steps.

When players feel prepared they tend to become very confident, and that's kind of the downfall.

It's hard work and we're not going to cut any corners, that's what we're all about. We're gonna out-work our competition whether we're projected to finish first in the league or dead last, we would never go about our business any other way but go full-board, go after it and make sure we're always prepared. That's something you've gotta do to defend the crown, and you can't take anything for granted.