Harry Hillson is the winningest coach in any sport at Mansfield University.
Star-Gazette
MANSFIELD -- Mansfield University baseball coach Harry Hillson gets two shots at career win No. 600 today.
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| Provided Harry Hillson is the winningest coach in any sport at Mansfield University. |
If he gets it, when the Mountaineers play a doubleheader at East Stroudsburg starting at 1 p.m., Hillson will have reached that plateau faster than any other Pennsylvania college baseball coach in history.
The teams meet again in a doubleheader at 1 p.m. Saturday at Mansfield.
Only four other Pennsylvania coaches in the sport have won 600 games or more, and only 37 in the NCAA at the Division I, II or III levels. There are now 872 NCAA baseball programs in the nation.
Seventy-two Pennsylvania colleges and universities at all NCAA levels have baseball teams, second-most in the nation. Five more are NAIA members, and others play in the National Christian College Athletic Association.
When he wins No. 600, Hillson, who is in his 19th season as head coach at Mansfield, will become the second Pennsylvania college coach to do so this season. Slippery Rock's Jeff Messer, in his 20th season, also got his 600th.
Six hundred wins are more than the combined total of all other current head coaches at Mansfield. It's double the 300 wins recorded by former men's basketball coach Ed Wilson, who was the winningest coach at MU before Hillson. And it's more than double the 287 victories by legendary baseball coach John Heaps, who also coached the Mountaineers for 19 seasons.
"I've said this before, and it's worth repeating: The wins say more about the success of the program than about how good a coach I may be," Hillson said. "We have been blessed with an awful lot of great players in this program, and blessed that someone like Dr. Heaps elevated it to such national prominence. I'm just trying to maintain the standard he set back in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s."
Hillson, who raises more than 90 percent of his scholarship money through camps, clinics and other fund raisers, has one of the most successful Division II programs in the nation. He ranked 17th among active Division II coaches in winning percentage (.651) coming into the season, and 24th all-time.