'There's pride in Washington State baseball again': Inside the Cougars' historic turnaround

May 16-PULLMAN - Mostly, WSU baseball head coach Nathan Choate remembers the feeling in the dugout - the spirit that reignited the Cougars' season. They had raced to a big early lead on UNLV, one of the conference's top programs. They were looking to clinch the series, looking to climb the Mountain West standings, and stay on pace for the program's first postseason appearance since many of the players were in kindergarten.

But then, on a warm afternoon in mid-April, things began to unravel for WSU. The Cougars yielded a run in the fourth. Two in the fifth. Three in the sixth. Then the Runnin' Rebels took an 8-7 lead with a two-out, run-scoring single in the sixth inning.

In the moment, the ghosts of seasons past crept up on Choate, whose first two WSU teams had gone a combined 20-40 in conference play. The common denominator that tied those teams together: "Once we blew the lead," Choate said, "it would have been probably over."

This time, the ghosts couldn't get the attention of Choate. They had no such luck either with the Cougars, who responded with a flourish. They tied the game with one run in the seventh inning. Two frames later, on a full count in the top of the ninth inning, senior first baseman Ryan Skjonsby got a high fastball and deposited it over the right-field fence.

That day, Skjonsby's blast helped the Cougars recover the lead and escape with a one-run win. About a month later, now that WSU has finished the regular season with a 27-25 overall record, including a 15-9 Mountain West Conference record to earn the No. 2 seed and a bye in next week's conference tournament, it registers as a little bigger. It feels more like a microcosm of the Cougars' entire season, of why they are headed to the postseason for the first time since 2010, when they came within one game of a Super Regional.

"We never flinched," Choate said in his office, which he's inhabited since the summer of 2023, only weeks before the traditional Pac-12 collapsed and WSU's world turned upside down. "You could feel in the previous two years, when something wasn't going our way - a bad call, an error - you could just feel the vibe, everyone taking a step back. That game, I could feel it in the dugout. We didn't flinch. We thought we were gonna win the whole time."

Which is a key reason why the Cougars are playing their best baseball in years - certainly their best since Choate took over. They ended the regular season winning six straight series. They finished with a winning record in conference play - Pac-12 or the Mountain West, which the Cougars have played in as affiliate members of the last two springs - since the dawn of the 2010s. This spring, meaningful baseball has returned to Pullman.

WSU rosters perhaps the conference's best starting pitcher, lefty Nick Lewis, who leads all starters with a 3.39 ERA to pair with an 8-2 record. The Cougars' second baseman is senior Gavin Roy, who ranks fourth in the conference with a .365 batting average. Their right fielder is veteran Max Hartman, who leads the conference with eight triples, and their leadoff hitter is true freshman Trevor Smith, the conference's current freshman of the week. It's all come together for WSU, which will open the Mountain West Tournament on Friday evening, facing the winner of fourth-seeded Nevada and fifth-seeded New Mexico.

It begs this question: How? The Cougars have a storied baseball program, but to find anything worth reading, you have to flip back a decade and a half. Coaches have found it hard to field a consistent winner, whether as affiliate members of the Mountain West or as traditional competitors in the Pac-12, which only held a conference tournament from 2022-24. The Cougars didn't make the field in any of those years, but even before the tournament was introduced, they would only have made it in a handful of seasons.

So how to explain the rise of this WSU team, which is largely constructed of the same players on last spring's 18-36 team? The long answer is a little complex. The short one, well, it also hearkens back to that April afternoon in Las Vegas.

"I think that's one of the things with the program too," Choate said, thinking about what that win over UNLV represented for WSU. "Now the expectation to win is back a little bit."

----Choate had just reached the top of an escalator at Sea-Tac, where he was about to depart from a recruiting trip, when his phone rang. It was August 2023, when traditional Pac-12 teams began to jump ship, putting the conference on life support. Choate had some level of awareness, but like many in the orbit of West Coast college athletics, he held on to a shred of hope.

No way the conference just collapses. Not with 100 years of history, not with so much tradition.

And then Choate answered the call from Mitch Straub, one of WSU's deputy ADs who then worked as the program's baseball sport supervisor, who relayed the information. Washington and Oregon had decided to join the Big Ten, which would all but decimate the Pac-12 and leave WSU in the type of limbo that would define the university's next era. "Hey," Straub told Choate, who had been on the job for just over a month. "This is gonna come out in the news pretty soon. So don't be shocked."

In the moment, Choate couldn't help but feel that way. With his first phone call, he dialed his wife, Lori, who hails from the West Coast and knew the Pac-12 well.

"She's like, 'Your job just got really, really difficult,' " Choate said.

Choate says he understood things would become hard. "I didn't realize how hard this was gonna be," he says. For the Cougars, it was one thing to lose the allure of the Pac-12, a meaningful draw for recruits. It was another to consider how much time the program spent without anything resembling a conference home - and that the Cougs were alone in that regard.

The traditional Pac-12 dissolved in August 2023, when all but two schools decamped for other conferences, leaving Washington State and Oregon State without a home. WSU formed temporary alliances with the Mountain West for football and the West Coast Conference for basketball, as did OSU. But the Beavers went a different direction with their baseball program.

The calendar dragged into February, into March, into April 2024. The Cougars still had nowhere to go with their baseball program. That made things challenging for Choate and WSU's coaches to land some recruits, which would have presented problems in an ordinary year. This was not that for the Cougs, who were set to lose 17 seniors. Coaches didn't just have to sell recruits on a program without a conference home. Considering what they were losing, they had to scramble just to fill out their roster.

Plus, WSU had trouble securing a temporary spot in the WCC, whose officials took this approach with the two Pac-12 schools with nowhere to go: They would only accept WSU as an affiliate member if they could get OSU as well. When the Beavers decided to go independent, the WCC was no longer interested in the Cougars.

"At that time, we kind of were just stuck," Choate said.

By mid-April 2024, WSU had secured affiliate membership in the Mountain West Conference, where the Cougars would compete until their university had a longer-term plan. But in their first season, they hardly looked like a traditional Power 5 program. They finished with a team ERA of 7.54, second-worst in the conference. They lost their first eight games of the season, then their final five. Hartman, a centerpiece in the team's lineup and defense, missed about a dozen games with an injury. "Not having him was pretty impactful," Choate says.

There wasn't much to write home about for WSU, even with the new promise of a rebuilt Pac-12, which would include Oregon State and schools like Gonzaga, Dallas Baptist, San Diego State and others. The Cougars suffered another losing season in a decade full of them. Why would the next one be any different?

"Just because we have a tough year," said Lewis, the Cougars' best pitcher this spring, "doesn't mean that you have to jump ship."

----Max Hartman likes to say he never really considered leaving, not in earnest. After completing his 2025 season, his third at WSU, he certainly could have. The injury he suffered last season dinged his MLB Draft prospects, but it would have been fair to expect Hartman to have fielded suitors if he decided to enter the transfer portal.

"Just finishing my career out as a Coug," Hartman said, "and I knew that if pro ball was in the cards for me, that I'd like to have it done as a Coug alum kind of thing. So just that relationship that I've built with the coaches, that coaching staff, and the players here. I think that's the only way I'd like to be in pro ball as well. So it was a pretty easy decision."

Sure enough, lots of the Cougars' top players decided to return. Roy came back and now leads the team with a .365 batting average. Hartman leads the club with an OPS of .981. Skjonsby returned and his eight homers leads WSU. After a breakout true freshman season last spring, infielder Ollie Obenour has earned an .838 OPS. WSU has gotten similarly productive results from bats like infielder Kyler Northrop and from pitchers like Luke Meyers and Griffin Smith, all of whom are now on their second seasons of Division I baseball.

In truth, that's what has helped the Cougars soar this season. They are more experienced, more confident, more prepared for the moments that haunted them a year ago. They are far from a perfect club - in a recurring theme, they have blown late leads in several losses, including a one-run defeat in the final game of a series against Air Force, which used a five-run ninth inning to stun WSU - but they are a much-improved one.

Take one of the Cougars' best wins of the season, a 7-6 win over Oregon State, which was ranked No. 7 nationally at the time. Not 24 hours prior, the Beavers had eviscerated the Cougars in the first of this two-game set, thrashing WSU to the tune of 18-0. Maybe a year ago, WSU would have suffered a second straight loss. Not this group, which got a three-RBI afternoon from Skjonsby and one closeout strikeout from transfer reliever Scott Rienguette, who put out a fire of his own creation in the ninth inning.

Around the same time of year, WSU took two games on the road from San Jose State, which finished close to .500 this season. The Cougars won the final game of that series thanks to a three-run ninth inning, which followed a tied contest for much of the afternoon. To Choate, it was another example of what he thinks has unlocked this season: toughness.

What's interesting is the how. Did the Cougars do something over the offseason to become more mentally strong? Or are they tougher by virtue of having gone through such tough times?

"No, I think that's gotten developed," Choate said. "I think one of the things with the transfer portal now, when people leave when things get hard, you don't have a chance to grow in those areas. If you think about it, all of those kids got their teeth kicked in last year, and the guys that decided to come here, they took a leap of faith, and so they're just tougher. I think we've developed some toughness as a program."

That cuts to the heart of this WSU season, to the core of the way the Cougars have flourished like none of the 15 teams that preceded them did. They aren't just tough, aren't just winning. They're doing it at a place where winning doesn't happen often. One minute you're pinned down in the fox hole. The next you're popping out on the offensive, the bad memories fueling the chase for better ones.

"The biggest thing for the players is, I think there's pride in Washington State baseball again amongst the players and some alumni," Choate said. "I've heard from a bunch of alumni that they're proud to see how we're playing. This is such a really historically successful baseball program, and it just had fallen on hard times.

"I'm not saying that we've had the greatest season of all time. That's not what I'm saying. But definitely when we were at rock bottom, and with no conference, it is a big deal. It is a big deal. And I think it's a big deal to our fans. It's a big deal to our players. They have pride in what they're doing, and so I'm not gonna understate that that's not a big deal."

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