Hollibaugh reaches 500-win milestone at Grinnell College

Tim Hollibaugh played under some great coaches and grew up under the same roof as a great coach. So it should come as no surprise that he is a great coach himself.

>The Logansport native picked up his 500th career win this past season in his 32nd year as the head baseball coach at Grinnell College, an NCAA Division-III school located in Grinnell, Iowa.

>“It’s never been about me,” Hollibaugh said. “I am so blessed to have been coached by Jim Turner and Butch Jones. I always have figured out that baseball’s the most important thing — and the players — are two things that have driven me. So it’s a cool thing and hopefully I’m around another 25 years, 50 years, and I’ll probably reflect on it more. But it’s just a lucky thing having coaching for so long.”

>Grinnell is known for an open curriculum and a 9:1 student-to-faculty ratio. It’s also a highly exclusive school and is referred to as a “Hidden Ivy” due to its rigid academic standards and massive financial endowment, which rivals larger elite universities.

>“Grinnell College has been an amazing place to work,” Hollibaugh said. “We have the resources we need to be successful, the facilities, and the players. This is an elite academic institution. It’s not easy to recruit kids here because they have to be uber smart. But once you get them here, I don’t have to worry about their academics. Our team GPA was 3.6 this last year and that’s just one less thing that I need to focus on.”

>Hollibaugh has coached a lot of players who have gone on to become successful men.

>“I’ve coached a lot of doctors, a lot of lawyers,” he said. “I’ve been fortunate enough a couple of my players have gone on to be Division-III head baseball coaches. I’ve got a couple of guys that are coaching, one’s at Holy Cross and one’s at Harvard. We’re a well-rounded school and a lot of guys come here and they work on Wall Street.

>“The tough thing is, and this might sound unique, we’ve got a roster of 40 guys and we only have one guy on the roster from Iowa. We really recruit nationally, internationally. We have two guys from Japan on our roster. So probably the only thing that it’s tough to work here is because we don’t have any local guys, they all move out of Iowa and I don’t get to see them maybe as often as at a place like Hanover where I went to school. Their guys are more regional. But it comes with the territory and it’s just an awesome place to be able to work with guys from everywhere.”

>The Pioneers achieved historic, unprecedented success this past season by winning their first-ever Midwest Conference Tournament championship. They finished with an impressive 25-18 overall record, including a stellar 16-5 record in conference play and an incredibly dominant 15-2 record at home. They made their NCAA Tournament debut this year as well. Grinnell entered the NCAA D-III Regional Tournament as a heavy underdog against the top-ranked host, Denison University. They nearly pulled off a massive upset, outhitting Denison 11-9 before narrowly falling 5-4 on a bottom-of-the-ninth walk-off.

>Hollibaugh said the successful season wasn’t a fluke.

>“We’ve been pretty consistent,” he said. “Until this year, we hadn’t really found the recipe to get into regionals. Maybe we’ve had some bad luck, but I also believe you make your own luck and every time you coach, you learn from your experiences and you hopefully continually evolve and grow and get better. And that’s really, I think Coach Turner, that’s one of the things that he was always moving up and learning new things so that he could be a better coach. And just very fortunate to have been a Logansport Berry, and I’ve got a couple of signs that represent Logansport High School baseball. It’s just part of who we are and we were just lucky to be able to grow up in a community that was that excited about baseball.”

>Hollibaugh hasn’t coached a player that’s been drafted by an MLB team yet but he has had some move up a level recently.

>“We’ve had a few guys in this transfer portal era move on to Division-I schools. We lost a pitcher to the University of Richmond. He ended up being their No. 1 guy. We’ve got a guy that’s moving on to Columbia University,” he said. “I’ve had over a dozen-plus guys that have or are working in pro ball right now. So there’s just different avenues. I think we get more of the front-office type with the academics. But again, at the end of the day, we play team baseball just how I was raised and what I learned from playing for Coach Turner and Coach (Dick) Naylor down at Hanover. He’s an ABCA Hall of Famer, just like Coach Turner’s an Indiana Hall of Famer. And I just really hit the lotto with my baseball upbringing that really gave me a great foundation to become the coach that I am.”

>Hollibaugh graduated from LHS in 1985 back in the heyday of the NCC and Logansport baseball.

>“I hate Kokomo to this day because that was my last game,” he said. “I can remember that just like yesterday. But I was fortunate, I played with Mike Farrell and Johnny Nies. Mike went to Indiana State and of course got drafted and once in a while Mike and I stay in touch. We had some really good baseball players. It was so much fun.”

>Hollibaugh’s father, Jim, was the head football coach at Logansport in 1968, 1970 and 1971. The 1968 team had a win over No. 1-ranked Marion.

>Jim Hollibaugh was also an assistant coach under Harvey Roberts for many years. The Berries had an undefeated team in 1958 that finished ranked eighth in the state. The 1959 and 1960 teams finished ranked fourth. They won an NCC title all three of those years. The first state tournament wasn’t held until 1973.

>Jim Hollibaugh passed away in 2018 at the age of 90.

>“He’s the reason, honestly, I got into coaching,” Hollibaugh said. “I can remember back, I think they beat Jeff, and I was in the locker room and they were putting him up on their shoulders and just to see what it meant to the players, but more importantly, what it meant to my dad to see those smiles when guys could do things that that they couldn’t do before, their coaching staff’s impact on them. So he was a big influence on me getting into the profession and being able to, while he was with us, to be able to bounce ideas off him. I’m very fortunate just because you have a resource that you know and you try to model yourself after being just a great person and a great leader.”

>Tim Hollibaugh also coached football at Grinnell for many years. He just recently stepped down from that post two years ago as the associate head coach. He started in 1994 and was the defensive coordinator when the Pioneers won an MWC title in 1998.

>“I guess ‘24 was the last year that I was a dual sport coach and so that’s always been a challenge to be able to navigate doing both, but I also believe it’s helped me become a much better coach being able to balance the two,” he said. “As a coach, I go to 13 camps a year from Stanford to Harvard in the summer. I’m always trying to become better.”

>Hollibaugh is also an associate professor at Grinnell.

>“I teach a coaching methods course of the fundamentals of coaching and advanced baseball and a weightlifting course,” he said.

>He turns 60 next month and is hoping to coach the baseball team well into the future.

>“We don’t have to worry about NIL at the Division-III level, because there is some discussion. And I haven’t had to navigate the transfer portal much in my career,” he said. “As long as I can continue to focus on doing what I love to do and that’s coach, and you’ve got to take all the good and the bad and stay on top of stuff, but I just love the purity of Division-III athletics. It’s exactly what the NCAA is supposed to be about, not just the money, not just about television. Our guys play baseball because they love it. They’re coming to school to get a great education and my job is to provide them just as great of an experience as I possibly can with the facilities and the resources and the coaching staff that we’re able to provide.”