Franklin College baseball coach Lance Marshall, who got started with a 3-30 season in 1998, could pick up his 600th career victory today against DePauw.
Submitted photo | Chad Williams
Lance Marshall wouldn’t lose sleep if the mile markers of his coaching career whizzed past with little or no mention.
Nonetheless, the 26th-year Franklin College baseball coach knows from experience that victory totals divisible by 100 have a way of touching off a steady stream of congratulatory text messages.
Now, for a sixth time, here he is again.
Over the weekend, Marshall penned his name next to career win No. 598 with a 13-2 win at Anderson on Saturday, one that capped a lopsided doubleheader sweep.
The 52-year-old Springfield, Illinois native takes a 598-407 career ledger into today’s twinbill at home against DePauw.
Numbers are important to Marshall as long as they pertain to what his players are doing on and off the baseball diamond.
Beyond that, not so much.
“I’m really not,” said Marshall, the Grizzlies’ coach since August 1997, when asked if he’s a milestone person. “I’m just thankful to be able to do it as long as I’ve done it.
“It’s about the relationships with the young men. We’ve had terrific young men from great families.”
Only 26 years old at the time of his hiring, Marshall poured every ounce of that youthful energy into turning the program around.
It was neither easy nor overnight.
During the spring of 1998, Marshall watched his first Grizzlies squad sputter to a 3-30 record, all the while brushing away cobwebs as sole occupant of the Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference basement.
Such futility might have had some questioning their career choice.
Marshall didn’t.
“The first season, in particular, was very rocky. It was certainly challenging. We weren’t particularly strong, but we didn’t catch many breaks, either,” said Marshall, who had previously served as an assistant coach at Elmhurst and Rockford. “I think we lost seven or eight games in the last inning.
“I knew it was going to be a process, and worked my tail off recruiting. The second year, things started to go our way.”
Marshall’s 1999 ball club increased its win total by an impressive 16 games, finishing 19-22 and a far more respectable 6-8 in league play. By his fifth season (2002), the Grizzlies were capturing the HCAC regular-season title, an accomplishment they duplicated in 2005, 2009, 2018 and 2022.
Remove the 1998 season and the COVID-shortened 2020 campaign from the equation, and the Grizzlies have finished with at least 21 wins a total of 18 times (out of 23) on Marshall’s watch.
“It has a lot to do with culture. He recruits the right guys who fit Franklin College. People who are more ‘we’ guys than ‘me’ guys,” said former Grizzlies all-HCAC right fielder Ryan Bixler, the program’s career home run leader with 38.
“We’re all playing for the same goal — to win. We took care of our job, and it all just came together. Coach is positive all the time, but there was a time and place to light a fire under our butts, and he could definitely do that, too.”
Franklin College secured HCAC tournament championships in 2011, 2018 and 2019, each time advancing to the NCAA Division III regional. The 2018 squad was 39-5.
Marshall, who doubles as an associate athletic director at the college, took on another role last summer when he became an ordained minister in order to preside over the wedding of one of his former assistants, Tim Miller, and his fiancée, Emily.
He’s scheduled to officiate the June 23 nuptials of one of his former players, Ben Sprinkle, who is currently engaged to Olivia Paszek, a former Franklin High and Franklin College softball standout.
Coach. Minister. Motivator.
Lance Marshall, who wears a lot of hats, wears them all well.
“Coach Marshall, not to sound cliché, is very blue-collar. He would always tell you how it is in a gracious way, but very firm and blunt,” said former Grizzlies pitcher Krae Sparks, a Greenwood Christian graduate who now is an assistant coach for the Cougars.
“He believes in his guys a lot. If we got down in a game, he’s like, ‘I know you guys are going to be fine.’ That was big.”
