LOWELL – Merrimack Valley baseball players, are you paying attention?
The new coach at UMass Lowell is looking for some elite players to help elevate the program.
Earlier this month, Nick Barese was introduced as the fourth head coach in River Hawks history. After coaching Merrimack for seven years, Barese became an assistant at UML for the last two years. He takes over for Ken Harring, who resigned in late July after 19 years.
Harring leaves with a career record of 464-446, which includes nine straight losing seasons, one trip to the America East championship game, three trips to the AE playoffs and back in his first year of 2005, a trip to the NCAA Division 2 Northeast Regional. The program moved to Division 1 in 2013.
Barese had tremendous success at Merrimack College, finishing with a record of 153-129 over seven years. He ranks second all-time in program history in wins and led the 2018 team to the NE-10 championship title, the first since 1999.
He left after the 2021 season, and became the pitching coach and then pitching/associate head coach this past year under Harring. The pitching staff led the conference in almost every statistical category, while setting program records with a combined 444 strikeouts in a season.
Barese, who grew up in Braintree and played both baseball and football at St. Anselm which included being recruited by Harring who was the head coach there at the time, believes he can take the UML program to the next level and that starts with looking at the homegrown talent.
“Recruiting to me is the lifeblood of any program. If you don’t get good recruits, you’re not going to be any good,” he said. “We want to dominate the backyard and be great here in the Merrimack Valley. All of the better players look at UMass Lowell as a place that they want to be at. From being in the area, there’s so much good baseball here.”
After the 2021 season at Merrimack, Barese resigned stating that he had a philosophical differences with administration, mostly over the facilities. He said there’s absolutely no animosity.
“I still have so many great relationships with people there, with administrators there and there’s no hard feelings or ill will at all, at all,” he said. “I’m grateful for my time there. I grew so much as a coach. They gave me my first opportunity to become a head coach. I was looking for this – a beautiful stadium to play in and some resources with an indoor facility. I think UMass Lowell offers things from an academic aspect with the type of kid that you can get here. All of that was really important to me and I just thought this would be a great fit.”
Now as the head coach of the River Hawks, he said the plan is to develop student-athletes to be successful in the classroom, in the community and on the baseball field so they can leave the program set up to be successful in life. and of course the other plan is to win.
“The obvious goal is we want to bring the first Division 1 conference championship title to UMass Lowell. I know they have had a ton of success at the Division 2 level and we were really close of doing it two years ago and we’re ready to get over that hump,” he said.
Follow Jamie Pote on Twitter: @JamiePote