New Mexico State baseball prepares for season-opening series

With February now in full swing (no pun intended), that can only mean one thing… Baseball season is now within arm’s reach.

The 2018 season was nothing short of extraordinary for head coach Brian Green and the New Mexico State baseball team: first-time WAC Tournament champions, first NCAA regional appearance since 2012, tons of individual awards within the squad and even named the New Mexico Sports Hall of Fame (NMSHOF) College Team of the Year.

But now all that hardware and fame is in the rearview mirror for the defending WAC champions, and Green and his team are solely focused on moving forward in 2019, hopeful that they’ll be able to surpass the previous year’s success.

“Grind to get better,” Green said when asked what it’s going to take to produce another fruitful season. “We feel like we got a chance to be deeper on the mound just in terms of the numbers and having more guys that can come in and compete and throw strikes. We like our experience at the plate, you potentially have got seven guys who were starters last year offensively – and you bring back all that defense who set a school record for fielding percentage (.977).

“What we’re really talking about with our guys is just taking better pride in the preparation and the process and really making a drive towards May and getting better every day.”

NM State put up gaudy numbers a year ago, topping the WAC in multiple categories including batting average (.310), slugging percentage (.478), on-base percentage (.409), runs scored (493) and hits (656) while cracking the NCAA top-25 marks in hit by pitch (119) and triples (25) – just to name a few.

NM State is even garnering national attention, with College Baseball Daily ranking the Aggies at no. 39 in their preseason Top-40 poll.

The 2019 slate will be all but easy for NM State as they bring back quality opponents in Texas Tech (whom the Aggies lost to in last year’s NCAA tournament regional matchup), Arizona State, Arizona and Yale.

“Really excited about the schedule and the potential of it, you got potentially in the first four weekends three projected league champions,” Green said. “Texas Southern has been in the postseason three out of the last 4 years, Yale is picked to win their league, Delaware is always competitive, you got Nebraska in week five – aside from the midweeks a really really challenging schedule for us and the fact that we get to play those first four weekends at home is exciting as well.”

Although NM State’s numbers are flashy, Green is focused on what he and his team can control right now – and it’s evident that his humble attitude is reflected throughout the whole club house.

“This is definitely the best team we’ve had – like [as] a family and as a whole, just coming together and working together and the younger kids are starting to pick up on it,” redshirt-senior leader Caleb Henderson said about this year’s squad.

Henderson sat out the 2017 season after transferring from Arizona Community College following a knee injury. The now-senior admitted that he was playing through some knee pain in 2018 and was not 100 percent – although his junior season stats say otherwise.

The Aggie first-baseman lead the WAC in runs batted in (65), doubles (20) and even added 10 homeruns, earning himself a spot on the All-WAC First-Team list to conclude 2018. He said his knee now feels “the best it’s ever felt”, which is scary news for the rest of the nation.

“Over the offseason I’ve been working on my speed a little bit – just being really versatile at the plate,” Henderson said when asked how we would exceed his individual stats from a season ago. “You just got to have a good mindset, stay positive all the time, can’t get down on yourself – keep working.”

With success comes high expectations and added pressure, as other NM State athletic programs have come to know as well in recent years, and that’s no different for the Aggie baseball team.

“New Mexico State Athletics is such a great department, everybody is successful, so for us –and for me personally – there’s always pressure to perform,” Green said. “You want perform for the administration, and the honor of getting the opportunity here. There’s no more added pressure, we put that on our self, we want to do something that’s never been done here and that’s win a regional. But there’s no added pressure, but I think anytime you’re in a head coaching position there’s certainly pressure, and you just want to perform to the best of your abilities.”

NM State will bring back big-name starters with the aforementioned Henderson, junior Joey Ortiz, senior Tristen Carranza and the All-American honoree sophomore Nick Gonzales. The Aggies will open the 2019 season with a four-game home-series against Texas Southern, starting Feb. 15 at Presley Askew Field – opening pitch is scheduled for 4:05 p.m.

Salas to cap off illustrious career with one final trip to the Big Dance

Brooke Salas has completely rewrote the New Mexico State women’s basketball record books.

Salas, who was named the Western Athletic Conference Player of the Year, also took home the conference’s Defensive Player of the Year award – becoming the first player in WAC history to win both prestigious awards in the same season.

This is the second-consecutive season that the senior from Placentia, Calif. has earned the Player of the Year honor, in what has been another banner-season for the 5-foot-11 guard. The awards don’t stop there, as Salas also received a First Team All-WAC and All-Defensive Team nod, voted by the WAC’s nine head coaches.

Add that to her three All-WAC tournament teams and being the first player in program history to play in three NCAA Tournaments and it is fair to wonder if Salas has a room big enough to store the accolades in.

“It’s very exciting, it’s very humbling,” Salas said in a press conference earlier this week. “I think it gives us a lot of momentum going into the tournament – it’s also a testament to my teammates and the coaching staff here.”

Salas has evolved into the complete package since coming to NM State in 2015. Since her freshman year, she has increased her scoring and rebounding averages by drastic means – nearly tripling her rebound average from 4.6 to a current and essentially growing 11.2 and doubling her points average from 9.4 to a now 19.0, while also leading the conference in points and rebounds per game.

Impressively, she has started in all but one of the 125 games played in her Aggie career (so far) and her 1,913 career points has her set in second-place in career scoring at NM State, trailing only Anita Maxwell’s 2,601 points, and fifth on the all-time WAC scoring list. Her 611 points this year also marks a new career high for season scoring, topping her already outstanding 592 points during last year’s campaign.

At this point, Salas is accustomed to climbing up the school record boards, and she continues to do that in a well-rounded manner, pulling down 355 total rebounds on the year (the third most in a single season for NM State) and bringing her career total to 941, situating Salas in sixth place on the program’s all time rebounding list.

All so often, fans have heard women’s basketball head coach Brooke Atkinson preach about defense being her team’s pride and joy, and Salas bought in and became the definition of a defensive terror, establishing herself as one of the greatest defenders ever to put on an Aggie jersey.

It was Salas’ second-straight season being put on the All-Defensive team, with her 1.7 blocks a game before the conference tournament putting her as the WAC’s runner-up in blocked shots. Not surprisingly, she also averaged 2.7 steals a game in the regular season, the second most in the WAC. Her 156 career blocks earn her the top spot in career blocks at NM State.

The Aggies will return to the NCAA Tournament after last year’s hiatus, defeating UTRGV in a double-overtime thriller to secure head coach Brooke Atkinson’s first WAC Tournament title in her two years and NM State’s fourth in the last five seasons.

Salas delivered on the biggest stage with a vintage 29 point, 12 rebound performance, doing everything she could to get the Aggies back to the Big Dance, where in their last appearance they nearly upset No. 2 seeded Stanford in the opening round (behind another stellar 26 point showing by Salas).

Time will tell if Salas and the Aggies will be able to bust some brackets for the first time in school history, but if one thing for sure, though, it’s that NM State will miss its back-to-back WAC Player of the Year once her illustrious career draws its end. Salas will undoubtedly go down as one of the all-time Aggie greats.