Couch: LCC baseball beefs up its resources and physiques as it chases even bigger dreams

LANSING – What’s remarkable about the story of Lansing Community College’s baseball program is that the Stars’ 39-9 record is no longer remarkable.

What is, however, is what’s been built and sustained now through three head coaches, and what’s transpiring under second-year coach Steven Cutter. A plucky underdog is morphing into a behemoth that looks the part.

It can be seen it in the size of the players, in the additions to the staff, the gear LCC wears and in the technology it’s using. A program that had 11 baseballs to its name — as in, actual baseballs — when Cutter arrived in August of 2021, is using a $30,000 piece of digital equipment to measure spin rate, release points, exit velocity, etc.

Make no mistake, LCC under Cutter is benefiting from the winning before him. Drew Huard showed what was possible at LCC, reaching the NJCAA Division II World Series in 2017 with a squad consisting of 18 local players. Jordan Keur kept it rolling and put together a 47-3 season two years ago, before leaving to join the staff at Western Michigan University. And now Cutter, most recently the head coach at North Muskegon High School and general manager and pitching coach for the Muskegon Clippers of the Great Lakes Summer Collegiate League, is trying to build the Stars into a program that’s a power beyond state lines.

His first challenge, though, was reconstructing a roster that had largely disbanded in the two months between Keur’s departure and when he was hired.

Cutter and his staff assembled a good group in Year 1, talented enough for LCC to reach the World Series last season for the second time ever. There, they realized the difference between the top programs in the country and themselves — largely in their physiques.

“If you go to the College World Series and look at the teams, they look like this (LCC) team now — big rosters, big, strong kids,” Cutter said. “You don’t want to be the underdog story all of the time.”

Last year’s fifth-place finish nationally inspired the addition of a strength and conditioning coach, Jason Thompson, and dietician, Kate Davis, and only ramped up ongoing fundraising efforts. In February, about 350 people attended the Stars’ first-pitch fundraising dinner, a warm response to intentional efforts by LCC’s program to be an active part of the community.

“Instead of going out and saying, ‘Hey, can you help us?’ We started going into the community and serving,” Cutter said. “And pretty soon people started realizing what we were doing. And they started coming to us and saying, ‘How can we help you?’ ”

What started with cleaning parks, led to good relationships with the city, as Cutter put it.

“Pretty soon we had the keys to Muni,” Cutter said of moving their home games from West Side Park to Kircher Municipal Field, a facility more in line with the aspirations of the program.

In all, they’ve raised $127,000 so far in the last 20 months, giving themselves the resources to have the look and feel of a major player in junior college baseball, matching their extraordinary winning of late — a record of 245-60 over the past six seasons, 146-17 in conference play.

They still do take their lumps from time to time, including losing both games in a road doubleheader Thursday to fellow state power Kellogg Community College, which has also twice made the World Series in recent years, just about alternating with LCC since 2017. The Stars host Kellogg in a doubleheader Saturday at 1 and 3 p.m. at Municipal Field, before closing the regular season at home against Grand Rapids Community College at 3 p.m. Monday.

While getting out of the region is no guarantee, LCC’s dreams and goals are in Enid, Oklahoma, the site of the NJCAA D-II World Series, beginning in late May.

The Stars know now that they can compete there and that they’ll fit in. They knew it after an early season trip to Mississippi, where, among other big-time programs, they took on Pearl River Community College, which beat them 17-8 in last year’s World Series. This time, LCC fell 4-3 on a walk-off single.

“After the game, we shook hands and we thanked them for hosting us and they were like, ‘Let's do it again in Edin,’ ” said assistant coach Jared Helmic, who was also part of Huard’s coaching staff. “We are confident we've got a team that can play at that level. … Last year we saw them and they were bigger, they were faster, they were stronger. They had more arms. This year, we looked like them.”

LCC has six players hitting .400 or better and nine batting better than .360, led by sophomores Hunter Lay (.457, 13 home runs, 58 RBIs) and Shane Juday (.445, 10 home runs, 70 RBIs).

“You don’t see that too often,” Juday said. “It just shows you what we have here. And I think that’s just a small picture of what this team really is.”

Six-foot-five freshman lefty Hunter Shaw entered the week with an ERA of 0.45 through seven starts, before losing at Kellogg. His stuff is often “almost un-hittable,” Cutter said.

This is a roster that’s more regional than local, with six players from the Lansing area, 33 others also from Michigan and five from out of state, including standout freshman outfielder Will Bowen, from California.

Cutter has lost track of exactly how many Major League organizations have come to scout the Stars — “at least 11.” Same for the number of four-year colleges — “at least 35.” A number of LCC’s sophomores have multiple scholarship offers.

Lay and Shaw, both from Chelsea, are among those receiving a lot of attention.

“I see myself being an established big-leaguer someday, honestly,” Lay said.

Why’d he choose LCC after transferring out of Walter State Community College in Tennessee?

“Because they win,” Lay said.

Same for Shaw.

“They’re the best in Michigan. They’re one of the best programs in the country,” Shaw said. “I knew if I came here, I’d be with the best guys in JUCO.”

Shaw had Division III offers coming out of high school, but thought he just needed another year or two to develop into a better prospect. It’s happened quickly at LCC.

That’s the part of the challenge of recruiting at the junior college level — projecting kids who might need another year of growth or a year in the weight room and suddenly you’ve got a 6-5 lefty who’s fastball is topping out at 91 mph, like Shaw.

Recruiting has changed for LCC significantly in the past five years. The Stars increasingly can get a more coveted player out of high school and in the transfer portal. But they’re also looking for players who are willing to play games with special needs children on Fridays at the Gier Community Center.

“We can’t just have really good baseball players here because we do too many things in the community,” Cutter said. “And that’s a reflection of not only our baseball team, but our college.”

A college that gave itself a chance at keeping its baseball program at this level by finally creating a full-time position that fit the schedule of its part-time baseball coach. Four months after Cutter was hired to coach the Stars’ baseball team, he also became the school’s assistant athletic director. That sort of athletics-based full-time gig was something the previous LCC administration didn’t have figured out for Huard.

Cutter felt the support at the first pitch dinner in February, when college president Steve Robinson and members of the board of trustees were among the hundreds in attendance at the Lansing Center at $100 a plate.

Full-time employment at LCC has made the leap of faith Cutter and his family — including three school-age daughters — made moving to Lansing all the more worth it, more doable long-term. His wife, Breena, left a good job at Mercy Health for Cutter's dream.

“She was kind of the one that said, ‘It’s your dream. Let’s go chase it,’ ” Cutter said.

“I feel like I'm living it right now. Most of the things that we've thought that we wanted to do have come to fruition. We talked about winning a national championship. And that's important to our squad, because they don't want to just go back there, they want to win one.”

Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.

This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Lansing Community College baseball beefs up resources to chase dreams