David Esquer shares message to Stanford locker room after CWS elimination
Stanford head coach David Esquer reached the mountaintop as a college baseball player with the Cardinal back in 1987. But before that year and after it as a coach, Esquer has dealt with a lot of heartbreak.
The latest heartbreak came this year in Omaha at the Men’s College World Series at the hands of Wake Forest and Tennessee.
“It’s raw at the end and, quite frankly, it should be,” Esquer said. “I can understand that. You’ve got to give them that time to feel the pain of the end of a season and last time to get a chance to play with some of those players. And they’ve gone a big battle this year, but from winning the league and the battle it takes to get through a Regional, and then a Super Regional, and the experience being here in Omaha.”
Stanford finished the year with 44-20 record and 23-7 mark in Pac-12 play to win the conference. And prior to the Men’s College World Series, the team went 6-2 with five wins to stave off elimination.
“Playing at the highest level and going to a school like Stanford and getting that education, but also proving that you could play your sport at the highest level, that will set a standard for their whole life no matter what they do,” Esquer said. “It doesn’t matter what line of work they go into. But that will mark them as fathers and husbands even after baseball is all said and done with. That was my experience. So I know getting them here to Omaha and letting them know that they could play baseball at the highest level, they could study and go to a school at the highest level, they could expect that out of themselves.”
The trip to the Men’s College World Series was the 19th in program history and third in the last three seasons. However, the program hasn’t won the title since 1988.
But that doesn’t mean the Stanford program hasn’t been successful, as Esquer explains.
“They will be not only great baseball players at a professional level but great doctors and lawyers and employees for any business that would have them,” Esquer said. “That’s what you walk away in the end when you graduate from Stanford and you get a chance to play baseball here. I’m proud to continue that. Coach Marquess set the standard here at Stanford. And I’m able to take that baton from him. But I’ve been marked by our program, and I hope that we’ve done the same thing for everybody in our program.”