Troy Is What College Athletics Should Still Be About

Friday night in Troy, Alabama, 6,426 people packed a stadium that seats 2,000.

They stood along the concourse and past the outfield walls at Riddle-Pace Field — named in part for Chase Riddle, the coach who won Troy back-to-back Division II national championships in 1986 and 1987 — for the first Super Regional in program history. When Aaron Piasecki and Josh Pyne hit back-to-back home runs in the second inning, the place shook. When Jabe Boroff crushed a grand slam in the eighth, it erupted. The record crowd chanted MVP at a designated hitter who hit .149 during the regular season.

Troy routed Little Rock 12-2. The Trojans need one more win to reach the College World Series.

Troy went 36-30 this season. The Trojans finished third in the Sun Belt at 17-13. They lost their regional opener. On paper, this does not look like a College World Series team.

On the field, they played like one all postseason.

Troy beat No. 19 Alabama 6-1 at Riddle-Pace in May, snapping the Crimson Tide’s 11-game winning streak in the series. In February, the Trojans went to Athens and beat No. 8 Georgia 6-5 in 12 innings. In the Gainesville Regional, they dropped the opener to Miami, then won four straight elimination games — including two wins over No. 8 national seed Florida, the host — to reach the Super Regional. Troy scored 55 runs in five regional games and hit 11 home runs as a team.

In the rush to commoditize college athletics — to consolidate conferences, stack revenue at the top and build superleagues around the biggest brands — Troy’s run is evidence of what gets lost when the conversation ignores programs outside the Power 4. When you give them a fair shot, they win. They fill a stadium past anything the fire marshal imagined and take another step toward Omaha.

Before Friday’s game, the Troy community was already feeling the weight of the moment.

“We often ask, ‘Why not Troy?’” Chancellor Jack Hawkins Jr. told Troy University. “A few years ago, we made the investment in our baseball program and facilities, not just to be successful in the Sun Belt Conference but to compete for a national championship. We are excited to host the Super Regional and to share our baseball program, our university, and our community with a national audience.”

The investment shows. Riddle-Pace Field underwent a $12 million renovation completed before the 2024 season. Skylar Meade, hired in 2021 from South Carolina’s pitching staff, has won more games in his first four seasons than any head coach in program history. Meade pitched in the 2007 College World Series for Louisville — posted a 0.00 ERA in Omaha — and brought that standard to a city of 17,769 in the Wiregrass.

Troy is the eighth Sun Belt team to reach a Super Regional. The Trojans are chasing a spot as the third Sun Belt program to reach the College World Series, following Louisiana in 2000 and Coastal Carolina last year. No Sun Belt team has ever won the national championship. The Sun Belt sent five teams to regionals this year — a conference record.

The people who built this program’s foundation recognize something in the way this team plays.

Jude Rinaldi was the Most Valuable Player of the 1987 Division II World Series. Nearly 40 years ago, he hit a three-run home run at Montgomery’s Paterson Field to break a 4-4 tie with Tampa in the national championship game. He made the trip to Gainesville to watch this year’s regional.

“What this team has done has been nothing short of amazing,” Rinaldi told Troy University before the Super Regional. “I didn’t think that this was ever going to be possible. Skylar has put together a hell of a team.”

Rinaldi sees the comparison to his own era: “This year’s team kind of started out the season like our 1987 team did. We started out 12-8, but once we came together and gelled as a team, we finished 38-10,” he told Troy University. “This team started a little slow, but once they gelled, they began playing very well and just haven’t looked back.”

Jody Singleton played outfield for Troy in 1990 and 1991 and was inducted into the Wiregrass Sports Hall of Fame in 2024. He has watched good Troy teams come close before.

“It means so much to so many,” Singleton told Troy University. “I have stayed involved through the years, and I have seen us have some really good teams come so very close. To see this come to fruition with this team against the likes of Miami and Florida is very rewarding for me, both as a letter winner and an alumnus. I thought this could eventually happen, but I didn’t think I would see it in my lifetime.”

Then there is Jabe Boroff.

Boroff hit .149 during the regular season — four home runs and seven hits total. He came to Troy from Enterprise State Community College, where he hit .452 with 20 home runs and was named ACCC Player of the Year. The transition to Division I was rough.

Something broke loose in the postseason. Boroff now has 11 home runs on the season — seven of them in postseason play. Against Little Rock, the junior from Pike Road went 2-for-4 with six RBIs — a two-run blast to left field in the sixth that pushed the lead to 8-2, then the grand slam in the eighth that turned Riddle-Pace into something closer to a football stadium on homecoming. Troy Athletics has taken to calling him Jabe Ruth.

“I think it’s just being confident and not trying to do too much,” Boroff told AL.com after the game. “Don’t need to do too much, simplify, don’t overswing. I’d also pay tribute to God. He helps me.”

Benjamin Stubbs set the tone on the mound — six innings, five strikeouts, no walks, limiting Little Rock to two runs after the Trojans fell behind 1-0 in the first. Drew Nelson went 3-for-4 with two RBIs — he tripled in a run and scored on a sacrifice fly in the second to give Troy the lead, and the Trojans never gave it back. Shea Meier went 3-for-4 and scored three runs.

“I felt like when we went up 2-1 in that second inning we were like, ‘all right, this is what we’ve been doing the last two weeks,’” Nelson told AL.com.

His teammate Jimmy Janicki, the Sun Belt Player of the Year, tied Troy’s single-season RBI record at 85 during the regional. He needs one more home run to become the first Trojan with a 20-double, 20-homer season. Aaron Piasecki led the nation with 11 hits during regional weekend.

Jack Weaver, president of the Troy University Alumni Association, said the phone started ringing the moment the Trojans won the Gainesville Regional.

“Since the team won the Gainesville Regional, I have had numerous calls and messages from alumni saying how proud they were to be a Trojan,” Weaver told Troy University.

“I believe we have an invigorated body of alumni right now, thanks in large part to the success of this team,” Weaver said. “I think this has served to further unite us and inspire us to work hard for the University, not just on the athletics side but on the academic side as well.”

A city of 17,769 in Pike County does not have a professional sports team. What it has is a university, a baseball team that earned the right to host a Super Regional and a community that showed up at three times capacity to prove it.

The drive to consolidate college athletics — to stack power and revenue among a handful of conferences and leave everyone else behind — threatens to eliminate exactly this. Programs like Troy do not get this stage in a superleague model. They do not host. They do not compete against Alabama and Georgia and Florida under the same rules. The opportunities that Boroff and Janicki and Nelson earned disappear. So does everything those opportunities create for the university and the town that surrounds it.

Singleton, who waited 35 years to see Troy reach this point, put it simply: “I want to enjoy every bit of this ride wherever it leads,” he told Troy University.

Game 2 is Saturday at 2 p.m. on ESPN2.