The 2024 season came to an early end for the Arkansas Razorbacks. Now, head coach Dave Van Horn is preparing for a massive roster overhaul going into next season.
Van Horn explained that Arkansas isn’t going to need to make any difficult roster moves. All of those are being made for the team already with the amount of players who he expects to leave the program for one reason or another.
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“Well, I don’t think there’s a lot of decisions we have to make this offseason,” Dave Van Horn said. “We’re gonna lose almost all of our players again for the third year in a row. Really, since ’21 we’ve had to almost start over.”
Roster turnover comes in many forms in modern college baseball. Players can leave through the Transfer Portal with relative ease. On top of that, there are still the old ways teams would lose players, like the MLB Draft and graduation.
“You have a couple of freshmen and maybe one or two sophomores that have shown some stuff. But we’ve lost our complete outfield again. They’ll all be gone. We’re gonna lose the second baseman. I don’t think the first baseman will be back. Starting catcher is gone. Starting third baseman graduates. Your whole rotation will probably go if they get an opportunity. I mean, I could go on and on. I think about it every day. It’s just the way it is these days. We’ve got kids coming in.”
The MLB Draft is a unique one for college coaches to navigate. Not only can teams lose current players to the draft, but they can also lose top-end players who they recruited for the following season to the MLB Draft if they’re taken out of high school. That happened to Arkansas last year and Dave Van Horn knows it hurt the team this year.
“We’re gonna get hit in the draft again. Last year, the draft killed us. Absolutely killed us. We lost four freshmen last year that would have been freshmen on this team. They got 11 million total for all four of them. You’re just hoping to get a couple of them, just get one of them. We didn’t get any of them. So, that’s our battle. We know it,” Van Horn said.
“We’ve got some good young guys in the program that are going to get better and gain some experience, but we’ve got to have more. So, we’ll be working hard.”
Dave Van Horn explains Arkansas’ poor performance at home to end the season
It was a difficult end of the season for Arkansas, with the Razorbacks losing five out of their last nine regular season games, both of their SEC Tournament games and getting bumped out of the NCAA Tournament in the Regional round. Those issues are something that Dave Van Horn explained following the Regional.
“Well, we didn’t pitch very good. I mean, that was pretty obvious last month. We were rolling pretty good early… you got two lefts and a right, and they’re all gonna give you innings; they’re all experienced. And then, all of a sudden, you can see a little crack in the armor. One got wild, one’s always having issues with his arm, and the steady was [Hagen] Smith. Smith is the guy. He was a rock; he carried us. The whole season, that guy carried us,” Van Horn said.
“I just think that the pitching got a little tired. The offense was a roller coaster all year — we had to fight for so many wins. You go back and look at our scores; I’m gonna say in the SEC, we had played 15-18 games, win or lose by less than three runs. Everything was tight. We didn’t blow anybody out [and] they didn’t blow us out… it was stressful. And I think it beat us up a little bit mentally.”
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