The Transition from NAIA to NCAA Division II with Coaches Dom Olech and Kevin Johnson…

How Roosevelt University is Making the Transition Work

Since 2009, Roosevelt University’s baseball team was part of the Chicagoland Collegiate Athletic Conference (CCAC), a strong NAIA conference that typically had one or two teams receiving votes to be in the top-25 each year. In 2023, it was announced that Roosevelt’s baseball team would be moving into the NCAA Division 2 Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (GLIAC). I decided to take some time to catch up with a grad assistant coach, Dom Olech, and an Assistant Coach, Kevin Johnson, to talk about some of the differences that the team is facing these days.

As a former baseball player at the NAIA level, I wanted to know what was different about the recruiting portion of baseball at the D2 level. How are NCAA guidelines different than NAIA? To be honest, after talking with Coach Olech, there were three (3) big differences. Olech stated, “The biggest challenges with recruiting are behind the scenes with compliance. Every phone call, text message, and interaction are logged in a compliance system, making it extra work for the coaches.” The first big challenge is time. You only have so much of it, and a limited recruitment schedule to actually reach out to players. This is on top of competing for players time as they’re being reached out to but also spending time on your current roster as well.

Olech also included, “Another major difference in recruiting is that an NCAA coach can't contact a player until after their sophomore year, whereas an NAIA coach can interact with any high school athlete.” When I asked about the middle schoolers who are receiving and accepting offers, he told me that’s fake. “It isn’t real.” There’s a lot of regulations that the NCAA puts onto coaches, including not being able to reach out to players until they’re juniors. You can get infractions on your program if you do reach out beforehand, and the NCAA is extremely strict about it. Coaches actually will call players just after midnight on the first day they can call prospects. NAIA doesn’t have rules as to when you can reach out, so it’s free reign.

The biggest challenge in my mind is money. Olech told me “the scholarship system works differently. There's more likely to be walk on's with NCAA because there's a scholarship limit, whereas with the NAIA "average system", more players have a chance at getting some scholarship money.” In a world that is being pulled towards money, the opportunity for players to get more money would be tempting.

Obviously, the NAIA isn’t NCAA D2, so the talent level is going to be different. I asked both coaches about their opinions on the skill levels that they saw this past season. Is the competitive difference that big? Olech stated “The average talent level is definitely higher in Division 2, but the biggest difference is in the fundamentals and little things. There were fewer errors and mental mistakes in D2.” Johnson added, “skill isn’t sufficient to describe the difference between NAIA and Division 2. Are guys a little bigger on average? No doubt, maybe 2 inches taller and 20 pounds heavier on average, but the difference doesn’t come from that. Any good team we play in the NCAA D2, there is a complete baseball player at every position, not just some elite athlete. Any time we made mistakes, they would make us pay for them.” To summarize, the biggest difference was the fact that the players were more well-rounded, not just physically bigger or more skilled.

Despite facing better pitching and more well-rounded players, the team still made the conference tournament this season and had four players named to the All-GLIAC Conference team, including James Berry, who was named a first-team All-Midwest Region performer by the National Collegiate Baseball Writers Association. Second Team All-GLIAC performer, Koa Ogawa, regressed a little bit at the D2 level, but Berry performed just as well at the D2 and NAIA level. Both players are seniors this year and will be looking to play professional baseball next year. This led me to ask the two coaches about how players respond to an NCAA D2 team, compared to an NAIA team when they’re offered a spot on the roster. Do players take more interest in an NCAA D2 team over an NAIA team? Does the NCAA name hold more notoriety than the NAIA name? The coaches responded below.

Coach Olech stated, “A school that transitions to D2 will immediately draw greater interest from a larger pool of talent. Some high school athletes who might be D1 recruits might opt to go to a D2 to have a better chance of playing time.” Coach Johnson mimicked that sentiment adding, “Being in D2, the name just carries more notoriety and so, it is more enticing for a more talented player.” Both coaches talked about NAIA coaches targeting more JUCO players, while NCAA recruiting is more viable for “play-now” ready high schoolers.

I also wanted to know about the workload. When I was at the NAIA level, I was putting in about 3 hours of practice, 2 hours of lifting per day, along with classes and study halls thrown into there. Coach Olech told me, “Surprisingly, for some, the NCAA has less workload for athletes.” This surprised me at first, but as Olech continued, it made more sense to me. There are fall and spring “windows” where the players are only allowed to practice and lift for a certain amount of time. With those windows of time, they have to be regulated and checked for compliance. Olech told me, “Coaches record all these hours, and players are selected at random every week to ensure that the inputted hours match what actually occurred.” He added that, “the only limit that NAIA has is total amount of team practice weeks in the whole academic year.”

As hard as it is for the players to adjust to a new league and new teams, it’s also difficult for the coaching staff. The coaches are learning how to help players with new challenges, like mental battles of facing better talent than they previously were. Coach Johnson told me, “Teaching players how can they use their strengths and weaknesses to overcome being a little less talented than their opponent, (and) having a strong sense of gamesmanship will take you a long way in baseball.” The coaches were more involved in the mental aspect of the game at the NCAA D2 level than in NAIA. When Coach Johnson said this to me, it made me think of ways that the team went about finding those strengths and weaknesses.

Coach Johnson and I were talking about what he does to prepare for games and new teams that they haven’t seen before. He told me about his experience driving down to Lincoln Memorial University, he spent “8 hours straight of every one of their pitchers appearances that season.” He would consistently ask himself, “What’re their tendencies, are they tipping their pitches? Does he use a slightly different arm slot for different pitches? Is the catcher tipping the pitches by the way he’s set up and presenting?” He was looking for things that would give his team a leg-up. At the end of the day, winning is about having the better prepared team, right?

One thing that I can say about this Roosevelt team is that they are gritty. I was able to attend a few games this season and the coaching staff was constantly talking with the players, talking with their fellow coaches, and simply becoming better as a unit. They took the extra bases, they dove for balls out of reach, they played the game with hustle and passion. With the guidance of Head Coach Jason Becker, who ironically was a NCAA Division II All-Midwest Region player in 1998 and 1999, this team will be heading in the right direction at the NCAA Division 2 level. I’m excited to see what comes next for the Lakers in 2026.

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