When Mark Wasikowski became Oregon baseball’s head coach in 2019, he knew something was broken.

Rather than speculate on what the issue was, or try to fix a problem he knew nothing about, he was blunt in his first meeting with the team.

“What’s broken? You guys tell me. I haven’t been here,” he recalled saying. “It was a really quiet room. I asked the team though, ‘What’s going wrong here? Because this is a beautiful place. You’ve got a beautiful field. You’ve got a budget, and it’s plenty good enough for it to be good.’”

He was met with silence and confusion from a locker room full of players decked out in all the Oregon paraphernalia you can imagine — Nike shoes, gear, backpacks and everything a Division I athlete expects to be given. But the shiny clothes and expensive shoes couldn’t hide the reality that the Ducks had recently gone 10-19 in Pac-12 play or that they hadn’t finished higher than eighth place since 2015.

So Wasikowski didn’t hand them all that gear. Instead, he gave them two plain white T-shirts and a pair of basic running shoes.

He was met with more befuddlement. Some of the players were ticked off that they weren’t getting the equipment they thought they deserved.

But Wasikowski had a simple message to the team: “If you want to be here, and you want to be here for the right reasons and play for the school and try to play for the people that think you guys are spoiled — prove that wrong.”

The group rallied behind the fact that they weren’t going to be handed anything. Everything the coaches gave them, they would have to earn.

And still, the team’s first issue every year is a pair of white T-shirts. It helps remind Wasikowski, and the team, of why they show up to play baseball every day, and why they need to work hard to prove their worth.

“It means a lot to us, even though it literally is probably the ugliest thing you’ve ever seen,” Wasikowski said.

Now in his third full season of coaching Oregon under this “white shirt mentality,” Wasikowski’s leadership has paid dividends, turning this program into a national contender and a force in the Pac-12.

His drive and passion for baseball go back to his playing days, a path that led him to an unexpected career in coaching. After being introduced to the game as a kid, he went on to play for Pepperdine as a third baseman. He played under head coach Andy Lopez, who became one of the most influential mentors in Wasikowski’s life.

His first memories of Lopez are of an intimidating, no-nonsense authority figure.

“He wasn’t a ‘give you a hug and tell you how wonderful the day is’ kind of coach,” Wasikowski said. “He was as tough as they got… He coached us like we were a gang, and he was in the gang.”

Wasikowski didn’t need to go to Pepperdine. He had multiple scholarship offers, but he instead joined the Waves as a walk-on.

“My father disowned me at the time,” Wasikowski said. “He told me point blank, ‘You’re stupid. You got all these big scholarships. Who’s gonna pay for it?’”

He insisted he would take out loans, paying for college on his own dime. And so he stayed the course with Pepperdine.

As a junior in 1992, Wasikowski batted .311 and led the team with 18 doubles. At the time, he asked scout Art Sherman if he’d ever be good enough to get drafted by an MLB team. Sherman said yes, and he bet a dinner that Wasikowski would be drafted someday.

That same year, Pepperdine made it to the College World Series. At the large banquet dinner, Wasikowski recalled Pepperdine being introduced as “Pepper-deen,” and Lopez being introduced as “Al” instead of Andy. The players had fun with that, teasing each other and ragging on the coach, but it was emblematic of how unseriously the Waves were taken, almost like they were an afterthought in the tournament.

They went on to win the College World Series.

“We didn’t have as good a team as any of those other teams, and we still won a national championship that year,” Wasikowski said. “We had a chip on our shoulder, and [Lopez] coached us really, really hard. He did some things that would have gotten him fired today, easily.”

The following year, as a senior, Wasikowski led the Waves in hits. And sure enough, come draft time, he was selected in the 35th round by the Milwaukee Brewers. He was hand-picked selectively by Sherman, the scout who had bet him a dinner.

“I think the only reason why I got drafted, to this day, is because he was too cheap to pay for a dinner,” Wasikowski said. “So I had to buy him dinner because he drafted me.”

But that didn’t mean his path was set in stone. Being taken in the 35th round, he didn’t have large piles of cash being thrown his way. His choices were to play minor league baseball on a dime, or find a job and start a career outside of baseball.

He picked the latter option.

“I chose not to sign with the Brewers because I didn’t want to just be like some of the guys I’d seen that signed and played for a few years, and then were behind in life,” Wasikowski said.

His first job was at Enterprise Rent-A-Car. But 25 minutes into the first day’s training session, he knew he didn’t want to be doing that.

So he called Lopez.

His Pepperdine coach, who he was still in close contact with, recommended he get a second degree. The problem was Wasikowski didn’t have the money, as the loans he took out caught up to him. The next option was to get a teaching credential, but Wasikowski couldn’t get through that before realizing he hated it.

He bounced around several jobs — from a bartender at a restaurant in Sunset Beach, to an assistant high school coach making a couple hundred dollars, going to bed after 3 a.m. and waking up around 6. To call it less than glamorous would be an understatement.

But then he got a call from a former junior college coach he’d played for. He informed Wasikowski that Mark Hogan, the head coach of Southeast Missouri State, was looking for a graduate coach. Just as importantly, the position would pay for Wasikowski to get a master’s degree.

So he took the gig.

Despite possessing no prior knowledge of Southeast Missouri State, he joined the staff and helped them achieve the program’s first NCAA Regional selection. As Wasikowski neared completion of his degree, Lopez — who was now coaching the Florida Gators — talked to him about joining his staff there.

Wasikowski ended up following Lopez to Florida for three years, then to Arizona for 10. Lopez is, according to Wasikowski, the most meaningful person in his life besides his own father. Today, Lopez still regularly sends him Scriptures.

“He just tries to be a guiding force every single day,” Wasikowski said. “And he doesn’t want me to call him when things are going good. He only wants to be called when things are going bad… He just had a heart that he wanted to help serve others. I hadn’t met many people like that in my life.”

In 2009, while Lopez and Wasikowski were working together for Arizona, Oregon baseball became a Division I program for the first time since 1981.

“[Lopez] made the comment: ‘This place can explode,’” Wasikowski said. “And at the time, Oregon was terrible. It was an easy three wins.”

George Horton, who had tremendous success with Cal State Fullerton, became the Ducks’ head coach. Their first season was miserable, with a 14-42 overall record and 4-23 in Pac-10 play. Horton even asked Wasikowski if he wanted to join his staff, and Wasikowski said no.

But under Horton’s leadership, the program rose to respectability over the following few years. The Ducks went 40-24 in 2010, then hosted regionals in 2012 and 2013.

So in 2012, Wasikowski accepted Horton’s offer and joined Oregon as an assistant.

“Still to this day, in my opinion, in the dugout, the best baseball coach I’ve ever been around,” Wasikowski said of Horton. “He had his weaknesses like anybody else, but still, on the field, in the dugout, nobody was gonna be a better coach than that guy in terms of winning the game. He was really smart. Everybody knew it.”

Wasikowski’s path stayed on the upswing. After he had a few good years at Oregon, Purdue hired him for his first head coaching gig in 2017. He took a team that had gone 10-44 the year prior and made them an above-.500 squad.

In 2019, the Boilermakers took a step back, going 20-34. At the same time, Horton and the Ducks mutually agreed to part ways after a ninth-place finish in the Pac-12. Naturally, Oregon became interested in Wasikowski for the vacant position.

And while he was interested, he wasn’t immediately convinced.

“I wanted to ask Rob [Mullens] what his vision was for baseball at Oregon,” Wasikowski said. “If it was just to play, I wasn’t interested. If it was just to have a program or something like that, I wouldn’t be very interested.”

That’s been Wasikowski’s mantra from the beginning, even looking back at his Pepperdine days: He’s in it to win. He won’t accept being on a team that everyone writes off and expects to lose, one that can’t even get its name pronounced correctly at the banquet dinner.

“If you’re not putting in your best effort, you’re kidding yourself. And you know that you’re kidding yourself,” Wasikowski said. “And if you know you’re kidding yourself, you know you’re not giving everything you can in what you desire to do. And if you’re not passionate enough to give everything to what you’re doing, then you probably aren’t doing the right thing.”

Wasikowski was announced as the new Oregon head baseball coach in 2019. It required him to move from the Midwest, where he met his wife and was geographically closer to her family, as well as spend less time with his two daughters.

“I knew that I wasn’t gonna be around a lot for them, which hurts,” Wasikowski said. “But at the same point in time, when I was around, they saw how much I care about them and love them. I make sure that even when I’m not around, they’re getting little notes or whatever.”

It was then that the “white shirt mentality” kicked in. Despite an initial interruption because of COVID-19, Wasikowski has seen the team flourish in his tenure here. The Ducks went 39-16 in his first full season at Oregon, hosting a regional for the first time since 2013. They made it to a regional as well in 2022, and are off to a 24-10 start this season.

While Wasikowski didn’t initially plan on being a college baseball coach, there’s nothing he’d rather be doing. He said if the New York Yankees called him asking him to manage their team, he would decline.

“I’m a PE coach that’s getting paid,” he said. “It’s a blessing where I’m at.”

Within these few short years, Wasikowski has seen Aaron Zavala go from a walk-on to a second-round draft pick. He’s seen guys like Kenyon Yovan and Gabe Matthews, who started playing college baseball under Horton’s leadership, go on to professional careers. He’s seen players like Josh Kasevich and Anthony Hall break out and receive high draft picks. He’s even seen 5-foot-6 Rikuu Nishida hit his first United States home run, with a flock of Ducks in the dugout waiting to cheer him on.

And that’s what keeps him going: the joy of the players, and the success they can have when they put their mind to being great and having fun, employing that “white shirt mentality” in everything they do. 

While his life is dominated by family and baseball — rarely with room for much else, by his own admission — he does it for the players, and he does it for the people.

“Just enjoy people,” Wasikowski said. “The stuff that you hear in the world about people hating people and stuff, it doesn’t need to be that way. All people are good. Just love them and enjoy it, and enjoy being around people. If you can just do that, and then spread that good will for others, it’s going to make this whole, sometimes messy situation we all feel, just feel a lot better. People are good.”