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Hallowell moves up to head coach of Pirates
INDEPENDENCE, Kan. -- When head coach Jon Olsen, left the Independence Community College baseball program for another job last month, the school didn't have to look far to find his replacement.
Tye Hallowell, who spent the last four seasons as Olsen's top assistant with the Pirates has been moved into the head coaching position and accepts the challenge of keeping a winning attitude going in the program.
"Its exciting," said Hallowell. "You quickly learn what a head coach entails after being an assistant. It's a fun challenge.
"I feel like I have an advantage with what's going on with the program. We have an assistant coach coming back and some players returning. I don't really feel like I'm at a loss for a lot of different things I have to do. There's a lot of office work and paper work that I'm not used to, but I'm picking up on that stuff."
Hallowell has never been a head coach at the college level.
Prior to his four year stint as assistant coach at ICC, he spent five seasons under Olsen as a coach at the American Legion level for three summers in McCook, where he assisted the 18 and under team to three top four finishes in Nebraska.
That included being the runner-up in 2001 and a third place finish at the Nebraska Class B state tournament in 2003.
Of course most of Hallowell's experience has come at the college level while at Independence, where he helped Olsen build a once struggling baseball program into a squad in the Jayhawk Conference-Eastern Division.
Olsen, who is now the head coach at McCook Community College capped off a five-year career in Independence with an overall record of 134-147.
That included the first two winning seasons in Pirate history -- 27-26 in 2003 and 31-27 in 2007.
"With that longevity and also a little bit of the nature of my relationship with coach Olsen, I really feel like I was integral part of what was going on as an assistant," Hallowell said.
"Now, it's just going to be me doing the practice plans now instead of just talking about it and having Jon print it out. I'll be more involved in the baseball end of things.
"The biggest thing that I find is that I want to get away from always comparing everything to the way it was when Jon was here. I always will find myself saying that it'll be the same.
"As we move forward, people won't understand what that means. I'm trying to make it my program, even though it will be very much the same it has been."
Although coaching has played a role in Hallowell's life he said he was not absolutely sure this was the pat he would take.
"A lot of coaches go into coaching and that's what they want to do -- be a head coach," Hallowell said. "That's not necessarily the case for me. I like the baseball end of it, and so its sometime easy to just stick to the assistant and worry about the game itself.
"The more and more I get into it, I'm learning how ready I was for this position. It's pretty fun to be presented with a challenge and try to sept up and accomplish it."
The Pirates are coming off their most successful season in school history, surpassing the 30-win total for the first tie ever while knocking off Jayhawk Conference-Western division co-champion Seward County en-route to a spot in the Region VI tournament in Wichita, Kan.
"Last year, having the best season in school history, I'm really happy where the program's at," Hallowell said.
"I fell like with me taking over it has a really good chance to have some continuation of the progress that has been made.
"It would probably be naive to say that there won't be a step or two back, but it doesn't have to be anything major. As far as where I want to go it doesn't really change. I want us to compete to win the league, find ourselves in Wichita each spring and competing for a chance at Grand Junction."
Hallowell has been busy at work since taking over the job less than a month ago.
"Recruiting was real iffy there," Hallowell said. "You never want to lie to a kid, and there was a period there that we didn't really know if Jon was going to be here and then there was a period that we didn't know if I was going to coach or not.
"So we were trying to talk to these kids and make them understand the situation as we were recruiting them and we couldn't give them definitive answers. We did lose some kids because of it, but we were able to get some good ones too.
"Jon gift-wrapped this with a bow on top for me, basically. For the most part, the team was in place. The huge challenge in this job is both the fall and the spring schedule.
"Both of those things were done when he left. So it was really just a matter of adding some players to the roster and learning a lot the office type work. He set me up for success in my first year, and I appreciate everything he has done for me."