Trying to manage a college baseball team is hard. Kevin O’Sullivan, who is entering his tenth season as the head coach of the Florida Gators baseball team, knows this all to well.
Division I baseball teams are allowed to have 27 scholarship players on the roster. Unlike football, where schools are afforded 25 scholarships or women’s sports, where every student-athlete is afforded a full scholarship, baseball coaches have to divide up 11.7 scholarships among their roster.
“It’s a huge juggling act. It’s not easy,” O’Sullivan said of the task. “You obviously have to over recruit to a certain degree because of the draft of guys that you’re losing on your team and guys that are incoming, but I’ve been doing it for so long that you kind of know that threshold and where you kind of don’t want to go over.