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Hannah Walker

Baseball

Q&A with New CSUB Pitching Coach Jeff Opalewski

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. -- The Cal State Bakersfield baseball team is currently in the heart of Fall Ball as third-year Head Coach Jordon Banfield continues to grow the program toward competing for Big West championships. With improvement in the win column each of his first two seasons at the helm, largely driven by one of the best offenses in the conference a year ago, Banfield heads into Year 3 looking to put together a complete program that features a consistent and effective pitching staff. Guiding the way from the bullpen to the mound this season will be new Pitching Coach Jeff Opalewski, who Banfield brought in this summer to help move the needle.

We sat down with "Coach Ope" recently to discuss his coaching philosophy and the progress of the Roadrunners pitchers this Fall, and we had full intent to paire down his facts and thoughts into a few quotes for a quick press release. With nearly 20 years of coaching experience, a lifetime in baseball, and a nack for eloquent speech, there was just too much quality insight from Opalewski to choose from. As such, we shifted course and are sharing the conversation here as a Q&A.

Baseball fans will surely enjoy the following insight and knowledge from Coach Ope, and if what he has to say gets you excited about Roadrunner Baseball this Spring, then stay tuned in the coming weeks for the team's 2027 schedule release and for tickets to go on sale!

Fall 2026 Q&A with CSUB Pitching Coach Jeff Opalewski

Question: What attracted you to the opportunity when you heard the job was open at Cal State Bakersfield? What stood out and led you to make the decision to come here?

Answer: There were a lot of reasons, but the primary one was probably the relationship I have with Jordon Banfield. We have known each other for about 15 years, going back to when he was running the Ann Arbor Travelers travel baseball program in Michigan. I was the recruiting coordinator and pitching coach at Central Michigan. That was how we initially met.

Jordon started working some camps for us and we found that we were aligned in a lot of different areas in terms of player development, culture development, and things like that. As our careers evolved, I think we both had a desire to work together in some capacity if things lined up. It starts with the personal relationship and the level of trust I have in him as a friend, but also as somebody I could see myself thriving under.

The next thing would be my affinity for the league. During the year I spent at Long Beach State, I fell in love with Big West baseball. It has more of a throwback feel. College baseball has gotten so offensive, the parks keep getting smaller and the balls are loaded up right now. It has become, I think, a cruder game where the home run is king and some of the skills are getting washed out. In the Big West, it is not like that. I am a pitching coach, so it is certainly a little self-serving, but the league is dominated by suffocating offenses from the mound and defense. The skill still exists, and runs matter.

Stylistically, I really enjoyed the league. I enjoyed the opportunity to come back to The Big West, work for Coach Banfield and work with Bailey Montgomery, who I worked with at Miami for two years. There is a really comfortable dynamic between the three of us in terms of the long-standing relationships, trust, respect, and understanding for the work Coach Banfield and Coach Montgomery have done during their first two years here. Having been at Long Beach State in 2024, I know the state of the things that Jordon inherited, and I know the progress he has made in the last two years.

It is not lost on me that they finished second in The Big West in runs scored a year ago. They have the offense where it needs to be to compete for a Big West championship, and I felt like I have a skill set that can help close the gap between where things are from a run-prevention standpoint and where they need to be.

We believe we can put ourselves in a position where we are not just hoping to make the conference tournament, but legitimately competing with the UC Santa Barbaras and the Cal Polys and the teams that have had a lot of success over the last several years, not just at the conference level but nationally. We are not that far away, and I thought an opportunity to do that with people I trust, in a situation where it became apparent to me that the administration cares about baseball and the community cares about baseball, was a lot of things lining up with what I was looking for in the next step of my career.

Question: You have four or five returning pitchers from last year's staff. How have you seen the returning group and the new pitchers come together to build chemistry and create one cohesive unit?

Answer: I would say we are still in the process of doing that. Because of the construction at Hardt Field, we have spent a little less time in a cohesive group setting than we ordinarily would. We are running over to the off-campus practice field, we have bullpen groups going here on campus, and the team practices over there. That has been a little bit of a challenge, especially when you are talking about 30 new guys and 18 new pitchers on the staff. You are trying to create opportunities for guys to get to know each other, invest in each other, and spend time with each other.

The primary tool I have tried to use is establishing consistent meetings where we talk about what we should be able to reasonably expect from one another and how we are going to be as a pitching staff. We have a subculture within our group that falls under the umbrella of Coach Banfield's team as a whole.

At the same time, we have a very specific task. We have a unique situation where we have 22 pitchers on our roster, but there will only be one of them out there at a time. Even our best guy, if we are fortunate enough to develop somebody into a Big West Pitcher of the Year, is probably going to throw less than 20 percent of the total innings we pitch. It is a very unique situation. Our shortstop is going to play every day;  our catchers can play every day. We are really trying to get the pitchers to understand that their job is how they integrate with the rest of the group. Everybody's job depends on everyone else doing theirs. If I can trust you to do your job, you can trust me to do mine, at that point, we are going to raise the collective floor of the group, and we are going to pitch with a whole lot more consistency.

Question: So far this fall, what have you seen from the group? What positives stand out, and what areas need the most growth and work?

Answer: It is hard to know what to expect in terms of real expectations. You can have reasonable expectations based on your evaluation in the recruiting process and the conversations you have had, but I came into a situation where I had only coached two of these guys before. Josh Donegan was with me at Long Beach State and UNLV, and now he is with me again. Austin Castillo was a freshman at Long Beach State, and he transferred to us over the summer.

We have 20 guys I have never coached before, and they have never played for me before, so you just do not know exactly what you have. You have an idea, and I think as we have gotten into it - I believe this is our eighth week now - we have a chance to be deeper than I might have thought in the middle of August. I think there are going to be a bunch of guys who can have value in a specific role. I do not know that we are going to have a couple of 100-inning starters in the group, and I do not know that we would want that, quite frankly. But it is encouraging to see the number of guys who can contribute in specific roles.

The area where we need to grow is that we do not have a lot of guys who have had success at this level before. They do not have the tangible experience to bank on and say, 'I can go back to when I did this.' We have some guys who have been successful at the junior college level and some who have been successful at the Division II level, but we do not have many who have been successful in NCAA Division I baseball. That does not concern me, because nobody has been successful until the first time they are successful. They are capable, but we do not have a long track record of self-belief to draw on. A lot of it is trying to get them to see themselves in a way where they expect to have success.

Question: Given the various stops throughout your career, do you feel each one has shaped your coaching philosophy, or do you have a method that you take from place to place because it has proved effective?

Answer: I have sworn to myself that if I ever start a Fall with the same plan I used the Fall before, it is probably time for me to be done because I have stopped learning and growing. I have not found a way to improve upon the processes we have used.

If you go back to the 10-year stretch I had at Central Michigan, there is very little I would still be using in terms of the tools and methods I used during that stop. The job at IMG Academy was very different because the goal there was not wins and losses. There were 12 teams, and it was more of a pro-ball model in terms of development being the driver. I enjoyed it, but the objectives were totally different.

Going back to the college game at Miami, Miami was by far the most academically oriented institution I had worked at, and there were challenges because I felt baseball was not the most important thing to a lot of those guys. That was something I really struggled with, so I had to change the messaging with that group.

What we are doing right now most closely resembles the way I coached at Long Beach State. There are similarities in the academic side of things, the geographic side of things, and the type of player you are recruiting.

The reality is that you coach people, not players, so you have to coach them in a way that connects with who they are, what they need, and what their value systems are. This is a unique situation, and we are trying to build a different culture here than what we did in Vegas or at Long Beach. You have to coach in a way that is consistent with the organization's big-picture agenda.

If one of my former players from Central Michigan showed up at practice right now, they would look around and say, 'I kind of recognize you, but this does not look anything like what we did when I played for you.' I think that is a good thing, because every iteration has been an improvement. You learn lessons from successes and failures, and then you try to streamline things to make them as efficient as possible. You operate within the framework you have, from setting practice plans to setting the calendar.

On the surface, the task is the same: We are trying to keep guys healthy and put them in positions to prevent runs and put the team in a position to win. But the ways we are going about it with this group are significantly different from anywhere else I have ever done it, if not unrecognizably different.

Question: What do you hope will be noticeably different about the pitching staff in February because of the work the group has done this fall?

Answer: I would hope literally everything. I would hope it starts with mentality. I would hope we have a bunch of guys who go out there with an offensive, attacking mentality. We are going to control counts and assault the strike zone.

With the depth of arsenal we have worked to develop, we are going to have guys able to do things physically that they have never done in the past. They will be operating with higher velocity ceilings, a deeper arsenal, and a deeper level of conviction in terms of what they are doing.

So, quite literally, every single aspect that would put us in a position to prevent runs should be better. We should be more physical. We should be literally better at everything. That would be my hope and expectation, quite honestly.

~GoRunners.com~
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