Harvard names Bill Decker head baseball coach

Harvard has appointed Bill Decker, head coach of baseball at Trinity College for the past 22 years, as its new baseball coach, director of athletics Robert Scalise announced on September 25.  Decker succeeds Joe Walsh, who died suddenly last July 31 of an apparent heart attack, as the Joseph J. O’Donnell ’67 Head Coach of Harvard Baseball.

Decker led the Trinity Bantams to a 529-231 record (.696 winning percentage) during his tenure there, compiling the most wins of any varsity coach in the college’s history. His teams made nine appearances in the NCAA tournament. Their best season was 2008, when the Bantams went 45-1 and the American College Baseball Association named Decker the National Coach of the Year after his team won the Division III National Championship. That squad ran off a 44-game winning streak, the longest in the history of Division III baseball, and their .978 winning percentage is the best in NCAA history for any sport or division, for a team that had played as many games. Last year, the Bantams recorded a 34-11 record and won the New England Small College Athletic Conference title.

Walsh had mentored the Crimson for 17 years and was a beloved coach, though his teams had hit a rough patch in the past five years, going 61-150 over that span.

Decker, a 1985 graduate of Ithaca College, starred in both baseball and football there, and was an All-American defensive back.  At Trinity, over the past seven seasons, eight of his athletes have gone on to play professional baseball.