Thursday, August 3, 2000

Marshall Plan
Former Cooper shortstop will help rebuild NCAA Division I Roadrunners
By Al Pickett
Reporter-News Staff Writer

Jason Marshall, whose baseball impact has been felt in Abilene as a player, coach and author, has landed a Division I baseball coaching job.

Marshall began work Tuesday as the top assistant at the University of Texas-San Antonio, a member of the NCAA Division I Southland Conference. He joins the staff of new Roadrunners head coach Sherman Corbett.

“I’ll be in charge of defense and recruiting,” Marshall said.

UTSA won only 17 games last year and finished last in the Southland Conference.

“Definitely, the only way to go is up,” Marshall said. “It’s a big-time challenge for us.”

Marshall was the starting shortstop on Cooper’s back-to-back Class 5A state championship baseball teams in 1987 and 1988. He then went to Texas A&M, where he was a three-year starter at shortstop for the Aggies.

The Kansas City Royals drafted Marshall in the 13th round of the 1992 baseball amateur draft. He played for the Royals’ minor league teams in Eugene, Ore.; Appleton, Wisc., and Wilmington, Del., before spending the 1995 season with the Wichita (Kan.) Wranglers in the Double-A Texas League.

Marshall’s teams made the playoffs all four years he played in the minor leagues. Wilmington won the 1994 Carolina League championship with a team that included current major leaguers Johnny Damon, Michael Tucker, Jon Lieber and Jim Pittsley.

Marshall gave up his playing career following the 1995 season and returned to Texas A&M to finish his degree. He was a student assistant for Aggies’ head coach Mark Johnson for two years before joining Lee Driggers’ staff at McMurry University. Marshall was an assistant coach at McMurry for the past three years, where the Indians won a pair of American Southwest Conference championships.

In 1994, while playing for the Wilmington Blue Rocks, Marshall wrote a weekly award-winning column for the Abilene Reporter-News about life in the minor leagues. He also dispensed advice and tips for Little League players and parents.

“I still get more reaction to that column in the Reporter-News than anything I’ve ever done,” he said.

Marshall won a Katie Award from the Dallas Press Club for his column.

Corbett, the brother of Tampa Bay Devil Rays’ scout Ray Corbett, has been assistant coach at A&M Consolidated High School after a 10-year professional baseball career that included three seasons with the Anaheim Angels. He is a native of San Antonio.

“Sherman and I have worked the Aggie baseball camp the last four or five years,” Marshall said. “I heard him as an FCA (Fellowship of Christian Athletes) speaker when I was in college at A&M. I already had respect for him and his baseball knowledge.

“Lynn Hickey (formerly the women’s basketball coach and assistant athletic director at Texas A&M) is now the athletic director at UT-San Antonio. Things are changing in a hurry. They are adding a position in baseball and upping our scholarships so we will be on a level playing field with the rest of the teams in the Southland Conference. I knew she was a go-getter. She’s being well-received by the administration.”

Marshall said the opportunity to coach at a Division I school was also too good to pass up.

“I really wanted to be at the Division I level,” he said. “This is the only Division I program in San Antonio, a city of one million people.”

Coaching fraternity

There are at least five members of Cooper’s 1987 state championship baseball team now coaching high school or college baseball. Besides Marshall at UT-San Antonio; Chris Feris is an assistant coach at Rice University; Scotty Pugh is the head coach at Cooper; and Kyle Heller and David Tollison are coaching high school teams in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.

Marshall’s wife, the former Ashleigh Krieger of Abilene, will be coaching and teaching seventh grade in the Boerne school system, just outside San Antonio. She is a recent graduate of McMurry.

National speaker

Marshall, who co-wrote a devotional book The Highest Education for college-age men, also learned recently that he has been invited to speak at the American Baseball Coaches Association’s national convention next January in Nashville, Tenn.

Marshall and Seattle Mariners shortstop Alex Rodriguez will be the clinic speakers on infield play and drills.

“That will be a neat deal,” Marshall said, “but I’m sure I’ll be nervous.”

Marshall said he spoke at the Texas high school coaches’ convention last year, and Johnson, his coach at Texas A&M, was instrumental in landing him the prestigious speaking engagement at the ABCA convention.

Contact sports editor Al Pickett at 676-6772 or picketta@abinews.com. We are on the Web at sports.texnews.com.