Iowa baseball coach Rick Heller. Photo courtesy of Brian Ray/hawkeyesports.com
Iowa coach Rick Heller would like to see Omaha and TD Ameritrade Park become the permanent home of the Big Ten Conference Tournament.
The home of the College World Series will host the league tournament for a second time this week and the Big Ten announced an agreement in April to have Omaha serve as host from 2018 through 2022.
“I think all of our coaches would support it, even the guys on the east coast just because of the tremendous fan support and how logistically things work here in Omaha”, said Heller. “They are set up for a tournament like this because of the World Series and everything runs so smooth.”
Heller says the fan support in Omaha gives the tournament an outstanding atmosphere. The championship game in 2014 set an all-time attendance record of 19.965 fans.
“We need to try and have it here as much as possible and if one of our teams would make it to the World Series it is a nice trial run for that as well.”
Iowa is the eighth seed in the tournament and plays regular season champion Minnesota in Wednesday’s opening round. The Hawkeyes played their way into the tournament by winning five of their last six games and Heller hopes they can maintain that momentum.
“We have beaten every team in the tournament, except for Nebraska who we did not play, at least once. I know our guys feel like if we play well we can win this thing.”
Minnesota took two out of three games from the Hawkeyes back in early April.