Steve Farley's Bulldog Baseball Camps

Steve Farley-Camp Director

The Bulldogs have developed into a consistent winner during the tenure of Butler University head baseball coach Steve Farley, now in his 17th season. Butler has averaged nearly 30 wins per year during the last 10 years under Farley's reign.

Teams under his guidance have broken Butler's school record for victories three times. Farley owns the eight-highest single-season win totals in Butler baseball history, and he's Butler's all-time winningest baseball coach with 393 career victories. He's had 54 players earn all-conference honors, and 20 of his former players have signed professional baseball contracts.

Most recently, Farley guided the Bulldogs to the brink of their third NCAA Tournament appearance in 2006, scoring a pair of wins over regular-season champion UIC in the Horizon League Tournament to advance to the championship game before falling short to host Wright State.

Butler's baseball program has flourished under Farley for more than a decade, and recent seasons have seen unprecedented success. The Bulldogs captured conference regular season championships in 1996, 1998 and 1999 and league tournament titles in 1998 and 2000.

Farley was named MCC "Coach of the Year" in 1994, 1996, 1998 and 1999. In 1998, the Bulldogs visited Tulsa, Oklahoma, to compete in the NCAA Play-In series against Oral Roberts, and in 2000 Butler captured the Horizon League's automatic bid to the NCAA National Baseball Championship. In 2002 and 2003, Farley guided the Bulldogs to a school-record 34 victories, Butler's third and fourth 30-win seasons in six years.

Farley's success hasn't been limited to wins and losses. Thanks to his efforts in collecting donations from alumni and other benefactors, Bulldog Park has gone from an average playing facility to a top-notch baseball complex - one that hosted the Indiana North-South high school all-star series in 2001. Farley has also annually scheduled games in Victory Field, home of the AAA Indianapolis Indians. He has made Butler summer and winter baseball camps an annual success, with many Indianapolis-area little league and high school players attending his camps each year.

Farley also guided the Bulldogs to their first international competition with a six-game tour of Australia in 2003. Program building wasn't something new for Farley. After serving as a graduate assistant coach under the highly regarded Jerry Kindall at Arizona in 1983, he began a full-time coaching career as an assistant at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y. As the team's pitching coach, he helped lower Army's team earned run average to a school-record 3.99 in just two seasons. Farley moved to Davis & Elkins College in 1988, inheriting a team that had finished last in the conference the previous two seasons. In 1990, he was named Coach of the Year in the West Virginia Intercollegiate Athletic Conference after leading Davis & Elkins to its first 20-win season in over a decade. In 1991, he guided the Senators to a division championship.

A high school all-state pitcher at River Falls, Wis., Farley earned a baseball scholarship to the University of Minnesota, where he became a starting pitcher and three-year letterman. He helped lead the Golden Gophers to the Big Ten finals and a berth in the NCAA tournament in 1981. Farley, recipient of the Williams Scholar-Student Athlete Award, earned a bachelor of science degree from Minnesota in 1981, and a master's degree in physical education from the University of Arizona in 1983.

In addition to his coaching duties, Farley has served as a director or instructor at several baseball camps, including the NCAA Youth Education through Sports (YES) clinics at the College World Series. He has also had several articles on baseball strategy and technique published in athletic journals. In January of 2006, he joined several other baseball coaches from the United States on a trip to Regensburg, Germany, to participate in several baseball clinics. The clinics were sponsored by Major League Baseball's Envoy Program.

Farley and his wife, Lisa, have two daughters, Hannah (13) and Sarah (10).