SPRINGDALE -- Derrion Hardie watched as more than half of his baseball team struggled under the weight of a portable batting cage they were tasked with moving on a sunny Thursday afternoon in mid-April.

And that was before they had to lift it over the chain-link fence on the first-base line.

"Try to keep it off the fence," Hardie, 42, said to his players. "Do we need to go back to the weight room or what?"

Players shouted directions at each other as the team struggled to lift the batting cage over the fence.

"Go that way," one said, only to have another yell back, "No, no. The other way."

Eventually the team was successful in getting it to its storage area. But moving a heavy steel batting cage is far from the only challenge facing the 2-year-old baseball program at Ecclesia College.

Ecclesia is a small Christian college in Springdale with an enrollment of fewer than 300 students. Last year, its baseball program made the jump from being a club sport to a sanctioned sport in the National Christian College Athletic Association.

Under Hardie's leadership, the Royals came within one game of playing in the NCCAA World Series and finished their first season ranked No. 18 in the nation. This season, they have a 24-23 record and are back in the polls at No. 20.

The success has come despite Ecclesia starting from scratch.

The Coach

Hardie wasn't looking for another job when he stumbled upon Ecclesia's open head coaching position on the Internet.

Then the head coach at Northwestern College, an NAIA school in Orange City, Iowa, Hardie was looking up information about the NCCAA after scheduling two teams which were members of the association.

While on the NCCAA website, he noticed a job openings link and clicked on it. He was intrigued by the Ecclesia job's description as "pioneering a first-year program."

"One of the things I've always told my wife is that if I ever had the opportunity, one of my dreams would be to start a college baseball program," Hardie said.

Hardie said he believes he was made for the job because he has always enjoyed -- and been good at -- building things, but his baseball background also made him a viable candidate for the job.

He played college baseball at the University of Sioux Falls in South Dakota. Hardie broke into the coaching ranks at the high school level after graduating from Sioux Falls in 1995 and played semi-professional baseball for three seasons before retiring to focus solely on coaching.

After winning a pair of state championships in South Dakota, Hardie became an assistant at his alma mater, Sioux Falls, and eventually the head coach at Northwestern College in Iowa.

Hardie applied for the Ecclesia job and his experience jumped off the page when Dean Skinner, Ecclesia's athletic director, and Oren Paris, the school president, were searching for the Royals' first head coach.

"We were going through dozens of resumes and I saw Derrion's and I immediately called the president and said, 'We need to take a look at this guy,'" Skinner said.

Skinner and Paris hired him before last season and since then, Hardie has been allowed to hire two full-time assistants, uncommon for a school the size of Ecclesia.

"That's been a big reason for our success," Hardie said. "They help me organize and run practices well."

The Field

Ecclesia does not have a field on its campus, leaving Hardie to find his team a home.

Luckily, he found one when Chad Wolf, the operations manager for Springdale Parks and Recreation, allowed them to play on one of the three regulation-size fields at the Tyson Sports Complex in Springdale.

The Royals call the upper field home, while Springdale High School and Har-Ber High School play on the lower two. The Springdale Babe Ruth League also uses the fields.

The field Ecclesia plays on has chain-link dugouts and outfield fences. The team's equipment shed isn't big enough for all of its gear and it's difficult to keep the field in peak condition, Hardie said.

"We'll hand drag it, fix the mound and get home plate all taken care of for a game or practice, then we'll come back the next day and it's torn up because someone else was on it," Hardie said.

Last fall, Hardie approached the Ecclesia administration about funding a renovation for the field. The school agreed to pay approximately $30,000 for the materials, and Hardie submitted a proposal to Wolf asking for the city of Springdale to provide the labor.

The goal of the proposal is to get brick dugouts and an improved outfield fence, as well as a permanent storage area where the team could keep a four-wheeler used to take care of the field.

The proposal has not gotten to the Parks and Recreation committee yet because it is running behind schedule with other projects, but Wolf said he hopes it will be discussed in the next couple of months.

"That field needs a lot of work and upkeep," Wolf said. "I don't have a vote, but there's no doubt in my mind that we need (the renovations)."

If the proposal is not approved, Hardie has other ideas that would improve the field aesthetically, such as placing windscreens with the school logo on the outfield fence and around the dugouts and painting the scoreboard in the school's blue and gold colors.

Ultimately, Hardie wants to have an on-campus field like the Ecclesia softball team.

"That's a key," Hardie said. "That way we'd get to keep our athletes on campus. Right now we're driving back and forth all the time. It also creates more school pride."

The Players

Every player had a smile on his face by the time the batting cage was on the other side of the fence after practice.

The situation showcased the camaraderie of a team that had seemingly been together for several years instead of only two.

It's also not readily apparent that the team is composed of players with widely varying backgrounds. Of the 33 players on the roster, 18 are from Arkansas. The other 15 players come from places like Texas, Oklahoma and as far away as Venezuela.

Hardie hopes the fact that Ecclesia is the only four-year collegiate baseball program in Northwest Arkansas other than the University of Arkansas will draw the top talent in the area to his team.

"I want Northwest Arkansas to be our moneymaker," Hardie said. "It's in our backyard and when building a program, the more support you have, the easier things are."

One of the local players is freshman infielder and right-handed pitcher Austin Van Poucke from Siloam Springs. He hoped to play college football, but an injury ended his football career and forced him to look at other opportunities.

"I wanted to play at the college level and I saw [Ecclesia] as an option, so I looked into it," Van Poucke said. "I really like coach Hardie as a man and the way coaches."

Gerry Sifuentes, who is batting .331 with 26 RBIs this season, played at Mountain View Community College in Texas as a freshman and East Central University in Oklahoma as a sophomore before ending up with the Royals.

The utility player's experience at two schools in two years gave him a different perspective than other recruits, but Hardie was still able to get him to sign with the Royals.

"I had some questions that a kid in high school wouldn't have," Sifuentes said. "The way that coach Hardie answered them with confidence and what I heard was really convincing."

The Goal

The NCCAA allows schools to have dual-membership with the NAIA or NCAA, so the Royals' schedule is full of opponents with much larger enrollments than their own.

"It's constantly David versus Goliath," Hardie said.

Hardie hopes to join the NAIA some time in the next few years.

From there, he said the team could eventually move into the NCAA, but that would be a lot further down the road. It seems like a far-fetched dream, but there is a precedent.

Dallas Baptist is an NCCAA team in Ecclesia's region. It won back-to-back NCCAA National Championships in 2003 and 2004 while also a member of the NAIA before joining the NCAA as a Division I team in 2006.

In their sixth season at the Division I level, the Patriots clinched a spot in the Super Regionals and was one win away from making the College World Series recently.

Until then, though, Hardie is only focused on conquering the state.

"We're the best-kept secret in Northwest Arkansas," Hardie said.

Sports on 04/23/2014