Jon Paul Mueller (born January 26, 1970) is an American
college baseball coach who has been the head coach of
Albany since the start of the 2000 season. Mueller, who was named the 2004
America East Coach of the Year, led the Great Danes to their first
NCAA tournament appearance in 2007.
Playing career
Mueller attended
Stillwater High School in
upstate New York, where he played baseball and basketball. Mueller won a state basketball championship in his senior season, 1988. He was offered a basketball scholarship at
Siena, but chose instead to attend
Eckerd. He played both basketball and baseball at the Florida college as a freshman and sophomore but focused exclusively on baseball as a junior and senior. He graduated in 1992.
After getting his
master's degree from
Saint Rose in 1994, Mueller began a seven-year professional baseball career spent entirely in
independent leagues. From 1994 to 1995, he played for the Marshall Mallards and
Will County Claws in the short-lived North Central League. Partway through the 1995 season, he returned to upstate New York, where he played for the
Adirondack Lumberjacks
The Adirondack Lumberjacks were an independent professional baseball team based in Glens Falls, New York. The team moved to Bangor, Maine and became the Bangor Lumberjacks following the 2002 season. The team won the inaugural 1995 Northeast League ...
from 1995 to 1996 and the
Albany-Colonie Diamond Dogs from 1997 to 2000. Primarily a
first baseman and an
outfielder, Mueller had a career .286
batting average and hit 76
home runs.
Coaching career
Saint Rose
Mueller's first coaching job came with
Saint Rose from 1993 to 1994, where he worked as an assistant while getting his master's degree.
Albany
In 1999, Mueller worked as a volunteer assistant at
Albany under head coach
Doug O'Brey
Doug is a male personal name (or, depending on which definition of "personal name" one uses, part of a personal name). It is sometimes a given name (or "first name"), but more often it is hypocorism (affectionate variation of a personal name) which ...
. In the program's last season in
Division II, the Great Danes went 21–21 and reached the ECAC Tournament final.
Mueller was hired as Albany's head coach the following season, the Great Danes' first in
Division I. Playing as an
independent, they went 19–24. After the season, he played his last season of professional baseball. Albany joined the
America East Conference for the
2002 season. In
2004
2004 was designated as an International Year of Rice by the United Nations, and the International Year to Commemorate the Struggle Against Slavery and its Abolition (by UNESCO).
Events January
* January 3 – Flash Airlines Flight 6 ...
, the team went 37–14 and tied for second in conference. It appeared in its first
America East tournament and Mueller was named the conference's
Coach of the Year.
Mueller led the program to its first NCAA tournament in 2007. After a 26–27 (13–11 America East) regular season, the Great Danes received the third seed in the
2007 America East tournament. There, they defeated
Stony Brook in the opener and
Binghamton twice to win the championship and the conference's automatic bid to the
2007 NCAA tournament. At the Fayetteville Regional, the team went 0–2, losing 9–0 to host
Arkansas and 21–11 to second-seeded
Creighton.
From 2000 to 2019, eight of Mueller's players have been selected in the
Major League Baseball Draft. The highest selection was Stephen Woods in
2016
File:2016 Events Collage.png, From top left, clockwise: Bombed-out buildings in Ankara following the 2016 Turkish coup d'état attempt; the impeachment trial of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff; Damaged houses during the 2016 Nagorno-Karabakh ...
, an 8th-round selection of the
San Francisco Giants.
Head coaching record
Below is a table of Mueller's yearly records as a collegiate head baseball coach.
See also
*
List of current NCAA Division I baseball coaches
*
Albany Great Danes
References
External links
Albany Great Danes bio
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mueller, Jon
Living people
1970 births
Adirondack Lumberjacks players
Albany Diamond Dogs players
Albany Great Danes baseball coaches
Albany-Colonie Diamond Dogs players
American men's basketball players
Baseball coaches from New York (state)
Baseball players from New York (state)
Basketball players from New York (state)
College of Saint Rose alumni
Eckerd Tritons baseball players
Eckerd Tritons men's basketball players
People from Stillwater, New York
Saint Rose Golden Knights baseball coaches