This time a year ago, the Kansas baseball team was nearly 4,000 miles away, soaking up some sun, preparing for its season opener against Hawaii-Hilo. Today, however, three weeks stand in the way of Kansas’ perennial season-opening series on the Big Island.

What gives? The NCAA, of course – as in the NCAA giveth and the NCAA taketh away.

This season, the NCAA implemented new rules in college baseball, regulating when teams can begin practicing in the spring, when teams can begin regular season play, and how often teams can practice in the fall. Under the new rules, teams can’t begin spring practice until Feb. 1 and can’t open their season until the end of the third full week of February. So, whereas the Jayhawks had weeks of practice under their belt at this point last year, today marks their first practice as a team since the fall – a change the team is neither accustomed to, nor fond of.

“It’s weird,” junior first baseman Preston Land said. “My first year I was back like Jan. 4, my second year I was back like Jan. 7 and we’d been practicing four times a day until school started. I think it’s a little bit of a disadvantage.”

Junior outfielder Nick Faunce shared Land’s sentiments.

“I think it’s a disadvantage,” Faunce said. “Normally we would have come back two weeks before we started school and started doing multiple practices per day, which you get a feel for your team in that sense and you get strengthened.”

According to the NCAA Baseball Issues Committee’s final report on the rule changes, the uniform start dates would be “more reflective of baseball as a truly national sport.” While this may prove to be the case, the new rules have put Kansas coach Ritch Price in a bind.

NCAA rules also prohibit teams from missing more than 10 days of class for games. In the past, Kansas was able to utilize weekends for road trips to the West Coast to minimize class days missed. Now, with three fewer weeks to play the maximum 56 games, Kansas has had to shift many non-conference games to the midweek, making it harder to stay within the class-days-missed limit.

“I do think it will level the playing field as far as the difference between the warm-weather states and the cold-weather states being able to get outside,” Price said. “The drawback is we’re geographically challenged. It’s three hours to Wichita and it’s three hours to Creighton, which are our non-conference opponents. We’re not in Dallas or Miami or Los Angeles, where you can go to school, drive across town and play different schools. It’s impossible for us to do with our 10-day miss class time.”

To stay within the class-days-missed limit this season, Price had to cancel a series at Clemson, which is known around the country as one of the best college baseball venues.

“It was unfortunate because that was my favorite place to play since I’ve been in college,” Land said.

Not counting spring break, the Jayhawks have 14 midweek games this season. Price is concerned that playing five games a week throughout the season will be counterproductive for college players.

“That’s going to be difficult on our pitching staff,” Price said. “The second thing it’s going to do is it won’t allow us to practice enough to keep improving our players.”

So why don’t teams schedule fewer games? Well, if the NCAA gets its way, that’s probably where this is headed.

“They’re talking about reducing games, which that’s one of the things they told us, when the coaches agreed to have a national start date, was they wouldn’t reduce games,” Price said. “Now the first thing they want to do is reduce the number of games.”

Considering how college football has added games to its regular season in recent years – not to mention the games it will add if and when a playoff system is put into place – and that college softball teams have been practicing for weeks and will begin regular season play next weekend, it’s hard to deny a double standard when it comes to baseball.

“We’re adding football games and we’re adding basketball tournaments into exempt status and we’re the only sport they’re looking to cut games,” Price said. “It’s been a tough year for baseball at the NCAA level.”

The one positive result Price has seen from the Issues Committee’s rule changes is the new fall practice guidelines. Under the new rules, teams are allowed to hold 32 practices within a 45-day window. In the past, Kansas usually held only 14-20 practices during the fall. As a result, the coaches were able to work extensively with the players and Price was able to give the team fall break off for the first time.

For now, Price is content to let the season play itself out. While he’s curious to see how other coaches react to the rule changes at season’s end, winning games is his first priority.

“I love the rule change in the fall,” Price said. “I still don’t like the rule change in the spring. I’d rather be indoors preparing my team to play than just sitting here doing nothing. I wish they could have extended the fall like they did and left the spring the way it was.

“The best thing I’ve learned in my 30 years in the game is to only worry about the things you can control. My whole focus is just to get us to overachieve. We know we’re an underdog in the conference we play in. I try not to let those distractions affect the way we go about our preparation.”

—Edited by Russell Davies