VALDOSTA, Ga. – With the help of a number of former Valdosta State baseball players, generous donations and countless hours of work, VSU Athletics is proud to announce a webpage dedicated to a full season recollection of VSU's 1979 NCAA Division II National Championship Team.  
 
Click here for the webpage which highlights VSU's first national championship in any sport with Hall of Fame head coach Tommy Thomas as the helm of the program.  
 
That season, the Blazers went 5-1 in the College World Series in Springfield, Ill., culminating in a thrilling 3-2 victory over Florida Southern.  The website also has digitally remastered audio coverage of just about every game of the College World Series and the ninth inning of the national championship game.  The page also features a full roster of the team, biographical information on Coach Thomas and a full schedule of the 1979 season.   
 
Former Blazer teammates on the 1979 team, Kip McLeod and Mark Brown, gathered the information and built a website, complete with 43-year-old newspaper articles and cassette tapes of the one-time radio broadcasts from the College World Series to Valdosta.  
 
The website was an 11-month process and involved the almost impossible luck of cassette tapes surviving 40 years through multiple moves in a zip loc sandwich bag. The initial contact list had literally one correct email address and phone number, and that was McLeod.  
 
Brown made a special note to the individuals who did the actual building and funding of the project, remarking, "The website was only possible because of Douglas Carlson, Linda Reinhard, Heather Bradley, Carrie Parker, and Mario Meadows. We couldn't have pulled it off without them."
 
The 1979 Blazers went 47-14-1 and the 47 victories ties for the second-most wins in a season in program history.  VSU now has eight national championships, including four in football (2004, 2007, 2012, 2018), two in men's tennis (2006, 2011) and one in softball (2012).
 

 
VSC had finished fourth in back-to-back Division II World Series and was returning an All-America selection and a strong staff, but had lost one of the all-time hitters to the MLB draft, and the roster was dotted with junior college transfers of varying success.  That team, however, ended up winning Valdosta State's first national championship, the 1979 NCAA Division II Baseball National Championship in Springfield, Ill.
 
Throughout the season, one of the most striking things about Valdosta State's baseball schedule back then was, even though we were a Division II school, we played a number of Division I schools. (We were 41-6 against Division II/NAIA teams).
Clemson opened our season with a doubleheader against us in Valdosta. Florida State, a nationally ranked powerhouse at the time, came to Valdosta twice that year and we played a doubleheader in Tallahassee. The head coach of the Seminoles was Dick Howser, who left after that season to become the manager of the New York Yankees. He also got ejected from a game in Valdosta that year. West Virginia came through town twice. We stopped in Statesboro, Ga., on our way back from Armstrong Atlantic State, and played Georgia Southern in a doubleheader (losing 21-0 in game one and winning the second game, 9-3). 
 
We played a home-and-home with Jacksonville University and Mercer.  Our last regular season game before the NCAA Regionals was an 11-2 pasting the Gators laid on us in Gainesville, with most of my family in the stands. We did end up, though, winning our fair share (6-8-1). In the South Atlantic Regional, we avenged three of our losses that Columbus State had given us that year, taking them down twice, and sending us to Springfield (my first time on a plane). 
 
We were an overlooked team, with a ton of pitching at the College World Series, and after getting bounced into the losers' bracket in our second game, and falling behind 3-1 against Cal-Poly in an elimination game, we eventually pulled ahead to win 6-3. We never trailed again until the championship game, when Florida Southern went ahead 2-1 in the bottom of the sixth inning on a solo home run. With just six outs left for us, we turned a single, a walk, an error, a sacrifice fly, and a suicide squeeze bunt into two runs, and a 3-2 lead in the top of the eighth inning that held up. The bottom of the ninth was surreal, even at the time…(link).  It starts in the bottom of the eighth and is about 20 minutes long.  The bottom of the ninth starts around the 13:00 mark. It's a grainy, old time radio sound.  That's what winning a national championship sounded like in 1979.