Excerpt (by Roy Bragg in the SA Express-News):

A winning baseball team doesn’t need nine Mike Trouts to win. With the right instruction, nearly anyone can be good at it and compete at a high level.

Hallmark knows this approach works because he’s watched it happen firsthand.

A former catcher, Houston native Hallmark played baseball at Rice. He was all-conference in 1995, when Rice won 40 games for the first time in school history.

After nine years in Major League Baseball, Hallmark returned to Rice. He spent 11 years as an assistant coach at his alma mater under legendary Wayne Graham, who coached Hallmark there.

Hallmark spent last season as Missouri’s pitching coach.

Rice qualifies as a legitimate college baseball powerhouse, but it wasn’t always that way. Before Graham arrived in 1991, the smartest guys in Houston fielded the worst baseball team in the Southwest Conference.

During Graham’s tenure, Rice produced 27 All-Americans, played in 29 NCAA postseason baseball tournaments, and went to the College World Series seven times, winning it all in 2003.

Graham arrived at Rice facing a situation similar to what greeted Hallmark when he was hired last year — a private school doing poorly in a sport where it should be playing toe-to-toe with national powers.

The Cards went 20-36 last year under Danny Heep, the school’s fourth consecutive losing season.

Hallmark will use Graham’s blueprint to revive Cardinals baseball.

“He recruited the right guys, coached them, and focused on the fundamentals,” Hallmark said. “It sounds simplistic, but that’s the answer. They got better and they rounded the corner.”