Nicholls baseball coach Silva striving for more after SLC regular-season and tournament titles.

If you walk into the baseball office at Nicholls and you want to get a glimpse of the head coach behind his desk, you must peer between two trophies.

The trophies represent the Colonels’ 2023 accomplishment of winning the Southland Conference regular-season title and the league’s postseason tournament.

If Mike Silva had his way, the view would be totally obscured by a ton of hardware.

“I want two more. And I want two more after that,” said Silva, who wound up his second season as Colonels’ coach with a postseason tournament berth.

Constantly striving for more and more, Silva said, can be tough on those around him.

“It’s hard sometimes on the staff and on the players because you are never satisfied,” Silva said. “I mean sincerely that I wish I was one of those guys that could go sit, post up at the bar and just enjoy for the next four months.”

That’s not likely.

“I enjoyed the regular season one for 24 hours. We had fun. We partied. We had a great time,” said Silva, motioning to one of the trophies. “The conference tournament one, the same thing. We enjoyed that for 24 hours. Then it was on to the regionals.”

The conference tournament championship earned Nicholls a trip to the NCAA regionals. The Colonels were sent to the Tuscaloosa Regional where Nicholls lost to host Alabama 4-3 in their opening game when the Crimson Tide came up with a walk-off, run-scoring single in the bottom of the ninth inning.

A 14-6 loss to Boston College ended the Colonels’ season at 34-24.

“When the regional was over – I don’t want to say it was a sour taste – it was a successful season, but I want to win that thing and I don’t think we’re that far off. That’s the next step for us,” Silva said.

All the accomplishments by the Colonels helped to earn Silva a contract extension at Nicholls through the 2029 season.

Exactly how long Silva remains at Nicholls is a question even the Colonels coach isn’t sure of.

“I don’t know if this is my forever place,” said Silva. “That’s just the truth. I want it to be. I’m trying to turn it into that. I didn’t feel like if I left after this first championship season, how would I have found out?

“Obviously, our program is looked at a heck of a lot different than it was two years ago when I walked in the door here. My dream has always been to take over a basic program like Nicholls and in a community like Thibodaux and build it into a Top 25 national powerhouse. I know a lot of people don’t think that’s realistic, but I think they’re starting to believe a little bit more that it is.”

Following his college days as a catcher at Northwestern Oklahoma State University in 2003, Silva split the next two years as a college assistant at Clarendon College in Texas and playing in an independent league.

Silva spent a year as an assistant at Bethany College before getting out of baseball for two years. He returned to Clarendon, first as an assistant for a semester before becoming the head coach at the age of 27.

He served as the head coach of Galveston College from 2010-2012 and as an assistant at Texas State for the next three years.

 After a year working as a scout for the San Diego Padres, Silva returned to the college ranks as an assistant coach at Arkansas-Little Rock for two years.

He spent three seasons as an assistant at Louisiana Tech before getting the head coaching position at Nicholls.

Despite several obstacles, Louisiana Tech raised the level of its program, eventually reaching a ranking inside the Top 15.

“We went in there and it became really a national powerhouse in three years and overcame a bunch of adversity,” said Silva.

Among the hurdles was the loss of the school’s baseball stadium after it was destroyed by a tornado in 2019. Complicating matters during that time was the COVID era.

“That job probably gave me the confidence that this job could be done because we were ranked, I think, as high as like 13th or 14th in the country for most of the year. We hosted a regional,” Silva recalled.

“What a lot of people didn’t know,” Silva continued, “is that we didn’t have a facility to recruit to for two years. We had no field. We had no nothing.  All we did was get better. We grew. Then we had COVID mixed in with all that and we got better.”

While dealing with no place to play, Louisiana Tech found other things to sell recruits other than a stadium.

“It wasn’t easy then because there was nothing to recruit to, but we had a great university. I thought Ruston was a great community. People like going to school there,” said Silva.

That approach would come in handy when he moved from Louisiana Tech to Nicholls.

“I think there are a lot of similarities,” Silva said. “I jokingly always say the difference between Ruston and Thibodaux, besides the mileage in north Louisiana and south Louisiana, the difference in the cultures is Southern Baptist versus Cajun Catholics. Their faith in their families and their communities is a huge part of all their lives.”

When Silva first arrived at Nicholls in 2022, he found a program in need of attitude adjustment.

“What I saw was an extremely unconfident group of individuals,” Silva recounted. “When I walked into that locker room, I thought there were some really good players in there. I just didn’t think they knew it.

“I told them when I walked in, ‘you guys are champions. You just don’t know it yet.’”

Despite what Silva described as “an inferiority complex” in the Colonels players, he also saw there were positive aspects to work with, just like there were at Louisiana Tech.

“They love Thibodaux, and they love going to school at Nicholls, but in this program, they didn’t have a lot of confidence in themselves and what they were doing,” Silva observed.

“But those are two things,” Silva continued, “that I learned early on in the process when I walked in and with my team and visited with them individually for the first time: They love going to school here, so their experience going to school here was positive, and they love Thibodaux. They loved this general area. So, they were happy with that, but the baseball side of it, they were miserable. They should have been happy, confident. Their expectations were really low.”

Except for a 10-8 COVID-abbreviated season in 2020, the Colonels had only one other winning season in the previous six years prior to Silva’s arrival. The last time Nicholls won a Southland Conference title was in 1998.

Inheriting a team that had gone 21-34 the year prior to his arrival, Silva’s first squad reached the conference tournament, winning one game and then losing two to finish the year with a 26-25 record.

“We had exit meetings when we pulled back into town about midnight,” Silva recalled of the trip home following the Colonels’ elimination from the conference tournament. “I was ready to move on, and I loved those kids.”

“I thought that first group really laid the foundation for what’s to come because we overachieved with that group,” he explained. “We weren’t quite talented enough, but they showed up and gave us everything they had every day they had really positive energy. They were really fun to be around.

“It’s just hard when you’re going around the Kentucky Derby and you don’t have a thoroughbred.”

The experiences of the first year, Silva said, led to a new-found approach by the Colonels going into Year 2.

“Going into the season this year, there was a different vibe. You could just tell. They were bought in. They were drinking the kool-aid. They understood it. They wanted to be pushed, they wanted to be coached hard,” the Nicholls coach said. “They cared about each other. They were always at the field. They spent so much time here at the field, there in the locker room. They did everything together. You could just tell, and you could feel it.

“If we didn’t win this year, in my opinion, we would have been unsuccessful, and I told them that. It’s championship or bust. We’re good enough to be a championship team.”

Now comes the task of sustaining and improving the program. Facility improvements and increased fan support will be key factors in that effort, according to Silva.

“Although there’s challenges here, there’s challenges everywhere,” the Nicholls coach said. “There are just different types of challenges. I’m hopeful that our following grows this year from last year. If not now, then when?

“That’s the thing, if people aren’t showing up to watch us play now, then they’re probably not coming. That’s the truth. We should be even better this year than we were last year, and we keep growing that brand.”

Continuing to win, Silva said, can cure shortcomings.

“The reality is you’ve just got to keep winning. People love winners. So you keep winning and doing it the right way and keep growing your brand and hopefully this can be something bigger than what probably a lot of people dreamed that ever could be.”