59-0! The College Baseball Team That Never Lost a Game.

Wall Street Journal

a day ago

59-0!
What a ridiculous baseball accomplishment.
Sounds like witchcraft, honestly. It might be unbreakable, like Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak and Cal Ripken's 2,652 consecutive games played.
The Louisiana State University Shreveport Pilots just completed a college baseball season in which they went 59-0.
Baseball isn't supposed to work like that.
This is a game in which even greatness is humbled by repeated failure. Miss 70% of the time at the plate and you might have the swing of a Major Leaguer. Juggernauts that win 100 games still lose 62 times. Even the Savannah Bananas drop a few.
Baseball has long seasons, rainouts, injuries, bad days, double-headers, missed calls and quirky bounces.
Fifty-nine and oh? Nobody goes 59-0.
Until now.
LSU Shreveport's run is historic. There's never been a college baseball season like it, at any level. The Pilots, who are part of the LSU system and play in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, won the school's first ever national championship at the NAIA World Series this past weekend.
I'm still flabbergasted. How on earth do you go 59-0?
LSU Shreveport isn't really sure, either.
'I don't think anybody sets a goal of trying to not lose a game,' says Pilots head coach Brad Neffendorf. 'We wanted to put ourselves in a position to win every game, but am I ever thinking we won't lose? No. Heck no. What we did was dang near impossible.'
Not that the players were even talking about it. Neffendorf says he didn't have to warn his team about letting the win streak go to their helmeted heads.
'They never did,' says the coach. 'There were reminders about staying true to who we are, staying humble, staying focused on what we're trying to do. They were phenomenal with it.'
LSU Shreveport has a tradition of stellar baseball—the school has won numerous conference titles and made multiple trips to the NAIA World Series. There have been some 40-plus win seasons and even 50-plus win ones.
But 2025 was something else. The Pilots—by the way, these are riverboat pilots, not airplane ones—returned a talented team stacked with senior leadership and flew right out of the gate. They swept their season opening three-game series against McPherson by a combined score of 38-4, and it was pretty much off to the races from there.
They didn't play many close games. In February there was a 7-6 walkoff win against Indiana University Southeast, a team coached by Neffendorf's brother, Brett. The Pilots had only three more one-run wins the rest of the way. LSU Shreveport never got taken to extra innings. They won a boatload of games by double digits.
Translation: They were really, really good.
'We always talk about being different here,' says Neffendorf. 'We play fast, up-tempo and aggressive. But most of all I want to play the right way. We respect the opponent, the umpires, everyone.'
Baseball is a superstitious sport—try yapping about a no-hitter during a no-hitter sometime. That was another reason not to talk about the streak.
But as LSU Shreveport's winning snowballed, it became hard to ignore, says athletic director Lucas Morgan.
'I still remember the conversation I had with Brad,' Morgan says. 'We were like 30-0, approaching the best start in program history, and we were like, 'This is something we want to publicize, but we don't want to jinx it.''
The AD recalls thinking: 'We're going to lose eventually, so we'll just wait until we lose, and then we'll put the announcement out there.'
'And then we didn't lose.'
Baseball in the NAIA is not a mega-money extravaganza. There's plenty of talent, including some D1 caliber players, but it's not awash in dilemmas over name, image, likeness or portal reform (NIL and the portal exist, however.) LSU Shreveport, which also has strong programs in basketball and soccer, tends to recruit from junior colleges and transfers from other four-year schools.
Games aren't on prime-time TV; they're streamed. Plane rides? The Pilots took one plane ride the whole season—to Spokane for the World Series in Lewiston, Idaho. The rest of the year was spent on the bus, with one back-and-forth to New Mexico stretching 10 hours each way.
Back in Shreveport, The Baseball Team That Didn't Lose became a point of pride. Pilot Field (capacity 1,000) was the hottest ticket in town.
'Our stands were packed,' says Morgan, the AD. 'You had huge groups of little kids trying to get autographs after the game. It's not that Shreveport hasn't supported our program before, but this was on a whole other level.'
Streaks of any kind create pressure. Neffendorf, a longtime pitching coach who took his first collegiate head coach job with the Pilots in 2020, says he was often asked if he wanted his team to lose so they could relax.
'I can't tell you how many people reached out and they're like, 'Man, what you're doing is unbelievable, but don't you feel like it'd be good if you lost one?'' the coach says.
He understood what they meant, but he felt his ball club was handling the situation just fine.
'I didn't believe in the process of, like, 'Hey, we've got to lose a game.''
In the end, they didn't lose at all. They hit well, they pitched well, they played stellar defense. They mastered high-tempo Pilots baseball.
They also stayed healthy. LSU Shreveport didn't suffer any season-ending injuries, says the school's sports medicine director, Meghan Neffendorf—Coach Brad's wife.
'I mean, that's just luck,' Meghan says. 'You have to have a little bit of luck to go 59-0.'
You sure do. That's why you may never see it again—what the mighty riverboat Pilots of LSU Shreveport just pulled off.
'We made the impossible possible,' says Brad Neffendorf.
Write to Jason Gay at [e-mail]