Rich Wallace Hired as UCF‘s New Head Baseball Coach

The UCF Knights Baseball program has hired former Knight Rich Wallace as its new head coach.

The news was first reported by Brandon Helwig of UCFSports.com.

After spending last season with Florida State as an assistant coach and recruiting coordinator, Wallace will return to where his college career began as a player in 2000.

After finishing his collegiate baseball career with UCF in 2003, then-UCF head coach Jay Bergman hired him as an assistant in 2004. Wallace remained a Knight until 2008, coaching the catchers and outfielders while coordinating offseason camps. During that time, UCF won the ASUN regular season title in 2004 and reached the NCAA Tournament.

Since his departure from the program in 2008, Wallace has served as an assistant coach at High Point, Creighton, Jacksonville, and Notre Dame. As recruiting coordinator and third base coach, he helped the Fighting Irish to their first back-to-back Super Regionals in program history and to a College World Series appearance in 2022.

“To come back to UCF as the head baseball coach is absolutely a dream come true for myself and my family,” Wallace said in a press release.

The 2024 season will be Wallace’s 20th year as a coach, but his first as a head coach.

As a player, Wallace played four years at UCF from 2000-03 after graduating from Bishop Moore Catholic High School in Orlando, highlighted by a freshman season that saw him named a Collegiate Baseball All-American Honorable Mention with a .380 batting average and .529 on-base percentage, which still sits as the 6th-highest single-season on-base percentage in program history.

UCFSports.com

Wallace will be the first former UCF player to return to the baseball program as a head coach in its history. As for UCF Athletics as whole, he joins Volleyball’s Laura Smith and Women’s Soccer’s Karen Richter Hoppa to become the third former Knight athlete overall to become the head coach of their alma mater.

As both a player and a coach, Wallace has been to the NCAA Tournament in a UCF uniform four times (2000-2002, 2004). The Knights are searching for their first NCAA Tournament bid since 2017.

“I firmly believe Rich has a great understanding of what it takes to build a tournament team and an Omaha roster,” athletic director Terry Mohajir said.

This story has been updated.