Unluckiest man in college baseball? How this SC coach navigated two team shutdowns
Limestone University voted April 29 to close the institution’s doors for good after nearly 200 years in existence.
The Gaffney-based school ceased all online and in-person operations. It shuttered its athletics department and eliminated every sports team on campus.
One of those teams was led by perhaps the unluckiest coach in all of college sports.
Brett Harker had been the head baseball coach at Limestone since August 2021. Prior to leading the Saints, he was the head coach of the Furman University baseball team in Greenville. His tenure there ended after the Paladins’ program was cut.
You read that correctly. Both of Harker’s last two college baseball head coaching stints ended with the programs being dissolved.
“I’m gonna write a heck of a book one day,” he told The State.
Since news broke of Limestone’s closure, he’s been busy finding new schools for his 75 players to call home while looking for employment himself.
The 40-year-old isn’t ruling out a return to college baseball but said it would take “the right, special job” and something coaches don’t always consider: “A healthy institution.”
“If this happens a third time I don’t know if my heart could deal with that,” he said.
‘I think that the world’s about to change’
To truly understand the adversity Harker has been through, go back five years to when the world was grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Harker was in his fourth year as head coach at Furman during March 2020 and was expecting to host College of Charleston for a weekend series.
Harker recalled CofC head coach Chad Holbrook calling him and informing Harker he’d been told by administration that the Cougars couldn’t travel to Greenville because of the still-new COVID pandemic. Harker said he remembers telling his coaches: “Man, I think that the world’s about to change here. I think things are about to speed up on us.’”
That series was scheduled for March 13-15 but never happened. On March 17, the Southern Conference canceled athletics through the remainder of the academic year.
Every other sports league did the same in a matter of days.
Two months later, in the middle of a global shutdown, Harker was called back to campus. The university’s president and athletic director told him and his staff they were permanently cutting Furman’s baseball and men’s lacrosse programs.
“It was just an absolute nightmare,” Harker said.
Harker and his staff immediately went to work on finding his players new homes and were able to do so for all who wanted to keep playing, he said.
Hiring freezes made it hard for him to find a college gig, but Harker was still under contract at Furman. That made it easier when he was asked to take a volunteer pitching coach position at Hillcrest High School in nearby Simponsville. Hillcrest is his alma mater and the place he met his wife, Tiffany.
Leaving the college level was a nice change of pace, but it was an adjustment.
“You go from a multimillion-dollar locker room … (to) changing in parking lots,” Harker said. “It was a reset of remembering what’s important and kind of getting back to your roots.”
Harker’s lone season with the Rams was a historic one — straight out of a Disney movie, as he described it. In 2021, Hillcrest went 23-8 and won its first state title.
Two months later, Harker was introduced as Limestone’s next baseball coach.
A common bond in a ‘weird’ situation
Lots of college coaches have been fired twice.
Harker has to be one of the only coaches — if not the only coach — to lose two college jobs because the team he was coaching ceased to exist.
But if there’s anyone who understands what Harker has dealt with twice in the last five years, it’s Bret Huebner.
Huebner played under Harker at Furman from 2016 to 2019, starting his career as a backup catcher before spending the last three years of his career as the Paladins’ starting shortstop. After he graduated from Furman, Harker brought Huebner on his staff as the Paladins’ director of operations.
Furman’s program was cut during Huebner’s first year on staff. He was on the verge of moving back to his native Minnesota when a text to Harker reeled him back in.
“I texted him to ask if I could put him down as a reference,” Huebner said. “And then probably no more than 15, 20 minutes later, I get a call from him. He said, ‘Hey, I have one more coaching position open over at Limestone … do you want it?’”
Huebner accepted the job on the spot. He worked as an assistant on Harker’s staff for the last four years and was on staff this year when Limestone folded.
“It’s not often somebody knows exactly how you’re feeling,” Harker said. “Man, this guy’s been through it all with me, too.”
“Weird” doesn’t even begin to describe what Huebner and Harker have been through, but it’s a word Huebner comes back to often thinking about the last few months.
“It was definitely weird because Furman, it was my baseball program, it’s where my degree is from, it’s where I met all my best friends, where I played for four years. And it was just the program that left and not the entire university,” Huebner said.
But Limestone?
“I’d never heard of an entire university closing down,” Huebner said.
Limestone, though, wasn’t the only college in the Carolinas to close its doors for good in April. St. Andrews University in North Carolina, roughly three hours away from Gaffney, announced it would be closing on April 25, just four days before Limestone.
Their demises are part of a larger trend nationally of small colleges shutting down because of declining enrollment, financial pressures and other factors.
Run at Limestone comes to an unceremonious close
On April 16, Evan Havreluk and all other Limestone students received an email about a meeting that would be taking place in the Timken Center, home of Limestone basketball, at 2:30 p.m. that day.
Havreluk, a sophomore infielder for the Saints, was confused. He figured the email was fake. Because the meeting time conflicted with baseball practice, he went to the coaches to check its validity.
“I checked my inbox, it said, ‘All faculty on campus, mandatory meeting at 2:00 (and) 2:30 following for the students,’ and my stomach dropped,” Harker recalled. “I just knew that wasn’t a good sign. … And I called my wife and I said, ‘I don’t know any facts.’ I just said, ‘I think it’s happening again.’”
Havreluk could feel the tension in the air as he walked into the gym.
“Nobody knew what was going on,” Havreluk said. “So there’s so much nervous energy in the building and just so much uncertainty.”
It was in that “very quick five-minute meeting” that Havreluk, his teammates and fellow students were informed by Limestone’s president of the university’s plan to close. An emergency attempt to raise $6 million to keep the school afloat came up short.
The news came as a surprise to everyone.
Huebner said he thought the school’s financial situation was “on the way up” after the baseball program took budget cuts in previous years.
And Harker found himself in the middle of the exact same spot he was in five years prior. This time, however, there were still games to be played.
Limestone’s baseball staff was suddenly tasked with helping find the players a new place to play while also trying to rally the team for a playoff push. The experience at Furman helped him “take the emotion out of it,” Harker said, and he was able to switch into “business mode” and essentially become an agent for his players.
“At the end of the day, all that matters are those young men and those families that put trust in you and your coaching staff,” Harker said. “… I’m very proud of the work that my staff and myself did to get these guys placed. We’re still taking phone calls. We’re still working with guys. But it turned into phone calls starting at 6 o’clock in the morning and taking until 11 o’clock at night, day after day.”
Balancing it all was tough at first, Harker said. But the Saints were eventually able to find a groove and finished the regular season on a three-game win streak. Limestone finished the year 25-24, clinching the No. 4 seed in the South Atlantic Conference Tournament (only the top eight teams qualify) in North Carolina.
Limestone’s season ended May 4 after a loss to Catawba in the semifinals of the SAC Tournament.
What’s next for Harker?
Harker said a “good number” of his players have found their next destination, including Havreluk, who recently committed to play at Texas A&M Texarkana.
Like Harker and the rest of his staff, Huebner is in the middle of applying for jobs and hopes to stay in college baseball.
Despite having every right to be upset, Harker is doing his best at keeping things in perspective. Yes, he’s out of a job, but so are many others in the Limestone community.
“At Furman, we felt very singled out,” Harker said. At Limestone, “it’s everywhere you go on campus. There’s still raw emotion everywhere. It’s not just students, it’s coaches — it’s our livelihood. It’s faculty. It’s the lunch ladies. … It’s the grounds crew. It’s everybody.”
Harker knows he’ll have to make a pivot in his life soon. When his Furman tenure ended, he had the luxury of time, as he was still under contract. But he told The State he received just one week’s pay as severance from Limestone and has to start thinking about how he’ll pay his mortgage and support his wife and two kids, Emma and Hudson.
Still, he jokes he’s doing “better than I deserve” and credits his family and friends for getting him through an unprecedented time in his life.
Again.
“I’m gonna write a heck of a book one day, and if there’s not adversity that makes for a very boring book,” Harker said. “This will not define me. This is just another chapter in this incredibly interesting and blessed life I’ve got to live.”
This story was originally published June 16, 2025 at 8:00 AM.
