Over the weekend, Jordan Getzelman celebrated a 31st birthday he’ll never forget.
On that day, he was offered the first head-coaching job of his career. In a whirlwind couple of weeks, Nevada baseball lost head coach Jake McKinley to a job with MLB’s Seattle Mariners and promoted Getzelman to replace him.
Getzelman was officially offered the job Sunday, which happened to be the same day he turned 31.
“It’s a birthday I’ll never forget,” Getzelman said Tuesday after his introductory press conference as Nevada’s head baseball coach. “I was pretty nervous early that morning to find out the direction we were going. But we went out to breakfast, tried to stay normal, then had the meeting and it made for a really cool birthday celebration that night.”
Getzelman inherits a loaded Nevada roster he helped put together as the Wolf Pack’s hitting coach and recruiting coordinator the last three seasons under McKinley. Returning are 22 players and five all-Mountain West honorees from the 2025 team that won a regular-season conference championship. In promoting Getzelman, Nevada athletic director Stephanie Rempe said continuity was an important factor in the decision.
“We knew what we have here,” Rempe said. “We have a very special team, and I kind of went through, ‘What’s the long-term best interest of the program versus this team?’ Because typically you want what’s best for the long-term interest, but today college sports is so different, and how often do you have 22 players returning from a championship team and a staff that has been here all together that built this? You just don’t have that opportunity very much because how many times do have an opportunity to win a championship? And I think we all believe that could happen again this year and hopefully go to the tournament and then go to the NCAAs.”
Getzelman will be tasked with trying to accomplish those goals, inheriting a program that has had as much success as almost any other on campus during Nevada’s MW era with Jay Johnson, TJ Bruce and McKinley all leading the Wolf Pack to conference titles in the last decade. After learning McKinley was accepting a major-league field coordinator job with the Mariners, Rempe’s first thought was to look inward to see if there was a coach prepared to lead the team.
She decided there was in Getzelman, who played for four colleges with his last stop being under McKinley at Menlo College. Getzelman then served as a volunteer assistant at William Jessup under McKinley and worked in the Milwaukee Brewers organization with him as well. While not all of his coaching experience came with McKinley — Getzelman also coached at Dallas Baptist and Middle Tennessee — he’s been a key mentor to Getzelman, who aims to build on what they helped put together in Reno.
“The continuity is really important, especially with what we’ve done in the last three years,” Getzelman said. “That first year was extremely hard, but it’s really cool to be able to look three years later and say that we got to be a championship team. Even with that, I don’t think the job is finished, and I think my vision for what we want moving forward, I wanna see that through. That’s why I wanted to be in this position moving forward.”
Nevada’s entire baseball roster was in attendance for Getzelman’s introductory press conference along with McKinley, who will join the Mariners for the MLB Winter Meetings, which begin Sunday in Orlando. McKinley said Getzelman is ready for the opportunity.
“He’s good at being himself, and I don’t want him to be me,” McKinley said. “I think he’s gonna embrace that. He’s got some skills that I wish I had. But what I think is good is he’s inheriting a really good roster. You talk about being ready. When you inherit a good roster, you’re probably more ready because some of it’s plug and play. But the players like him, they’ll run through a wall for him and they respect him.”
Getzelman said he’s looking forward to putting his stamp on a Nevada program that has a proud history dating back to the 1990s when it was one of the West Coast’s top programs. Getzelman said the bond between the current players is special after much of that group won last year’s MW title before falling short of an NCAA Tournament berth. While he’s learned a lot from McKinley, Getzelman said he’s ready to run his own program.
“We’re stylistically different,” Getzelman said. “I’m probably a little more vocal than Jake is. But the foundations of who we are and how we go about our business is very similar. His consistency, showing up as the same person every day to the field regardless of the result the day before, I will carry that on. The way that we do things, the standards that we set, they will be very similar.”
Given the midseason timing of the change, Nevada could have opted to put an interim tag on Getzelman but instead installed him as the permanent head coach on a multi-year deal (terms have not been disclosed). Getzelman said that level of belief from Nevada’s administration was important.
The Wolf Pack considered hiring a coach from outside, Rempe said, but believed in Getzelman after doing its due diligence on his candidacy, which included talking to those inside college baseball, including former Nevada head coach Jay Johnson, who won the Wolf Pack’s first MW title in 2015 and has led LSU to two of the last three national championships.
“They all say there’s risk if you’re hiring a 31-year-old head coach,” Rempe admitted. “There just is. But his top side, his baseball IQ, the whole dynamics with the team and working for Jake and he’s gonna work his tail off. Baseball is unique. There’s no question about Jake’s work ethic. There’s no question about Jay Johnson’s. There’s no question about Jordan’s. Baseball is a sport where they just work, and when you hear what Jordan did and how he dove into everything that he’s tried to become masterful at, it’s pretty unique. And then his emotional IQ is really high. It’s not very often you meet people that have that kind of emotional intelligence, and he does. He gets people, he knows how to communicate, he knows how to be humble. He’s got a lot of really unique characteristics that are pretty exciting to have on our staff.”
After being a key supporting piece to Nevada baseball’s recent success, Getzelman will now be the face of the program, something he’s ready to embrace.
“I feel a little familiar with it just being a player,” said Getzelman, who played at Division I programs Missouri and Kennesaw State. “I felt like I had that a lot early in my career — eyes on you and you have to learn to deal with that. I just love sharing about our players. I love sharing about our program. So to be recognized or to talk to people about that, I’m really excited for that opportunity.”
Columnist Chris Murray provides insight on Northern Nevada sports. Contact him at crmurray@sbgtv.com or follow him on Twitter @ByChrisMurray.
You can watch the report from Nevada Sports Net’s Shannon Kelly from campus below.