Bickings to be new Oran baseball coach

Joe Bickings, an Oran graduate who played on two final four teams at the school, will be the Eagles baseball coach next year.

Bickings has spent the last several years as an assistant basketball and baseball coach at Chaffee.

Oran coach Kody Campbell told me after the Eagles' 9-0 state sectional loss to Cooter on Monday that he would not be returning to the team. Campbell, a former Oran and Southeast Missouri State player, was filling a gap for Oran while he finished graduate school at Southeast.

Paul Bucher was hired to lead the team after long-time coach Mitch Wood, who remains the school's superintendent, retired following the school's first state championship last season, but Bucher "resigned" just weeks before the start of the school year.

Campbell was brought in after Bucher left but was never expected to stay long term.

Wood said he was proud of the job Campbell had done in a text to me on Monday and said he had a "good season" but was going in a different direction professionally.

Bickings is a 2003 graduate of Oran who played for some of Wood's best teams. He was a part of a third and second place finish at state, if my memory is working correctly this evening. I'll talk to him in the coming days, but I would imagine this is a dream job for him and I'd expect him to be around for a while. For now, I'm off to write my gamer on Monday afternoon's game.