Troy's Season Ended in Omaha. The Year It Caps May Be the Best in the School's Division I History.

West Virginia shut out Troy 12-0 on Tuesday to end the Trojans' first trip to the College World Series. The final score was lopsided. The season it capped was anything but.

Troy became the first program in NCAA Division I history to reach the College World Series with 30 losses on its record. The Trojans beat Florida in the Gainesville Regional, hosted a Super Regional for the first time in program history and packed the place, swept Little Rock 19-4, then took a crowd to Omaha and beat Ole Miss 12-8 with a 10-run rally to eliminate an SEC powerhouse.

Skylar Meade, in his fifth season as head coach, built a team that did not know when it was supposed to lose. Even in Tuesday's final, Troy loaded the bases in the sixth and seventh innings in front of 21,814 at Charles Schwab Field but could not find the hit to extend the night. The Trojans finished 39-32.

"Now everyone knows why you work so hard, why you talk about it, why you recruit so much, why you'd never take breaks," Meade said. "They know."

But the baseball run is only the final chapter of a 12-month stretch that may be the strongest collective year of Division I athletics Troy has produced.

The Full Year

Start with football. Gerad Parker's Trojans went 8-6 and reached the Sun Belt Conference championship game in December, losing to James Madison 31-14 in Harrisonburg. An 8-6 season with a conference title game appearance showed a program trending back in the right direction.

Men's basketball won back-to-back Sun Belt regular season titles and back-to-back Sun Belt Tournament championships at the Pensacola Bay Center, with Thomas Dowd earning tournament Most Outstanding Player honors. The Trojans earned their second consecutive NCAA Tournament bid before falling to Nebraska in the first round.

Women's basketball went 25-8, reached the Sun Belt Tournament championship game, won the Resorts World Las Vegas Classic early in the season and earned a postseason bid for the third consecutive year. Zay Dyer broke the program's all-time Division I career rebound record on Jan. 7 — her 768th board — and finished the season as the Sun Belt Defensive Player of the Year while leading the nation in double-doubles and ranking second nationally in total rebounds.

Then baseball went to Omaha.

Football played for a conference championship. Men's basketball won two of them. Women's basketball reached a championship game and set records. Baseball made history. In one academic year.

What Comes Next

Troy fans have earned the right to feel good about this. A year like this does not come along often, and it did not come by accident.

But the Sun Belt is not standing still. James Madison beat Troy for the football championship and is not going anywhere. Appalachian State and Louisiana are building. In-state, UAB, Jacksonville State and South Alabama are all hard at work and building their own success.

And the basketball program that produced those back-to-back titles looks different now. Scott Cross left for Georgia Tech in March. Thomas Dowd and the team's top four scorers entered the transfer portal. Adam Howard, hired nine days later, inherits the league's best recent run and the challenge of restocking it.

The momentum is real. So is the competition. What matters now is whether Troy can sustain this across multiple years — whether this is a peak or a platform.

That is the reality of mid-major college sports in 2026. Top players and coaches succeed and leave. Retention is never easy. The quest for money and exposure will not slow down.

But this year showed what is possible right there in little ol' Troy, Alabama. No Troy athletic department has produced a Division I year like this one.

And the baseball team that capped it exhibited the spirit and drive to excel as well as any Trojans team in any sport ever has. You didn't have to be there to feel it; that excitement jumped through the television screen.

"This is a one-in-a-lifetime opportunity," senior first baseman Blake Cavill said. "And I got to spend it with 33 close brothers that would do anything for me and I'd do anything for them."

That is worth celebrating. And then it's back to work.