Logan Hughes will enter his seventh year as Drury’s assistant baseball coach and recruiting coordinator in 2020.
During his six years with the Panthers, Drury has gone 191-139-1, won three GLVC-West Division titles and advanced to the NCAA-II tournament four times.
With Hughes as an assistant, the Panthers have had two position players receive All-American honors, six named All-Region and 19 have been named All-Great Lakes Valley Conference.
In 2017, Ryan Colombo won the Josh Willingham Award as the NCAA-II’s Most Valuable Player and was the GLVC Player of the Year. In addition to his work on the mound where he went 9-2 with a 2.62 earned run average, Colombo hit .375 with three home runs, 33 runs batted in, and a team-leading 11 doubles. He played in all 57 of Drury’s games that season seeing time at pitcher, first base, second base, and shortstop.
Drury also had a position player drafted following the 2017 season as catcher Nic Perkins was a 28th round selection of the Washington Nationals.
In Hughes’ first year as an assistant, Drury produced Nick Thimesch, who earned All-American accolades and was named the Midwest Region Player of the Year and GLVC Player of the Year. Thimesch hit .464 in the 2014 season collecting 104 hits, 15 doubles, and 53 RBI’s while posting a slugging percentage of .558.
Originally from Branson, Hughes started his college career at North Arkansas where he hit .511 with 15 home runs and drove in 76 runs. He was named a Junior College All-American and, in 2006, was inducted into the North Arkansas CC Athletics Hall of Fame.
Hughes finished his playing career at Missouri-St. Louis where he was an all-conference and all-region third baseman. He was the GLVC Baseball Scholar-Athlete of the Year in 2003 and 2004 and in ’04, he was given the Richard Scharf Paragon Award, the league’s highest honor and given to the overall student-athlete of the year in the conference.
Hughes was an assistant coach at UMSL from 2005-07, then spent five seasons as the top assistant and recruiting coordinator for Wayne State (Mich.) before returning to his native area to join the Panthers as an assistant coach.
In addition to his role as a Drury assistant coach, Hughes has had an active role in cultivating the university’s Fellowship of Christian Athletes chapter on campus. He is married to the former Janessa DeMuth, who was an NAIA All-American in basketball at College of the Ozarks. The couple has two sons, Luke and Zack.
