SLIPPERY ROCK — Three years and three coaches produced a 10-37 record.

The Slippery Rock High baseball program was going nowhere — a familiar destination for a team that had just one winning season and one playoff berth in nearly a decade.

Enter Nathan McCollough, a 2003 Karns City High School graduate and former player and assistant coach at La Roche College.

He brought with him a promise: to stay and turn the program’s fortunes around.

“McCollough doesn’t like to lose,” said junior pitcher and third baseman Joe Barnhart. “That’s kind of his deal.”

Slippery Rock went 8-12 in McCollough’s first year. It was an up-and-down season, but one that laid the groundwork for this campaign.

The Rockets have won eight of their last nine games, including three straight one-run victories in the playoffs, and are District 10 Class AAA champions for the first time in school history.

Slippery Rock will play Keystone Oaks in the first round of the PIAA playoffs Monday at 3:30 p.m. at Jerry Uht Park in Erie.

McCollough, 27-years-old, excitable and brash, didn’t expect this rapid of a turnaround.

“It’s funny, I just got off the phone with my dad (Ollie) about 20 minutes before practice (Wednesday) and he told me what a great job I was doing with the team,” McCollough said. “I was like, ‘Dad, I never in a million years thought it would come this early.’”

Yet it has.

Senior pitcher and third baseman Cody Stephenson was part of those last three years when the Rockets won just 10 games.

McCollough had a big part in transforming the right-hander from a pitcher with a 6.35 ERA to a hurler with an ERA under two, Stephenson said.

“He motivates us,” Stephenson said. “He shows us how much he wants it and that makes us want it just as badly. We want to win for him.”

McCollough said he didn’t have a timetable for winning when he took the job before the 2012 season.

McCollough, who lives with his wife, Elizabeth, and 4-month-old daughter, Brooklyn Ava, in Butler Township, didn’t want to wait very long.

“I wanted to win immediately,” McCollough said. “I wanted to win last year. Last year, when we didn’t make the playoffs, I was crushed.”

What a difference a year makes. Instead of walking off the field at the regular season without a trip to the postseason, this year the Rockets made the field of eight as a sixth seed and pulled off upsets of Harbor Creek, Grove City and Warren to win the district title.

McCollough has done it with three freshmen and two sophomores in the starting lineup. He’s also done it, with the help of assistant coaches Darren Schultz, Fred Pryor and Mark White, by being a stickler for details in the winter months.

With a season under his belt with his pitching staff at Slippery Rock and experience as a pitcher both at Karns City and La Roche, he went to work honing the skills of his talented arms.

What has resulted is a team ERA of 2.58.

“This was my second year and with Cody, I knew what I needed to work with him with,” McCollough said. “Same thing with Joe.”

No matter what happens in the state playoff game Monday, McCollough is looking forward to many more trips to the postseason.

“It’s good to see (the success) because you see the kids and they are excited,” McCollough said. “I hear some of the things they say to each other. They say, ‘We’ve changed it now. We’ve changed the culture. We’ve changed Slippery Rock baseball. Now people will look at this program differently.’

“That’s huge because that’s a mature thing to say,” McCollough added. “You can tell they are excited that something special has happened.”