Shepherd Rams
shepherd University athletic teams

The Shepherd Rams are the athletic teams that represent Shepherd University (formerly Shepherd College), located in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, in Division II intercollegiate sports of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). The Rams compete as members of the Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference (PSAC) for all 15 varsity sports since the 2019–20 academic year. They previously competed in the Mountain East Conference (MEC) from 2013–14 to 2018–19, and before that, the now-defunct West Virginia Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (WVIAC) from 1924–25 to 2012–13.
Varsity teams
List of teams
Individual teams
Baseball
The current head coach is Andrew Kowalo. He comes to Shepherd after serving as an assistant coach at Liberty University since 2022. The former head coach, Matt McCarty, announced his resignation on July 1, 2024, to become the head baseball coach at Francis Marion University.
The Rams baseball team has won the WVIAC/MEC championship in 1983, 1984, 2004, 2009, 2012, 2016 and 2017.
Football
The current head coach is Ernie McCook, a 1992 graduate of Wesley College. McCook was elevated to head coach after the retirement of longtime coach Monte Cater. McCook previously served as offensive line coach at Shepherd from 1999 to 2008 and was also the offensive coordinator starting in 2000.
The public source identifies “Shepherd Rams” as shepherd University athletic teams. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Shepherd, Rams and shepherd.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q22096490. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2019, 2013, 2018 and 1924.
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This entry incorporates text from “Shepherd Rams” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.