Swinging for the fences

This is the first in a three-part story examining club sports at Boston University.

In the spring of 2001, baseball officially came back to Boston University. And of the 15,000-plus undergraduates who graced the Charles River Campus at the time, probably only a few knew about it. Those who did were the ones with the bats and balls.

When the Boston University club baseball team entered its first (and only) three-game series that season against the University of New Hampshire, the dozen or so players who proudly sported the scarlet and white were no more a team than just a group of ball players who decided to wear the same uniforms that day.

‘At the beginning, we weren’t a team,’ said Todd Stankiewicz, senior vice president for the club this year and a member of the squad who made BU baseball history that afternoon more than two years ago. ‘We were a bunch of guys who got together to play baseball.’

Nonetheless, they were there. After a year of fighting for recognition the team wouldn’t receive official acknowledgement from the Boston University Department of Physical Education, Recreation and Dance until the following fall and hours upon hours of preparation, the Terriers had made it, suiting up against players other than themselves.

Six years earlier, baseball had fallen off the map at Boston University. After its 1995 campaign, the varsity baseball team was told it had played its last season as a competitive squad. And like any time when a team is cut from its school’s athletic program, it came with the force of a sucker punch to the stomach.

‘Nobody actually saw it coming,’ said Andy Whigham, the coach of the club team from 2001 up until earlier this fall, and a member of that ill-fated 1995 group. ‘Our coach at the time was handed a note by the athletic director essentially stating they were terminating the team at the end of the season.’

But amid their troubled past and humble beginnings, the Terriers have risen to heights unforeseen only a few years ago. Season by season, the team has grown since it first got off the ground in 2000: the numbers at tryouts have swelled from about a handful back in the first year to almost 40 this past fall.

Three players were named to the New England Club Baseball Association All-Star team this year, the most out of any team in the conference. And for the third straight season, the squad made it to the conference semifinals, this time bowing out to eventual champion Central Maine Community College.

With its success and that of the entire conference, BU and the rest of the NECBA are looking to join the National Club Baseball Association, a league that includes more than 70 teams and 16 conferences nationwide, in the coming years. That, however, is only one of many long-term goals for the Terriers.

‘Basically, we went from a scattered group of guys who wanted to play baseball to a baseball team,’ said Dave D’Onofrio, a former player and current coach, along with Dave Forster, for the club this season. During his time at BU, D’Onofrio also served as the editor of The Daily Free Press. ‘A team encompasses a lot of things. It takes commitment, organization. We really got our act together. It was definitely a gradual process.’

That gradual process includes the ongoing search for a home field. This past season, the Terriers called the diamond down at Amory Park in Brookline home. The year before, they played one home game at a field across the Charles River in Cambridge. The team has also practiced at a variety of locations, with Cleveland Circle and Rogers Park serving as options in recent years.

And so goes the life of a club baseball team.

Yet, despite the needed facilities and the limited funding, this team has surprised even those who have helped them get to where they are today on the verge of becoming a legitimate part of the sporting landscape here at the university.

‘I was very skeptical at first,’ said Tom Duval, the coordinator of Intramural and Club Sports at BU and advisor to the team. ‘In fact, I turned this club away several times, but they proved to me that their interest was sincere and that they were dedicated to playing.’

With such a large student population and growing interest in the club, players on the team feel that things can only get better for the program. And they say they are enjoying every minute of it.

‘I have tried to look back and picture my life [the past four years] without baseball, and I really can’t,’ Stankiewicz said. ‘We all still love going out there. We all love being out there playing baseball. That’s what it all comes down to.’

And as senior co-captain and the team’s Most Valuable Player Trevor Nugent described, it just makes it better when everyone playing around you is your friend. From the squad’s patented ‘blow it up’ hand shake to the road trips they take together, Nugent said everyone generally enjoys each others’ company.

‘All the guys are truly friends,’ Nugent said. ‘There are no cliques on our team either. When you’re with someone that much, you just bond with them.’

Among all the fun, though, the team has become increasingly serious when it comes to improving the program. Besides stepping up its play on the field, the team has devoted a great deal of time to thinking of new ways to raise money.

For a team that relies heavily upon outside financial help, the Terriers are always looking for different ways to make some dough. New ideas this year include selling BU Baseball t-shirts and setting up a comedy show with local comedians to not only help bring in some extra revenue, but to get the team’s name out around campus.

As senior co-captain and club president Erik Dugal points out, it will take more than a just good team-batting average to help get the club to where it wants to be in future seasons.

‘It’s about taking it to the next level,’ Dugal, a four-year member of the team, said. ‘We can make the jump to the next level to be even more competitive. It’s just about if you want to make that leap or not.’

With so many hurdles behind them, and even more looming in the future, what truly motivates this group that is simply succeeding where many of the BU baseball teams of the past have failed?

Is it their love for the game? Is it the dream of one day saying they laid the groundwork for a successful varsity program? Perhaps, but Stankiewicz jokingly provided one answer to these questions:

‘It’s the girls.’

Let’s just hope these guys can keep their minds on baseball.