Lynch to hurl BU ahead

Whoever decides on the location of offices within the fortress that is Boston University’s administrative office building at 1 Sherborn St. was not very fair to Assistant Vice President of Development for Athletics Mike Lynch. When you look up from his office’s decorations (the Jack Parker bobblehead doll, the Agganis Arena blueprints and the car seat) and out Lynch’s window, the CITGO sign – one of the most recognizable images of Red Sox Nation – hits you in the face. His life has revolved around baseball for much of its first 35 years, and there’s the stupid CITGO sign to rub it in his face every day that the department he will take over on July 1 as athletic director has no baseball program. “I’m sort of disappointed you guys don’t have a baseball team,” said Boyd Coffie, who was Lynch’s baseball coach at Division II Rollins College, from which the pitcher graduated in 1990. “I think he could be a big help there.” But there’s some sympathy for Lynch. Joe Carter, the former Toronto Blue Jays outfielder who probably had about a .900 career average and 600 home runs at Fenway Park, used to say that the CITGO sign, looming beyond the Green Monster, stood for “C it go.” In baseball or out of it, Lynch has been C-ing it go in the right direction for him in a pretty ridiculous upward spiral for the last 20 or so years. Since high school, he has fired a 19-strikeout no-hitter his freshman year at Rollins, where he had a full scholarship. He lost 11 pounds one afternoon while tossing five innings in 122-degree heat for the Milwaukee Brewers’ rookie team in Phoenix. The Yankee fan was signed by his hated Red Sox after a stint with the independent Erie Sailors. Then, after injury cut his playing career short, he figured he’d turn Union College’s baseball program from a laughingstock into a playoff team. Then he went to the University of Miami, where he witnessed two college football national championships (both free of Bowl Championship Series controversy). Weave in a wedding, 10 years of marriage, his family’s first bachelor’s and master’s degrees, a Division II College World Series appearance and two young daughters, and you have somewhat of an idea of what Lynch has done since college. Where Mike Lynch goes, it seems so goes success. “It doesn’t surprise me at all,” Coffie said. “Mike sets his mind to something, and he’s gonna get it done.” And though most Terrier fans had no idea who the guy was when he was introduced March 31, that success hasn’t stopped at BU, where he’s spent the last four years at 1 Sherborn. While his real daughters are without a doubt invaluable, you can put a price tag on his third child – the $50 million dollars he raised from more than 900 donors for the Student Village project. The due date on that is sometime in early January 2005, and another baby will become his on July 1 of this year when he takes over the athletic department. “This particular job is a job that a lot of people would be interested in because you’re in a great city, it’s a major international research institution, which has good athletic programs that are on solid footing that are looking to move upward – we’re building brand new facilities,” Lynch said. “It’s a chance to take a program and make it bigger and better, and that’s what really attracted me to BU.” You could say that the power pitcher and the program are a pair of rising forces that are combining. The man who helped draw Agganis Arena from the ground up is taking over just in time to see it open. “I don’t see how you can’t be excited when you talk to Mike Lynch,” said Ed Carpenter, BU’s assistant AD and director of athletic communications for the last 27 years.

THE MAN

The guy looks like he could be out there building the thing himself, too. The 5-foot 11-inch righthander, with his muscular frame far from hidden by his pink button-down shirt, looks more like a major league pitcher than dainty Red Sox ace Pedro Martinez. Looking at him from across the table, you can tell from Lynch’s strong stare and demeanor that he means business, but the somewhat soft-spoken dad still manages to mix in a laugh. “He’s not a real outgoing person, but he’s a quiet leader in his own way,” Coffie said. “He’s very strong in his convictions. I wouldn’t say he’s opinionated, but he’s close. He works hard. When he was at Rollins, we worked hard physically and he was also an outstanding student. So Mike had the whole package.” It was that time at Rollins that convinced him that after the dream of Major League ball – a dream Coffie said would have come true if not for the injury – died, he wanted to get into college athletics. His right arm ended up providing what his parents (his father is a firefighter and his mother is in child care) couldn’t financially – a full scholarship to Rollins. Georgia Tech and Clemson also wanted the hard-throwing righty, but they only offered partial scholarships. So he left his boots and snow shovel at home in Binghamton, N.Y., and flew south to Winter Park, Fla. “That was the first time I was away from home, 1,500 miles away,” Lynch said. “But after the first semester, when you know that when I’d call home it’s five below zero and I’m out throwing a baseball around and its 85 degrees, it’s pretty easy to accept at that point.” College baseball accepted him pretty easily, too. Early in his first season, Lynch used what he said was a 92-mile per hour fastball to overpower the University of the Pacific in a 19-strikeout no-hitter. “A lot of no-hitters, there’s luck involved, obviously. But in this particular case, I don’t remember them hitting the ball hard off him,” Coffie said, insisting that Lynch threw 93 or 94. “He just overmatched ’em in this particular game. Just flat overmatched ’em.” Coffie, who Lynch called a “strict disciplinarian,” was a part of a four-year period that Lynch said was not only probably the best of his life but changed him as a person. “Discipline and hard work and responsibility … were things that I thought I had a handle on when I went to school. But once I got there, I understood that I really didn’t,” Lynch said. “And through [Coffie’s] determination to make me a better player, he made me a better person. I guess I don’t think I’d be where I am today if I hadn’t run into him.” His time at Rollins included a Division II College World Series appearance his junior year, during which Coffie called him “very instrumental.” He lived with Clay Bellinger – an outfielder who ended up winning two World Series rings with the Yankees – for three years, earned a 3.1 GPA and finished with the seventh-most innings pitched in Division II history. Oh yeah, and the respect of pretty much anyone he met. “The 30 years I was in college coaching, he would rank in the top five pitchers and certainly was one of the more enjoyable guys. Mike didn’t say much, he just did the job,” Coffie said. “He told people, and I guess they respected him and he’d tell it like it was.” After the Milwaukee Brewers took a chance on him in the late stages of the 1990 draft, Lynch said he got “$1,000 and a plane flight to go out to Phoenix.” Two weeks later, he found himself on a field in intense heat with all non-English-speaking players from the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico playing rookie-league ball. “I took Spanish in high school,” Lynch said, following by showing off his proficiency. “Hola.” Lynch was putting up the necessary numbers (despite the intense heat), but midway through his first year in the minors, his elbow started bothering him. Lynch had pitched since he was seven and had never been hurt, but the wear and tear finally caught up with him in his early 20s. “I was a low-round draft choice that may not get a chance to go on if I was to tell ’em that I was injured,” he said. “If you’re more of a low-round guy that they’re giving an opportunity to, you have to take advantage of every little chance you get, so I wasn’t about to say that I wasn’t up to par.” The Brewers let him go that winter because of the injury, and Lynch was unable to bust back into a major-league organization right away. Erie, Pa. was the site of the Mike Lynch rejuvenation, as he led the independent New York-Penn. League in strikeouts and rehabilitated his elbow. But much to his surprise, after a childhood of passion for pinstripes, the Boston Red Sox were the ones who gave him another shot. “You grow up being a fan of one particular team, and then you’re picked up by someone else and you immediately fall in love with that team,” he explained. “I couldn’t have been happier to be a Red Sox at that point.” But the elbow acted up again halfway through the year, and that was it for his playing career. “I had kind of made a decision in my mind before I even got into pro baseball that if I didn’t make it by the time I was 25 that I was going to seriously consider going into something else,” Lynch said. “I just felt like if I couldn’t perform at the highest level, that was fine with me – I had gotten my shot, I had done as good as I could have done. And I was gonna walk away from it, and really try to build a life around something else.” To say he’s done that would be a gross understatement. It started at Union College, where he brought a 3-22 team to the playoffs in four years as the pitching coach and associate head coach who was basically running the program, and also learned how to raise money. Despite the fact that he knew what it was like to be a player, Lynch said he “definitely wasn’t a player’s coach.” After he “felt like he had made an impact” at Union and got his master’s at the nearby University at Albany, Miami “took a chance” on Lynch. He spent three years as a Hurricane doing strictly fundraising for the Hurricane Club and a campaign to build a new basketball arena. And that’s where he got the experience to come to BU, where he was hired in 2000 specifically to raise funds for the huge Student Village project. After doing so in resounding fashion, the former player and coach will now lead an entity whose most important assets are players and coaches.

THE PROGRAM

Gary Strickler has led that BU athletic department for the last 15 years, and as Lynch said, he has the Terriers in a enviable spot in just about every way. BU has won the last two Commissioner’s Cups, given to the best overall department in the America East Conference, and despite off-years for a few Terrier teams, there is a reasonable chance of a third-straight trophy landing on Babcock Street. The men’s basketball team went 17-1 in the conference and beat the University of Michigan this year before a playoff stumble. The women made their first-ever NCAA Tournament appearance last spring. The soccer teams are always competitive, the softball and lacrosse teams have been outright cruel to the conference recently and the Icedogs, though in a separate conference (Hockey East), are the perfect poster boys. All of that does not include mention of an administration that, while widely criticized for cutting the football program in 1997, has sang a different tune in recent years with the abundance of new facilities. Where this puts BU is on the cusp of a different level, fueled by recent speculation that the Terriers could be close to jumping from the relatively lowly ranked America East to a better conference, such as the Atlantic 10 or the Colonial Athletic Association. “I know the university is actively looking at opportunities to take the program to a different level,” Lynch said. “I can’t specifically say where we would think about going – we would entertain any option that came up as long as it made sense for the university from an academic as well as a fiscal perspective.” As Strickler pointed out, when it comes to making a jump, it comes down to the highest-profile sport in the conference – men’s basketball. And since the Terriers have won regular-season championships the last two years and made an NCAA Tournament appearance the year before last, coach Dennis Wolff said he thinks that might not be such a bad idea. “I have always thought that we could compete at a higher level if we were in a different league,” Wolff said. “So I wouldn’t in any way be opposed to that – I actually think it would be a good thing if it was the right league.” Lynch made reference to the recent shakeup that has occurred in some of the elite conferences, primarily the Atlantic Coast Conference and the Big East. He predicted that will make its way down to the mid-majors via a “domino effect” over the next few years, but women’s soccer coach Nancy Feldman doesn’t mind either way. “I would be excited about that opportunity, but I’m not unhappy with the situation we have right now,” said Feldman, whose team has won three of the last four America East titles. “Either way, as far as I’m concerned, there can be good things happening. I don’t think we have to get out of this conference in order to advance Boston University athletics – I don’t think it’s a requirement.” Advancement to a different conference immediately produces questions about the currently non-existent baseball and football programs. Much to the chagrin of Coffie, baseball seems like a relatively unreasonable goal due to the lack of a field, Lynch said. But the future AD said he would be open to ideas that make sense for the university, and with John Silber, who was known for his anti-football stance, out of the picture and a strong fundraiser at the head of the athletic department, let the speculation begin. “As far as adding sports to our portfolio, so to speak, I’m gonna look at a lot of different options for doing that,” Lynch said. “But they have to make fiscal sense as well, and they have to make sense for the type of program that we want to build.” But as far as the sports BU does have, don’t expect things to skip a beat over the transition. Lynch will be meeting with every coach personally over the next few weeks to examine his or her specific needs, and the hiring of a BU insider could do wonders to prevent a tough adjustment period. “I think he has a good understanding of Boston University and how things work here, and he knows our coaches already,” Strickler said. “He has the advantage that somebody coming in from the outside would not have because he already knows a lot of what we’ve been doing and he’s been supportive of it for a long time.” Plus, Lynch has goals of increasing fan support – a problem that helped slay the football program and that is a frequent complaint of many along Commonwealth Avenue. “That’s one of the things that I’m going to be working on over the next couple years is really trying to engage students, faculty, staff, alumni in [the men’s basketball] program, as well as in our hockey program and all our other programs,” Lynch said. “We need to show other conferences that we can draw – I think we can, we just need to put a focus on it.” But no matter what happens, right now is that perfect point for Terrier Nation. In the grand scheme of things, the teams are all doing well. There will be a few new toys under the tree this Christmas. And a confident, young new leader is hoping to put the pedal to the floor on a promising mid-major program. During his college career, Coffie said Lynch “learned how to pitch inside.” The BU athletic department is in for some high cheese, and it doesn’t even have a baseball team.