For most students, summer is a season in which they can relax, kick back and just hang out. No one is worried about when the next test is or whether a teacher will be giving a pop quiz on the reading; it’s a time to regroup, rest and prepare for the next school year.
However, for college baseball players, relaxation time will have to wait. For most players, as soon as the spring college season wraps up, they will move right ahead and begin play in summer wood bat leagues located all across the United States.
But for most of the Pack players, those locations will be mainly the Cape Cod League in the New England area, the Coastal Plains League located across the Carolinas and Virginia and the North Woods League, located up North around the Wisconsin area.
Justin Sellers, Assistant Commissioner of the Coastal Plains League, feels summer ball helps provide the young ball players a taste of what it would be like playing at the professional level.
“What we do here at the Coastal Plain League is to try and create a professional atmosphere,” Sellers said. “A lot of our ball parks have a minor league history to them or they are constructed based off of schematics of minor league stadiums. So being able to come to a league that can create not just the competition on the field, but the atmosphere in the stands, the on-field promotions, the travel, the just whole nostalgia that goes in along with it, makes for a good and worthwhile experience.”
Sophomore third baseman Andrew Ciencin echoed Sellers statements. Ciencin and fellow Pack teammate Pratt Maynard played in the Coastal Plains League last summer playing for the Forest City Owls and helped to lead them to a CPL championship.
“It has great talent. Scouts are at every game,” Ciencin said. “Summer ball is just a good time. You get to play with the best in the country and it will only make you better in the long run.”
Both Ciencin and Marynard will be playing in the Cape Cod League this upcoming summer, the most highly ranked of the summer wood bat leagues. Players such as the Houston Astros’ Lance Berkman, the Tampa Bay Rays’ Evan Longoria, the New York Yankees’ Mark Teixeira and thousands of other college baseball players played in this distinguished league and have gone on to play professionally in the Major Leagues.
Maynard believes it will be a great opportunity for him and Ciencin to play against the best players in the nation.
“It is a great feeling getting asked to play out there,” Maynard said. “I just hope it is a great experience like last year and I am sure it will be. But it is just fun to be able to showcase your talents against the best players in the world. It will be a tough but great experience for me.”
The biggest adjustment the players must make as they move into playing in the summer league is that the players hit with wood bats and not aluminum like in the college season. Sophomore Harold Riggins credits some of his success at the plate this year to hitting with a wood bat last summer when he played for the Madison Mallards of the Northwoods League.
“It’s a bit tougher,” Riggins said. “Obviously hitting with a wood bat there is a smaller sweet spot. Hitting with aluminum is almost unfair with a person who has power, but just playing with wood allowed me to shorten my swing and not get so long.”
Even though the players don’t get to sit around and relax like their non-athletic peers, Maynard believes that the fact that he doesn’t have to focus on school and can just get into a rhythm focusing squarely on baseball is very important.
“Having no school is a big deal,” Maynard said. “I am not the type of person who enjoys school. I do what I have to, but don’t personally enjoy it. So being able to get up early lift, rest for a bit and get into a rhythm everyday really helps a lot.”
The summer leagues also provides both on and off the field a chance for players playing on different schools to play with each other and develop friendships between them. Sellers believes that this is one of the unique aspects that many people overlook in the summer leagues.
“It creates a unique experience in the fact that players can play with guys who may be on rival teams in college,” Sellers said. “Whether it’s on their own team or they make an All-Star team, it’s not uncommon for State guys to be able to play with guys from North Carolina. It just creates nice relationships that usually carry over past the summer.”
Regardless of records, the main focus for the players is to get better, according to redshirt senior catcher Chris Schaeffer. His belief has been backed as the catcher is having a career year at the plate hitting .366 at the plate while leading the team in home runs with nine.
“It was just a good experience on and off the field,” Schaeffer said. “It was a good opportunity for me to grow up a little bit and on the field I got to work on a lot of things. I worked on my swing, my defense. And it has worked out pretty well for me.”
