Kings of the Diamond

By Casey Michel     4/10/08 7:00pm

At Rice, it is not difficult to see what reigns as king between the hedges: baseball. With just a glimpse of the Reckling Park scoreboard,piercing the night's humidity with its smoky blue "R's," anyone can see the varsity baseball team's ownership of the campus. Not many college teams can boast a slogan sans proper grammar - "Rice Baseball, 'Nuff Said" - and get away with it, nor can many hoist a National Championship banner to the same level as the Texas State Flag.It is kind of an exclusive club, to say the least.

So when Steve Bryant, Russell Kampe, Jake Schornick and Ben Saidman, all seniors at different colleges, decided to throw their collective weight behind a club baseball team in the fall of 2005, skepticism abounded. Not only did Rice offer only a very small pool of potential candidates to draw from - all the best players were members of the dominant varsity squad, after all - but the four also had no idea whether their team would even have a field to play on or funds to support it.

And yet, four years later, club baseball has overcome both financial and personal constraints to thrive in the Houston heat. No longer scrounging the bottom of the barrel to put a team together, the team boasts a two-person deep roster in addition to its distinct Nike-sponsored threads. On the diamond, the Owls are no longer the doormats of the National Club Baseball Association like they were in 2005: On March 29, Rice downed Texas A&M University 2-1 in College Station, Texas, to hand the former national champions their first loss in 15 meetings between the two teams. And the senior leadership, which will be departing once the graduation bells ring in May, can safely say the team is no longer in dire straits. However, the road to success had its share of curveballs, especially in the team's formative years.

---

---

Growing pains

Following a baseball career at Houston's Memorial High School, Bryant entered Rice with designs for a club baseball team already in the works. Soon, with some calls to the NCBA headquarters - and a couple well-placed flyers - Bryant cobbled together a group that could have been taken straight out of The Sandlot. All different sizes, ages and skill levels greeted Bryant in the team's first meeting, but this was to be expected. The sheer number of people, however, took Bryant completely aback.

"I wasn't expecting many people, [but] probably 40 people showed up with an interest in baseball," Bryant, a member of Sid Richardson College, remembered. "It was a lot more than I had expected. I was kind of overwhelmed, but there was a lot of interest, and I started putting the pieces together."

But this impressive display of interest was quickly tempered by the realization of Rice's academic rigors, and as the season commenced that fall, membership remained dedicated, but sparse at best.

The select few who hung on were rewarded for their efforts with playing time, but since fielding a full squad stretched the team's resources, some of Rice's lack of previous experience shone through.

"Those first couple years it was people who just wanted to play ball [but] who maybe hadn't played since Little League, or who hadn't played at all," Kampe said. "[The team] was rough around the edges. I think we won two games that year, but we had a good time."

Kampe was no exception to that observation - he had not played on an organized team since his middle school days.

Adding to the Owls' motley image were the patchwork outfits they sported during the games. The sole piece of "uniform" attire was an uncomplicated, navy blue T-shirt, featuring an "R" on the right breast and a number splashed across the back. The ragtag team wore all different shades of pants and cleats, giving them a haphazard aura - the poor kids on the block who every other team could steamroll.

And for a while, every team did. The losses piled on, and while the team trudged through the season, the remaining few loyalists were hamstrung with injuries and fatigue. As Schornick, who had heard of the team during a softball LPAP with Kampe, pointed out, the exhausted and bleary-eyed players could only be expected to do so much for the team.

"The second game of the weekend we'd be begging guys to come out to play because people would be sore, we would get run-ruled - no one would have any fun," Schornick said. "It was really hard to get people to come back."

It turned out that all it took for the stragglers to finally latch on was nothing more than one of the most dramatic, tiring wins Rice club baseball has ever earned.

Finally seeing victory

If the players felt fatigued during the season's infancy, they were nearly catatonic when the series against the University of North Texas rolled around. However, it was not the nine innings of evening ball which drained the winless Owls; rather, it was because the first game took place the evening of Beer-Bike 2006 that the players had no semblance of energy.

After a day replete with water balloons and bike racing, arms were hanging as Rice took the field against the Mean Green. Fortunately, then-Wiess freshman Yaw Temeng showed up with the reserve not commonly seen in a game with as little fanfare - or hope - as that day.

Miraculously, the Owls exited the seventh-inning stretch clinging to a 2-1 lead. But just when it seemed that Rice could finally see the light at the end of the tunnel, it went out - literally.

"We get out there and we're tired as hell, but we have a really good pitcher on the mound and somehow we all get into the game," Bryant explained. "[Then] the lights were off for a good 30 minutes and came off mid-pitch, so we were afraid that we were going to have to cancel the game. And it was pretty cutthroat, because we were up by one, and we were worried that we wouldn't have the same dynamic [if the game was postponed]."

In the end, Bryant's fears were unrealized - a quick call to the park maintenance corps took care of the darkness trapping both squads, and after 30 minutes, the lights were back on. However, the seventh inning's drama was not over, for one decision was left to be made.

"[The coaches] were just two guys who were trying to have fun or whatever, and while they're coaching our game, one of them just had a cigar the whole time in the dugout," Bryant recalled. "In the seventh inning, he said, 'Hey, I'm going to go to the store. You guys want some beer?' We kind of look up at him [and say,] 'Beer? We're playing a sport.' So he says, 'Gatorade? Or beer?' When we don't respond, he says, 'OK, I'll go get both.'"

Since the "coaches" - two local volunteers who eventually parted ways with team - elected to make the decision, the players were free to focus on the game. And as the final out was tallied in the ninth inning, Rice club baseball's first win entered the record books.

The weariness the Owls felt the morning after was comparable to the aftereffects of a successful Vegas outing, but it could not stop the team from an encore. Although the Mean Green batted around for a win in the first game of the day's double-header, then-junior pitcher Dan Perez (Sid Rich '07) kept Rice within a run entering the bottom of the final inning. Rarely does a pitcher get the chance to redeem himself with a bat; rarer still does a pitcher have a walk-off hit. But in keeping with the theme of that weekend, the unlikely happened - with Bryant stuck at third and Schornick sitting on second, Perez roped a double into left field, plating the runners and clinching the improbable 3-2 win for the Owls.

Nurturing consistency

With the experience of success firmly under their belts, the Owls set their sights in the following seasons on greater consistency and the growth of team cohesiveness. While the first practices of each season remained the most populated, subsequent drop-off was not nearly as dramatic as in the inaugural season. Soon, the team showcased a lineup brimming in both numbers and talent, as well as the unused uniforms of the varsity team - although those jerseys were usually of the XXL variety.

Schornick, who walked on to the varsity baseball team as a catcher but was later cut because of financial constraints, said that while the wins remained few, the team gelled through both commitment and, unfortunately, struggles.

"First and foremost, guys showing up to practice consistently [helped]," the Wiess college senior observed. "Playing together, turning double plays in practice - it's huge, just getting used to each other. It's a whole other level to team camaraderie. We've gone through so many losses and so many practices, and guys [have] been out here loss after loss. It's an 'adversity builds character' deal."

The Aggie adversary

Though the talent level had risen considerably since those days of uniform uncertainty, one thing had not changed: Every time Rice played Texas A&M, a team that had 150 people show up to club baseball tryouts in 2007, the Owls would lose. Badly.

So when the team took its caravan to College Station, Texas, on March 29, they were only grasping at faint strands of hope that they might finally make it their year. After the first two games of the series ended with the Owls on the black-and-blue side of run-rule bruisings, any chance of grabbing an elusive win looked as unlikely as ever. Only one chance remained for the team to earn a win for the seniors.

Apparently, that was all the momentum it took, because in one of the school's greatest upsets since the 1994 football victory over the University of Texas, Rice came out on top. The defense was fluid, the hitting was timely, and the pitching was worthy of a look from Wayne Graham. The game-changing moment pitted junior Leo Carter on the hill against a hulking, 250 lb. former Division I recruit with the bases loaded. Showcasing a knee-buckling curveball, Carter whiffed the batter to preserve the slim lead.

"[We] hit the ball well, didn't make any errors, ended up pulling out a real tough one," sophomore Matt Weingast, the team's new president, said. "We executed everywhere we needed to. They had a lot of people there, and it was great. You could tell they didn't expect it. They were pretty frustrated - it kind of felt good."

The nail-biter moved the Owls to 3-3 on the year and was sweet justification for the seniors, who had endured a 14-game losing streak at the hands of Texas A&M.

"That [win] cements the fact that we're a lot more competitive of a team," Bryant stated. "That we were able to pull one win out of it was, you could say, a milestone, and shows that we've been improving every year."

Saying goodbye

Maybe you've seen them on the Intramural Fields, tossing the baseball around like the campus Goliaths many mistake them for. Maybe you've seen them post-game at Fuddruckers, the script "Rice" emblazoning their once bleach-white jerseys dirtied by a home-plate hook slide. But after this year, you will no longer see the originals. Diplomas beckon, and soon those who got the wheels of the team moving will, like the Brooklyn Dodgers or New York Giants of old, be gone.

For Schornick, the future looks bright, but he gives all the credit to Bryant.

"We've got a core of leaders in position now, which is huge because Steve has done so much," Schornick said. "Steve deserves so much credit for getting this thing off the ground and keeping it going, but now we've got other guys stepping up. ...Look at it this way - last year, I was eighth in the nation in batting average. This year, Steve and I are both having our worst years, but the team has its best record. That speaks volumes about the kind of guys we have out here - the kind of guys who fight, who go up there swinging, who aren't intimidated by guys who have transferred from Division I baseball to play club baseball at A&M."

The future of Rice club baseball is in safe hands, and as those who started the team now leave the campus, it is clear that baseball is still king at Rice. But the crown, so long located solely at Reckling Park, is now shared.

---