Mark Bennett
The Tribune-Star
TERRE HAUTE —
Too often, we assume students at the local colleges bide their time in Terre Haute, pick up their diplomas, sell their musty apartment couches, move away, and leave little behind.
Assumptions can be so wrong.
A recent Facebook message popped onto Anthony Veloso’s computer screen in Leicester, Mass., where the 32-year-old works as an assistant football coach at Becker College. A former Indiana State University classmate sent the note. Terre Haute was getting an organized baseball team, a Prospect League franchise, the Terre Haute Rex.
Veloso smiled.
That may baffle some Hauteans. After all, Veloso is a native New Yorker and a lifelong Yankees fan. He came to this small Midwestern town to get a master’s degree in recreation sports management, did so, then moved back east. Veloso gave something back to Terre Haute, though, before saying goodbye.
He and 10 other ISU students from progressive professor Ethan Strigas’ sports management classes spent the fall, winter and spring of 2005-06 researching a vexing local question: Can Terre Haute support its own minor-league baseball franchise once again? The last professionally organized team — the Class B Terre Haute Huts — folded on July 3, 1956.
The students crunched population, market and demographic numbers. They personally interviewed regular folks, civic and business leaders and local baseball enthusiasts. They traveled to cities with minor-league teams — Fort Wayne, Peoria, East St. Louis and Evansville — and spoke with club officials and mayors. They weighed the costs of building a new park or renovating old Sycamore Field. They phoned similar key figures in towns where minor-league franchises share facilities with local college teams in New Jersey, Nebraska and Pennsylvania. Finally, they compiled their findings into a 151-page feasibility study and unveiled it to Terre Haute during a public presentation on April 20, 2006.
Their bottom line, found on Page 6, was “that it is feasible to bring minor-league baseball to Terre Haute. It will take the effort of both the city and Indiana State University.”
Tonight, at 7:05, when the Rex debut against the Springfield Sliders at Bob Warn Field, those 11 students — wherever they are now — should feel a tiny dose of satisfaction. Their research got some ink in the national media. It got locals talking baseball, seriously. Most important, it gave self-esteem-challenged Terre Haute a valid reason to believe in itself.
“I hope the study in some way helped show the people there that it was possible,” Veloso said by phone from Massachusetts. “It’s great that they themselves made it happen. They deserve it.”
The ISU Foundation’s private subsidiary — Sycamore Foundation Holdings — put up the money to own the franchise. The team nickname, the Rex, comes from the Clabber Girl coffee brand of the same name, which dates back to 1905. The home ballpark — Bob Warn Field at Sycamore Stadium — is also home to the ISU baseball team, and recently underwent a $2.5-million makeover. Tonight, the Rex begin a 56-game, summertime schedule.
Like anything else in life, everything didn’t turn out exactly as the students planned. The Rex and other Prospect League players are not professional minor leaguers. They’re offseason collegians who are fed and housed by host families. By contrast, the ISU students studied Terre Haute’s possibilities of landing a franchise in either the Midwest League or Frontier League, using paid players. The students recommended a club in the independent Frontier League, because it would be cheaper than a major-league farm club in the Midwest League.
Still, the Rex embody the kind of organized, community-backed baseball franchise Veloso and his classmates envisioned. (The Prospect League bills itself as “the highest level of amateur baseball” in the country.)
“The study certainly helped make the case, from a marketing perspective, that some kind of professionally organized baseball team could be successful in the Wabash Valley,” said Gene Crume, president of the ISU Foundation. Local advocates of baseball’s return here, including ISU athletic director Ron Prettyman and former big-leaguer Brian Dorsett (now the Rex manager), helped the foundation understand how to realistically make it happen, Crume added.
Prettyman came to ISU from California the same year the students began their study. He pitched Terre Haute’s organized baseball possibilities from his first days on the job. The sports management students spent hours interviewing him and “talking about hopes and dreams,” recalled Prettyman, who continued to keep the concept alive.
“It’s been fun to see it, in a little bit different form, come into reality,” he added.
Certainly, numerous people played major roles in the difficult task of turning an idea — which has been bouncing around Terre Haute for years — into a genuine, day-to-day baseball club. But those 11 students (and a dozen others who assisted them) also rolled up their sleeves and built a case for those long-simmering “hopes and dreams” Prettyman described. They believed in this community.
“I’m happy for the town,” Veloso said.
Mark Bennett can be reached at (812) 231-4377 or mark.bennett@tribstar.com.
