It’s called the “next level” in sports, whatever level you’re talking about.
And it’s worth looking at right now when thinking about who goes where and why. We started thinking about it a bit more this spring when we caught Northern Kentucky University baseball and the Florence Y’alls in back-to-back appearances.
It hit us then how a couple of the Norse finishing up their college baseball careers would fit in perfectly on the independent Florence minor league team. We’re talking about shortstop Noah Fischer, the Player of the Year in the Horizon League, a five-tool player who can hit, hit with power, run, throw and catch it.
Also a plus at the “next level” would be Victoria, British Columbia native Jayden Wakeham, a talented catcher who has been here for five years and plans to stay here. Call this pair honorary Northern Kentuckians.
Not a bad idea, we think, for the Y’alls to build up even more of a local following with their roster that now shows just one Kentuckian – Ray Zuberer from Owensboro Catholic and Western Kentucky University – and a trio of Greater Cincinnatians – Mason’s Rodney Hutchinson, Liberty Townships’ Tommy Siemer and New Richmond’s Zade Richardson – on a 28-man roster. The Y’alls come from 14 states, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic, with a manager who calls Lisbon, Portugal, home.
But getting us to the next part of the “next level” analysis, we ask why just three of the 36 roster spots on NKU baseball were occupied by native Northern Kentuckians this spring. Seems like there should be more for Northern Kentucky’s major institution of higher education.
And we know the talk has always been that NKU won’t waste baseball scholarships on local kids because they’ll just end up back here eventually as transfers. That’s the path starters Adam Schneider, an outfielder from Covington Catholic by way of New Mexico, and Carson Werrmann, a pitcher from Campbell County by way of Centre College, both took.
Only all-league infielder John Odom, a Beechwood alum, started his college career in Highland Heights.
But when you see top talents like Beechwood’s Cameron Boyd, the state’s top home run hitter, and Highlands’ shortstop Jack Hendrix, both leaving town to head to Southern Indiana, you wonder why. Both could certainly play at NKU.
By contrast, a quick look at the 24 players listed on the Thomas More baseball roster for next season has 19 of them from within commuting distance in Greater Cincinnati with five of those 19 from Northern Kentucky.
The pattern continues in basketball. Nine of TMU’s 13 men’s basketball players for next season reside within commuting distance, eight from Northern Kentucky. At NKU, the numbers show three Northern Kentuckians among the five Greater Cincinnatians on the 17-man roster.
For the women’s teams, there’s less of a difference. NKU’s women have two Northern Kentuckians on their 13-player basketball roster, and two more from Greater Cincinnati. Thomas More’s three-time national finalist Saints, with one NAIA national championship to their credit the last three seasons, have four Northern Kentuckians, with eight of the 12-player roster from commuting territory.
Those numbers got us interested in exactly how the two schools’ complete athletic rosters break down so we did the math.
For its 15 sports teams and 260 athletes listed, NKU has 43 Northern Kentuckians on the Norse rosters.
Thomas More, with 23 teams in NCAA and intercollegiate sports, lists 382 total athletes with 100 of them calling Northern Kentucky home.
By percentage, NKU has 16.5 percent of its athletes from Northern Kentucky while TMU has 26.2 percent of its athletes from local high schools. Three NKU teams – men’s soccer and men’s and women’s tennis have no Northern Kentuckians among their 33 athletes. At TMU, women’s lacrosse and men’s volleyball – not a sanctioned KHSAA sport – have no locals among their listed 26 athletes.
We’ll go into explaining and detailing all of this in our next column. It’s fascinating stuff where, why, and who our local schools recruit.
We could go on here about getting to the “next level” when it comes to grade school kids. One of the most momentous choices in Northern Kentucky history came when basketball-baseball star Bob Arnzen went from Ft. Thomas to Cincinnati St. Xavier and led the Bombers to a 25-point win over a No. 1-in-Ohio Lima Shawnee team in the state tournament semifinals and the thousands of administrators that day at Ohio State’s St. Johns Arena decided to disallow out-of-state freshmen to play sports in Ohio.
Then after a carpool load of Villa Hills Spartans decided to head over to Moeller to play football for Gerry Faust, Ohio shortsightedly extended the rule, making all Kentucky kids across the board ineligible for their entire careers, a decision that stands to this day. As a Kentucky athlete myself, who commuted from Northern Kentucky to Cincinnati and played football and baseball at St. X, the powers-that-be in Ohio could not have gotten this more wrong.
At least Kentucky hasn’t followed suit and has always been more welcoming to commuters like Covington Latin’s David Justice, a Cincinnatian, who went from Thomas More basketball to major league baseball stardom.
There was an earlier example of a cross-river athlete with the freedom to cross the Ohio. Back in 1948, Taylor Mill’s Ron Beagle rode his bike to Cincinnati’s Purcell High School so he could play football in those days before CovCath and Holy Cross offered the sport. All he did was go on to win All-American honors at the Naval Academy as well as the 1954 Maxwell Award as the nation’s top college football player. Little more than a decade later, Roger Staubach would follow that same path from Purcell to All-American to the Maxwell Award.
And yeah, we’re in favor of young people able to make the choice for what school suits them and their talents the best. Although we’re very much not in favor of recruiting at the high school level. Unless you’re talking about the student recruiting the school they want to attend.
And yes, we know that the schools around here that have done the best in sports over the years – Highlands, CovCath and Beechwood — will always hear the recruiting charge.
Mark us down in favor of recruiting, however, when it’s local and when it comes to NKU, TMU and the Y’alls.
Dan Weber writes a sport column for the Northern Kentucky Tribune. Contact him at dweber3440@aol.com. And follow him @dweber3440 on twitter.