Back to the future with Boise State baseball

Baseball is back at Boise State with a packed crowd showing up for the first home game of the year. It’s been 40 years since Boise State dropped the sport, and those who played on the Bronco diamond assumed it was gone forever. But on Friday, Feb. 28, the Broncos came back with a string of homestand wins that weekend. In true Bronco fashion, for that first home game in years, former players lined up single file and walked into the stadium to the acclaim of the crowd.

The decision to travel “back to the future” and reinstate Boise State baseball has its origins at a Mountain West presidents’ meeting in California when the Fresno State baseball team was competing in the NCAA finals that year. The president of Fresno State invited his fellow presidents to join him at a playoff game the evening of the meeting.

When we arrived at the stadium, the place was rocking. Fans were out in full support of the Fresno State Bulldogs. It was impossible to follow sports news up and down the West Coast without reading about Fresno State stepping up to the plate in the NCAA baseball playoffs.

At the time, Boise State was in the process of ramping up its academic and athletic profile, thanks in large part to a 2007 Fiesta Bowl win that attracted increasing numbers of students from across the American West, including many Idaho students who discovered a new and much improved Boise State. From the size of the Fresno fan base and the visibility the Bulldogs earned on the sports page, baseball appeared to be yet another important strategy for using athletics to improve the overall profile of Boise State.

Back on campus, creating an additional men’s sport would not be an easy call. The Office of Civil Rights keeps a watchful eye on Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 and any athletic program that violates the important and required balance between men’s and women’s sports. The University of Oregon found out the hard way when they added men’s baseball but had to drop the men’s wrestling program to maintain equity in its sports programming. Most unfortunately for the wrestling program, which was struggling at the time, Boise State would discover that dropping wrestling was its only route to adding baseball.

It was a tough decision and, justifiably so, given its winning record over the years. Thanks to Athletic Director Curt Apsey and his staff, wrestlers were assured they could keep their scholarships or staff would assist them in transferring to other programs where they could compete. Some would choose to move on and some would elect to use their scholarships toward their degree progress.

Meanwhile, the challenge of building a baseball team was underway. Heralded as the national pastime, baseball is deeply ingrained in the sports psyche of the nation. In recent years, college and university teams are often the first stop on the journey to the Majors, even though the percentage of players making it to the big leagues is still very small. With many talented high school baseball players leaving the Treasure Valley to play Division I baseball elsewhere, local baseball fans yearned for the day when Bronco baseball could give local talent the opportunity to play before hometown crowds as Broncos.

With Major League Baseball intent on reducing the number of minor league teams and currently in contentious negotiations with minor league owners, NCAA baseball appears to have a bright future as some minor league clubs disappear and college baseball likely fills the void. The timing was perfect for Boise State baseball’s return as a popular spectator sport in the Treasure Valley. An early win for the new Bronco baseball team was the hiring of Gary Van Tol, whose coaching experience in minor league baseball and years of experience in Treasure Valley baseball seemed like the perfect fit for both the coach and the baseball Broncos.

Bronco baseball also made sense from the standpoint of conference play. The Mountain West welcomed Boise State’s baseball program since eight of the 11 Mountain West members play baseball. Unfortunately, the Mountain West did not have wrestling competition, so Bronco wrestlers competed in the Pac-12 even though some of the teams were not regular Pac-12 competition, and rumors were rampant that the Pac-12 would drop wrestling, leaving Boise State to find yet another conference affiliation other than the Mountain West.

Baseball, on the other hand, is a popular and thriving Pac-12 sport. With rumors over the years that the Pac-12 may expand during the next conference realignment phase, Boise State is always on the short list of possible invitees, especially since achieving doctoral-research status by the Carnegie Foundation. If or when that day comes, the Pac-12 will be looking closely at how Bronco sports align with Pac-12 sports programs where 11 of the 12 teams in the conference play baseball.

A few years ago, the NCAA board of trustees held a “behind-closed-doors” meeting to hear from Major League Baseball about concerns over the increasing numbers of players from other countries and the decline in American baseball players, especially African-Americans. The discussion centered around the majors offering funding for more scholarships for Division I baseball players to achieve higher rates of participation by American players in Major League Baseball. The gist of the meeting was the concern that baseball could hardly remain the national pastime if young Americans were not participating as they did in yesteryear.

Bronco baseball gives colleges players one more opportunity to compete in Division I baseball, and it may also play a small role in assuring that baseball remains the national pastime. What’s more American than that?