From Club to Sport: Baseball Competes
Mary Freeman, Staff Reporter

Changes are in full swing this year for CSU Monterey Bay's baseball team.

From a new baseball field to new rules about cutting players, the team is growing and transforming much like the rest of the campus.

Although the team has been a part of the National Collegiate Athletic Association for three years, this is the team's first year as a full member. Under Title IX, full member teams can have only 35 players at any given time. This means that for the first year in CSUMB baseball history the team will be cut down to 35 players.

The first year as NCAA members, the coaches did not cut any players. The second year the team was cut down to 49 players and only 35 were “dressed” for the field. The 14 players that were not “dressed” were able to practice with the team, but they could not be in uniform and could not play on game days.

Head Coach Rich Aldrete stated that the new requirement has really, “raised the level of competition amongst the players.”

Assistant Coach James Walker agreed that while he does not like to cut players, it is imperative in order to keep competition up. Junior and Kinesiology major, Justin Rios, who has been with the team for three years, felt that not cutting players can establish a sense of entitlement throughout the team, especially for returning players who feel that they should automatically get their same positions.

Rios, continued, “it's a more competitive atmosphere. You concentrate a lot more and you don't take things for granted because you don't know if you're going to play.”

The newly acquired sense of competition could not come at a better time being that this is the first year that CSUMB is eligible to make it to NCAA playoffs. Rios stated, “we're one of the top teams in DII [Division II of NCAA], this year I think we're definitely going to step it up.”

The new change in policy will make CSUMB's baseball team more like college teams nationwide. Every team in the NCAA must cut down to 35 players. According to a statistic found at www.hsbaseballweb.com/probability only 5.6 percent of male high school seniors will go on to play at the NCAA level.

Dan Barras, Kiniesiology major, commented about cutting players from the team, “they've accepted it. That's how every other program does it.”