BB: CCIW: College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin

[Gregory Sager]

Preseason poll is out:

Team (First-place votes)	Points
1. Illinois Wesleyan (4)	56
2. Augustana (1)	49
T3. North Park (3)	46
T3. Millikin	46
5. Carthage (1)	43
6. North Central	30
7. Carroll	20
8. Wheaton	13
9. Elmhurst	12

[Gregory Sager]

Berea has canceled its multi-team array of ballgames this weekend due to pending inclement weather, so North Park's opening-weekend trip to Kentucky is off. The Vikings will now open their 2025 slate with what was originally planned to be a second foray into the Bluegrass State the weekend after next (Feb. 21-23), with games at Eastern Kentucky's stadium in Richmond, KY against Concordia (IL), Heidelberg, and Baldwin-Wallace.

Meanwhile, tomorrow Augustana will be the first CCIW team to take the field, as Augie will be in Memphis to take on Webster and host Rhodes, and then finish up there on Saturday with a game against Willamette, a team skippered by former North Park standout Mike Coduto. That Willamette game's a bit of a head-scratcher, though, because, while Rhodes shows that it will be played Saturday (the Rhodes website updated the weekend schedule a few hours ago), the Augie website shows that it will be played on Sunday, while the Willamette website shows that the entire weekend's worth of games at Rhodes has been canceled altogether.

The other CCIW team to take the field this weekend is Millikin. The Big Blue opens up with Saturday games in Conway, AR against Westminster (MO) and host Hendrix. On Sunday, Millikin finishes up in Arkansas with another game against Westminster (MO).

Thus, two teams start play this weekend; six more (Carroll, Carthage, Illinois Wesleyan, North Central, North Park, and Wheaton) open up the following weekend; and laggard Elmhurst finally begins its season on Saturday, March 1.

[Gregory Sager]

Augie opened the 2025 CCIW baseball season with a two-opponent doubleheader split in Memphis, losing to host Rhodes, 6-3, in the opener and then defeating Webster, 5-1, in the nightcap.

[BigPoppa]

Carthage opens their 2025 campaign at noon today vs Centre College in Kentucky, Augie Schmidt's 38th and final season. As usual, I'll be following every pitch as often as I can.

Last ride with The Chief. Let's Go, Boys!

[BigPoppa]

Well... that did NOT go as planned!

[mwunder]

Well... that did NOT go as planned!

Day 2 went much better.  Too many walks day 1 for sure. Can't put runners on for free.

[GU1999]

Watched the North Park game live on Sunday in Indiana.  Soph catcher Reyn Matsuzaki with two bombs in a close loss.  He really presented well behind the plate as well.  One of 10 Hawaiians on the team.  My wife, a former NPU employee, and I were blown away by that.  I am sure that someone knows the connection to Hawaii and we are curious.  Hawaii is a very baseball oriented, but very small state.  My wife posited that maybe the Coach Johnson gets a recruiting trip for he and his wife and the program covers it.  

[Gregory Sager]

Watched the North Park game live on Sunday in Indiana.  Soph catcher Reyn Matsuzaki with two bombs in a close loss.  He really presented well behind the plate as well.  One of 10 Hawaiians on the team.  My wife, a former NPU employee, and I were blown away by that.  I am sure that someone knows the connection to Hawaii and we are curious.  Hawaii is a very baseball oriented, but very small state.  My wife posited that maybe the Coach Johnson gets a recruiting trip for he and his wife and the program covers it.  

Nope. Luke's the only one who goes on recruiting trips; he and his wife have three kids at home, so there's no perqs for the missus.

North Park has had an influx of Hawaiians in recent years, and that includes students at large. The football and women's volleyball teams also have Hawaiians -- and they were recruited Hawaiians, not walk-ons. As you said, the Aloha State is a baseball hotbed that's very small, but for its size it has a large population (slightly less than a million and a half people). And with that many people residing on two geographically compact islands -- 85% of Hawaiians live either on Oahu or on the Big Island -- it makes recruiting more economical, because the reduced travel time means that you can see more players on your recruiting visit. Plus, the weather's conducive to year-round baseball, so you have more flexibility in terms of planning a recruiting visit there. Add in the fact that there's hardly any small schools there to keep Hawaiian players home rather than choosing schools on the mainland, and it's easy to see why it is indeed a recruiting hotbed ... and an apparently underserved hotbed, at that.

One of the fun things for me as North Park's sports broadcaster is that in the fall I get to thank all of the Swedish and Norwegian parents whose kids play on NPU's men's and women's soccer teams for waking up at 2 am to watch our home soccer broadcasts, and then in the spring I get to thank all of the Hawaiian parents whose kids play on the NPU baseball team for watching our games either over breakfast or (surreptitiously) right when they start their workday.

[mr_b]

Watched the North Park game live on Sunday in Indiana.  Soph catcher Reyn Matsuzaki with two bombs in a close loss.  He really presented well behind the plate as well.  One of 10 Hawaiians on the team.  My wife, a former NPU employee, and I were blown away by that.  I am sure that someone knows the connection to Hawaii and we are curious.  Hawaii is a very baseball oriented, but very small state.  My wife posited that maybe the Coach Johnson gets a recruiting trip for he and his wife and the program covers it.  

Greg may know the specifics, but I think it might have been a spillover from when the football team used to recruit heavily, and successfully, in American Samoa, Hawaii, and Guam.  One of the assistant coaches used to coach in Guam (I think) and had contacts there.  Perhaps he also spent some time talking with baseball prospects while he was on a Pacific trip.  Several years ago we had one baseball player from Samoa -- he never got any varsity time -- and an outfielder from Hawaii, who played on and off for four years.  After that, it might have been word of mouth and Zoom calls to Hawaiians who wanted to play ball in college but had very limited options to do so in their home state.

[Gregory Sager]

Watched the North Park game live on Sunday in Indiana.  Soph catcher Reyn Matsuzaki with two bombs in a close loss.  He really presented well behind the plate as well.  One of 10 Hawaiians on the team.  My wife, a former NPU employee, and I were blown away by that.  I am sure that someone knows the connection to Hawaii and we are curious.  Hawaii is a very baseball oriented, but very small state.  My wife posited that maybe the Coach Johnson gets a recruiting trip for he and his wife and the program covers it.  

Greg may know the specifics, but I think it might have been a spillover from when the football team used to recruit heavily, and successfully, in American Samoa, Hawaii, and Guam.  One of the assistant coaches used to coach in Guam (I think) and had contacts there.  Perhaps he also spent some time talking with baseball prospects while he was on a Pacific trip.  Several years ago we had one baseball player from Samoa -- he never got any varsity time -- and an outfielder from Hawaii, who played on and off for four years.  After that, it might have been word of mouth and Zoom calls to Hawaiians who wanted to play ball in college but had very limited options to do so in their home state.

The football assistant coach in question actually used to coach in American Samoa. I suppose that the football connection may be a part of why NPU baseball has developed such a strong pipeline to Hawaii in recent years, since for cost reasons (round-trip flights to American Samoa cost an arm and a leg) the Vikings football program under former head coach Mike Conway started to augment Samoan recruiting by dipping into the large Samoan population in Hawaii rather than making more than one trip to Samoa every year. It was a sound economic decision, given that the Samoan diaspora is just as football-crazed as they are on "Football Island", as people sometimes call Tutuila (the main island in American Samoa, where 95% of the people live).

But I'm not really sure that it's anything more than a coincidence. After all, Mike Conway and his coaching staff left NPU in 2018, and the first Hawaiian player that Luke Johnson recruited to come to the Park to play baseball, Ryan Moritsugu, arrived in 2019 and was Japanese-Hawaiian, not Samoan-Hawaiian. Either way, I think that the lion's share of the credit goes to Luke for doing his research and astutely coming to the conclusion that Hawaii was a great place to create a new recruiting footprint for NPU baseball, for the reasons I mentioned earlier.

My hope is that this recruiting trend will expand beyond baseball, football, and women's volleyball, and that Hawaii can become for North Park sports what Colorado is for Augustana sports. We'll know for sure that it's happened once they start serving Spam in the Magnuson Campus Center dining hall.

[GU1999]

Thank you for the information.  February snow games have to be a wild if your world is calabrated to 300+ days a year of 82 and sunny. 

[Gregory Sager]

Thank you for the information.  February snow games have to be a wild if your world is calabrated to 300+ days a year of 82 and sunny. 

The wonderful thing about Hawaiian kids is that they are all steeped in the Aloha spirit, as symbolized by the shaka ("hang loose") sign:



It's basically a stand-in for "Right on," "Thank you," "Things are great," or "Take it easy." Hawaiians as a group are the most easygoing people I've ever met. It's an entire culture built around a glass-half-full attitude towards life. I've yet to see a Viking student-athlete from Hawaii who didn't return to North Park as a sophomore after spending their first winter in frigid Chicago. You ask them about the winters here, and they'll all say, "Well, it's something different, something new to experience," or "Hey, it just makes you enjoy springtime here even more," or "I don't mind it, because we're all in the same boat and it's a great team-bonding experience to play in weather this cold." They're as relentlessly positive as they are congenial, and I for one think it's great. The more Hawaiians we have on campus, the better, as far as I'm concerned.

Then again, you and I would probably have better attitudes, too, if we'd grown up in the closest thing to Paradise this world has to offer.

[BigPoppa]

This seems like a baseball trip to the Hawaiian Islands could be in the future for the Vikings. Would be great for those kids to get to play in front their home state family and friends.

[Gregory Sager]

This seems like a baseball trip to the Hawaiian Islands could be in the future for the Vikings. Would be great for those kids to get to play in front their home state family and friends.

Would be great for their play-by-play broadcaster to go with them to call the games as well.

[cubs]

Carthage opens their 2025 campaign at noon today vs Centre College in Kentucky, Augie Schmidt's 38th and final season. As usual, I'll be following every pitch as often as I can.

Last ride with The Chief. Let's Go, Boys!

Not sure if you saw this BP, but I definitely thought of you when your former teammate passed this onto me!  (Yes, I know it's outdated, but for old guys like me I just saw it for the first time last week!  )

https://www.instagram.com/dodgersnation/reel/C-3jJ-DyE2n/?hl=en