Waverley Baseball Club has a rich history of players participating in the College Baseball programs in the United States of America.
As players reach the pinnacle of the junior baseball careers, pathways are available for either professional or college baseball. You may have seen in the Waverley Baseball Club “Tony Peek Pavilion”, the club has had many players go over to the USA and do well at the professional level.
What you may not be aware of is that Waverley BC has also had many players go over to the USA and have productive College Baseball careers, right back to 1982 when Phil Dale went to college in Georgia USA.
The College Baseball programs in the USA have approximately 34,500 players over 5 major associations, they then divide in to Divisions, 1, 2 3 and Junior/Community Colleges.
Division 1 colleges being the highest level where baseball talent needs to be matched with academic talent to get into the program and remain in the baseball team. The other divisions also play a high level of baseball and from personal experience can have 500 people watching a Division 2 game that is streamed with live statistics and full commentary. The rosters are equally impressive typically with up to 40 players to cater for the number of games they play in a season.
College Baseball is an option that not only enables young Australian Baseball Players to follow their baseball dream but at the right college enables them to obtain a college degree.
The College Baseball programs vary in size some with the huge budgets and massive facilities to the smaller programs either way you get to play a lot of baseball with full time baseball coaches.
As with the professional baseball, college baseball has intense training programs to get players ready rigours of intense baseball, as well as juggling the academic requirements to remain playing and achieving a tertiary education.
The technology has developed over the years, College Baseball is now streamed live which means that you can watch the young Aussie Baseballers play baseball, even though it might be 4 am in the morning sometimes.
We have compiled a list of the Waverley Baseball Players both past present who have played college baseball. If we have missed anyone please contact me so that I can make sure that the list is updated.
It is with immense pride and pleasure that we publish the list of Waverley Baseball Club USA College Players, some of the players we know that they played College Ball but we do not have their career details and again all information would be greatly appreciated.
Going forward we would like to reach out to all college players both past and present to participate in a questions and answers on their experiences in the USA to share with the Club.
As mentioned earlier the Club is proud of its college players and want them to remain part of the Club especially when they are so far away and would appreciate our support.
The best way we can do that is to watch their streamed games and reach out to them via social media.
We will endeavour to provide the details of the current players so that you can watch them play live or watch them later if you don’t want to get up so early.
In the last 12 months the Club had several players go to the USA to player college ball.
Whilst it left a big hole to fill in terms of the players not playing for Waverley, from a positive perspective it means that we now have families that can share their experiences with those players who may be looking to maybe also going over to the USA in the future.
Finally, a huge thank you to everyone who supplied the information to get this project up and going, our college players are another layer of the fabric that makes up our club they are and will always be Waverley Baseball Club Players.
Click here to see a list of our known college players (and please let us know if we have missed anybody or have any details wrong).
Robert Smart
