Something from nothing: How the Cabrini baseball team was formed

Come spring time, a bunch of men wearing caps, cleats and leather gloves on their non-dominant hand will be walking out of a dugout with letters that spell the word “Cabrini” across their chests. For the first time ever, Cabrini will have their very own baseball team and they will be looking to make noise right away.

“I think with what we have from a team leadership standpoint within the team, I think we have enough to squeak into that CSAC tournament and maybe make some noise and shake it up a little bit being the new team,” Cabrini’s first ever baseball head coach, Nick Weisheipl, said. “That’s our goal; to get into the CSAC tournament any way we can and from there see what happens.”

The long arduous process of the baseball team’s inception on campus started about three years ago said the director of athletics and recreation Brad Koch. According to Koch, “for a team to be added on campus, the director of athletics would need to construct a detailed analysis and justification of why a team should be added to the school.”

From there, the information is shared with the vice president for student life to outline the impact on the facilities and personnel needed to make it a reality. After that, Title IX laws, campus life, budget, enrollment and retention all need to be taken into account and looked at. Lastly, the president of the Univesity would need to give the okay before the process goes any further.

“There are a whole lot of things that have to be done (before adding a team),” Dr. Christine Lysionek, Cabrini’s vice president of student life, said. The first thing the school would need to do is feel out the interest level on the campus.

Cabrini has historically had a lot of student interest in baseball. While there was club baseball on and off for a long time on Cabrini’s campus, there was a lot of research needing to be done on that topic.

A real Cabrini baseball team, however, “wasn’t always possible for a few reasons,” according to Lysionek.

The first obstacle in the school’s way was the NCAA’s gender equality rules. A school’s participation in athletics must correspond with the gender diversity of an institution. Cabrini is a school that’s student body is 63% female according to U.S. News. With that number, adding a baseball team with 30 members would make the school’s gender equality go in the complete opposite direction of where it is needed to be. So if the school was going to add a baseball team, they were going to have to look at their women’s sports and see if they could do any finagling there.

The school also had to take a look at their athletic building, the Dixon Center. The building was opened back in 1998. Due to how the sports programs at Cabrini have grown in the past 18 years, as well as the amount the student body as a whole has grown, the school began discussing a Dixon Center remodel a few years ago.

Another issue was the fact that there was not enough land on campus to build a baseball field. “We were kind of landlocked too,” Lysionek said. “We do have some open land, but it’s on the big slope, so they are really not build-able”

When the board of trustees for the school was given the proposal, documenting the school’s needs, growth of programs and Title IX work around gender equality, the board realized there was a big need for a Dixon Center expansion. Not just for athletics, but for the student body as well. They eventually approved it and agreed to make its addition.

Luckily for Cabrini, their partnership with Archbishop Carroll High School for the school’s dual credit program that allows Carroll students to come take courses at the college became a building block for a potential baseball field arrangement. The field’s location, just six minutes away from the University’s campus by car, was one of the main reasons why the school proceeded to continue negotiations with the high school. The schools eventually reached an agreement, one that would have both schools invest in the field and put in a new locker room area and offices for the Cavaliers coaches.

The next step of the process was to cost it out. Expenses, revenue and team cost, among other factors, went into the total number. While Cabrini athletics wouldn’t disclose the financial obligation to Loquitur, we could imagine it came at a heavy cost.  All of this had to go through the board of trustees as well.

In this whole process, interest for women’s rowing emerged, which helped address the gender balance issue. At the end of the day, “without the Pavilion addition, we wouldn’t have been able to do it,” Lysionek said.

So when that was all said and done, and Cabrini University’s President Dr. Donald Taylor gave his approval of the team, the athletics department went full speed ahead into the process of finding their head coach. That’s when they hired Coach Weisheipl.

“We conducted a national search that consisted of multiple phone and on-campus interviews,” Koch said. “Nick’s coaching experience, philosophy, short-term and long-term goals for the program check marked all the boxes we were looking for.”

Coach Weisheipl was an assistant coach at West Chester University for the past two seasons and prior to that, he was Villanova’s pitching coach and recruiting coordinator. While his new gig will be the first one in which he will be the head coach of an NCAA team, Weisheipl was the head coach of the Division II Notre Dame College in Cleveland, Ohio of the NAIA (National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics).

Weisheipl also has experience coaching some very prestigious players, as he coached Detroit Tigers pitcher Jordan Zimmermann and Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim outfielder, Kole Calhoun when he coached in the Northwoods Summer Collegiate League for three seasons, according to Cabrini’s press release.

“I think when we hired coach Weisheipl, excitement kind of went through the roof,” David Howell, Cabrini’s sports information director said. “He’s got an incredible baseball background, locally coaching at Villanova and West Chester. He’s coached guys in the majors, he’s coached some really high-level summer leagues, he played professionally in Europe, but he’s got an incredible track record and knows a lot of people so I think that raises the excitement.”

Coach Nick Weisheipl and his staff were very active in the recruiting process, going all over the east coast to different showcases, tournaments and other various recruiting events, searching for talent and character.

“We evaluated talent and found guys that I felt would be a good fit for what we are trying to develop here as a program, so the character and makeup of a player was really crucial in what we were looking for as well,” coach Weisheipl said.

“I was at a showcase (in New Jersey) and coach Weisheipl came and he talked to me and three other players and after that, I went on a visit and then in the late summer, I decided to commit,” freshman outfielder Jamal Lamar said.

“I had no idea what Cabrini was until coach Weisheipl called me in November and I just so happened to answer the phone call, and all it took was that one phone call. I took a visit here in June or July and it was the first visit I took out of five and I decided this was the place I wanted to be,” junior transfer and starting pitcher Ryan Givens said. Givens is a Miami native who played his junior college baseball at Illinois Central College in East Peoria, Illinois. This kind of reach by Weisheipl and his staff is impressive, especially for a first-year program.

The roster, as expected before the recruiting process, will be filled with freshmen.

“Although the bulk of our roster are freshman, we do have a couple junior college kids in the mix, a couple four-year transfers as well, so we do have some experience already on the roster which I think is going to give us an opportunity to be relevant and competitive right away,” Weisheipl said.

Chemistry and leadership in a locker room is key to a team’s success, or lack thereof, in sports. Generally, when a team’s freshman class joins the club, the veteran group of players in the room who have been with the team for a while would set that culture and the tone, almost by default. This situation is completely different with the team just beginning to form from scratch.

“We have thirty-something guys on the team and 25 to 28 of them are freshmen, so you have to realize that not everyone thinks the same as you as far as of baseball, school work, tendencies, where they hang out, what they do, so you just gotta try and mesh it all together. Being one of the older guys, that’s one of our responsibilities.” junior catcher Vince Gares, who is also a transfer from Burlington County College said. His brother, Nick, is a freshman at Cabrini and is on the baseball team as well.

Vince Gares acknowledged that the team needs to hang out and do things together off the field to gain and build chemistry. This seems to be a common theme among the players and it also seems to be something that is currently being acted upon.

“I could say for certain that Ryan Givens and Vince Gares, since they’re upperclassman and the rest of us are freshmen, I’d say they took over the leadership role and they have been doing a good job of keeping us together, making sure that we’re really a team and doing team stuff or good things together,” Jamal Lamar said.

Playing pickup football games, going to dinner together, playing video games, soccer, or a number of other things are great ways to build team chemistry, and it seems that the Cavaliers are beginning to do that. This will go a long way for the club, as it’s nearly impossible to win games without chemistry.

“Big picture wise, I think the younger guys are starting to buy into the concept of what we are trying to do here. It’s hard when you have 30 guys who have never played together and are all very young to come in and try to buy into one thing,” Givens said. “With baseball, whatever works for you is the way you go about things. I’d say it’s taken a little longer than we wanted it to, but I think guys are starting to realize what it’s gonna take to get this thing done and each day it gets better just by doing the little things.”

Coach Weisheipl has said numerous times since being hired that while he wants his team to be known for their success on the field, he also wants them to be known for their character and their success off the field as well.

Weisheipl’s coaching track record shows both of these to be true. When he coached at Notre Dame College in Cleveland, Ohio, his teams not only finished with back to back winning seasons–the only two back to back winning seasons in school history according to Cabrini Athletics, but with a cumulative GPA of 3.0 as well.

When talking about his team’s style of play, Weisheipl talked about how well his team is going to be able to create offense.

“We are going to be a team that’s able to create offense even if we’re not hitting, we are going to have an understanding of how to create offense from basically nothing, and that’s something that my teams have been good at in the past,” Weisheipl said. “I think that’s why my career win-loss record in one run games is really good because my teams were always good in those situations where we could create that extra run out of the running game, bunt game, just being very conscious of how to do that.”

His players seem to agree with that assessment of their team.

“First and foremost I think that everyone brings something different to the team,” Lamar said. “I’d say we have speed and we do have some pop, but I wouldn’t say we’d be known for home runs or slugging, but I could definitely see us hitting a few this year.”

“Strength-wise right now, I think might be our bats. I think we have a lot of guys that can hit,” Givens agreed. “I think we can also play small ball, lay down a couple of bunts and make the defense work on the other side.”

Vince Gares explained it best when he made a big league comparison. “I think we are a bunch of guys like the (Kansas City) Royals,” Gares said. “We are scrappy, we are all young, we’re energetic, we like to have fun. It took them a little while to get together but when they all bought into each other and realized that there is no star, wouldn’t have that one guy who throws high 90’s, we don’t have that guy who just hits home runs. When we put it together we could be a real force but we gotta learn that every guy does their job and that’s how we will come together.”

The Cavalier’s offensive game-plan could also be furthered by the fact that they will play at a newly renovated ballpark that is very offense-friendly.

“We will have some big boppers in (the lineup) as well,” Weisheipl said. “Our field is going to be an offensive-oriented field, so we will have some guys that can slug it out of the park as well. That’s certainly a nice aspect of the game that we can bring to the table.”

You would expect a team that is rooting from the ground right before our eyes to be one which would hope to just tread water and get their feet wet, but with the way the Cavaliers have been built so far this offseason, the players and the coaching staff feel like they have high expectations and standards to meet, not just externally, but by themselves as well.

“Our expectation is, even though we are a first-year team and we have talked about this after every practice, it’s to win a championship, so that’s what we are working towards. We have other small goals we wanna accomplish of course before we meet that big goal, but we are just gonna take it day by day and keep working,” Lamar said. “If you walk down that hallway and you see all the banners and all the titles that everyone has won, and Cabrini kind of controls the CSAC, so for us in baseball’s first year that’s what we wanna do,” Givens said. “Is it gonna be easy? No. But I like the fact that we are coming in, nobody knows anything about us, we all have something to prove and kind of show them that we are capable of winning.”

Givens continued, “I’d love to say we will win the national title this year. Is it gonna happen? Who knows? I don’t know, we haven’t played a game yet but think our main goal is to take it a game at a time, win each at-bat, win each inning, take it day by day and see what happens.”

Cabrini Cavaliers baseball has come a long way over the past few months since the team’s inception was approved by the board of trustees. But even with all the work the team has done so far to get to this point, coach Weisheipl and his team know that the building of a champion is just beginning.

“My goal is to be a nationally relevant program, be gunning for national championships, be in the postseason every single year and be one of those teams that’s known whether you’re on the west coast, the east coast, the midwest, the south, everyone is going to know who Cabrini baseball is because of our level of success, but how we do it as well, first class the whole way,” Weisheipl said.

“That’s what I want to be known for, not a team that’s abrasive or is doing negative things on and off the field, I wanna be a team that does it right and is respected as kind of a flagship for what other teams want to be.”