UNI ends 103 years of baseball with dramatic win

There's a graveyard just a few hundred feet past the right-field fence at Riverfront Stadium. How appropriate on a day like this.

The University of Northern Iowa baseball program was officially buried following a dramatic, ninth-inning, 3-2 win over Bradley. After 103 years and 2,565 games, the grand old game is no more.

"It's a funeral," said former UNI Athletics Director Rick Hartzell, part of an announced crowd of 1,047. "It's a sad, sad day ... You drive up here thinking this is the last time you'll ever see this, and it's a very tough deal."

Northern Iowa's administration announced after the team's opening series of the season in late February that baseball was being cut for financial reasons. There was a codicil, of sorts, in that the program could be saved for three years if $1.2 million was raised within about a four-week period. Ten-million dollars would permanently endow it.

Supporters came up well short of the money needed, as was expected. There's talk of a lawsuit, an effort spearheaded in part by Perfect Game USA of Cedar Rapids.

But this was it, for all intents and purposes.

"Reality set in for me this week," said UNI head coach Rick Heller. "Each and every day coming out here, I tried to cherish every second of it. Same thing today. I tried to cherish every second of this. Once it was officially over, it hit me like a punch in the gut."

There were a mosh pit of players at home plate, then between first and second base after UNI's Jason Summers won Saturday's game on a deep fly ball to center field with the bases loaded and none out in the ninth. The hit, officially a single, scored Levi Ferguson to complete what would have been an obvious Hollywood script.

"I knew it was at least a sacrifice fly," said Summers, a junior who transferred to UNI from South Mountain Community College in Arizona. "I knew once the center fielder stopped running that it was over his head and time to celebrate."

UNI players and coaches saluted the supportive crowd postgame by tipping their caps in unison. Then it was hugs and smiles ... and a ton of  tears.

"Really bittersweet," said former Cedar Rapids Xavier prep Chad Arp, whose hit-and-run slap single moved Ferguson from first base to third.

Arp is a junior whose career has ended. Unlike the majority of his 31 teammates who are underclassmen, he's going to stay at UNI to finish his degree. He sobbed as he talked about the emotions of the day.

"Driving to the park today and knowing it was probably my last day, it's tough," he said. "I've never been as close to any team in my life. I won a state championship in high school, but nothing compares to this group of guys. They're completely selfless and everyone sticks together, no matter what. We went through a lot this year, but everyone stuck together."

Northern Iowa didn't qualify for next weekend's Missouri Valley Conference tournament but finished its final season with a 22-24 record. That's an amazing accomplishment considering the cloud it played under for three months.

Heller, who won over 200 games in his 10 years in Cedar Falls, gets a lot of credit for that.

"The one thing through all this that I've been most impressed with is the professionalism of Rick Heller," said Jack Wilkinson, who played first and third base at UNI from 1948 to 1952.

The 78-year-old longtime UNI professor threw out the first pitch before Saturday's game, with Hartzell his catcher. Wilkinson was one of approximately 60 baseball alumni at Riverfront Stadium. They were all applauded as they walked onto the field prior to the game to stand with the current team.

"Coach Heller and the team, I've probably said more contrary things about the adminstrations and athletics directors as anybody," Wilkinson said. "They put up an impossible hurdle when they started telling you to raise a $10-million endowment when the university has $50 million total. There's no way you can do that. That's completely unreasonable."

You'd have been hard pressed to find anyone Saturday who didn't think UNI's decision to eliminate baseball is unreasonable.

"Never," Hartzell said, when asked if he second guesses Troy Dannen, his successor as AD, and school president Ben Allen. "I'm not sitting in that seat. I've taken the high road all the way along here, and I won't change that. I'm sure they had a hard decision to make, and they made one."

"It's been an absolute nightmare. Brutal. I wouldn't wish it on anybody," Heller said. "To have to go through what these guys had to go through, what we had to go through this season was unimaginable, really. A lot of pressure today. It felt like the weight of the world was on our shoulders, with all the alumni here and so many people who wanted to see us go out winning the last game. To win it in the bottom of the ninth was exciting. But there are a lot of tears, a lot of sadness that this is the last time."