Shot to the Heart: A devastating lacrosse hit may have saved Charlie Gamache's life

Charlie Gamache never had a lot of opportunities to show off his speed.

Maybe that’s why the expanse of green in front of him drew the senior goalkeeper all the way into Dartmouth’s attacking zone before he finally passed the ball off.

He never saw the Apponequet player coming.

“I just got blindsided,” he says now, sitting on a sunny patio behind his family’s Padanaram home. “I didn’t see it coming at all.”

His first reaction was to pop back up and get in the defender’s face; act the tough guy. But as he jogged back to his own net, when no one was looking, he clutched his chest and winced.

“Oh, man,” he thought, “that killed.”

He’d suffered moments before where his heart would start racing, but nothing like this. It felt like it was trying to burst from his chest, Alien-style.

“He didn’t say anything,” Dartmouth boys lacrosse coach Peter Crane says. “He’s a tough little kid.”

Charlie was never one to admit pain, so he finished the half, stopping 10 shots in a game the Indians would win 7-6 in overtime.

But Charlie wasn’t there to see the finish.

“Oh, man, this is a little different,” he thought as his heart rate showed no signs of abating.

At halftime, the school trainer and a teammate’s father, a doctor, examined him and suggested a trip to the emergency room at St. Luke’s.

They were afraid that hit had caused serious damage.

It turned out they were wrong.

It was the exact opposite.

It may have saved Charlie’s life.

*****

The best way to describe Charlie — beyond the fact he would look right at home on a California beach, smiling from under bleached-out hair, leaning up against his longboard and strumming a guitar — is to tell the story of how he became Dartmouth boys hockey’s starting goalkeeper.

He had reached the eighth grade without ever playing in an organized game. His skating skills were limited to a little time on a frozen pond. But Dartmouth High coach and special education teacher Mike Cappello told him the team was going to be accepting eighth-grade waiver. How hard could it be?

But even his dad, D.J. — who, along with his mom Leslie, had started D-Lax with the Moroney family — was dubious.

“I literally said ‘The hockey ship has passed you by,’” D.J. recalls with laughter. “He ended up having an unbelievable experience.”

Charlie first played in hand-me-down pads from his cousin, Tyler Martin. Two years later, during his sophomore season, Gamache was promoted to starter. He found out from one of his teammates while at Baldies (now Prestige Pizza).

A lifelong lacrosse player, Gamache suddenly found himself starting on the ice before the lacrosse field.

“I always thought that was super funny,” he says.

In his first game, the Indians beat Bridgewater-Raynham and he recorded a shutout.

“He has a growth mindset. He puts his mind to something and he’s going to do it,” Leslie says. “The whole hockey thing? He said ‘I’m going to get a waiver’ and we’re like ‘You don’t even skate!’”

Gamache stayed in net during the Indians’ playoff run that year, as they stunned top-seeded and previously undefeated Southeastern-West Bridgewater en route to the Div. 3 South semifinals, where they lost to eventual state finalist Old Rochester/Fairhaven.

“The whole team had my back, so that was pretty cool,” he says. “Everyone was super supportive.”

By his senior year, Gamache was named a Standard-Times All-Star, finishing with a 2.52 goals-against average and two shutouts.

“He’s an absolute gamer, he’s a very competitive kid and that has paid off for him,” Cappello said.

It’s the type of quick rise that one would expect to see out of a lacrosse player; a sport rife with late arrivals.

Which brings us to June 10, 2019.

*****

The Gamache family arrived at Boston Children’s Hospital around 5 a.m. Charlie was still half-asleep from the hastily scheduled drive up.

They gave him some “calming medicine” and he drifted off as the nurses wheeled him into the operating room for open heart surgery.

For his parents and siblings — Ellie, 22, Grace, 20, and John, 16 — it was an excruciating six hours under the knife.

“They were more nervous than I was,” Charlie says. “My whole thing was I got there and I got knocked out. They had to sit through it.”

But Charlie wasn’t having his heart repaired because of that brutal hit. He was there because it had uncovered a congenital heart defect he was born with.

*****

Charlie was always an active boy. Whether it was at the family’s old home near Buttonwood Park or the one they moved to in Padanaram when he was 5, he was always out playing with the neighborhood kids, especially the Jedrey brothers, ensconced in endless afternoons of street hockey and backyard football.

He played all kinds of sports growing up, from T-ball to soccer. He even tried football as a freshman. But lacrosse was always his true passion. He started playing the sport in second grade and moved into goal in fifth grade.

“I thought it was a sweet sport to play,” he says. But why goalie? “I don’t know, there’s something wrong with me. (Older sister) Ellie was a goalie and that was always a cool thing for me.”

He joined the Aquidneck Cannons, out of Portsmouth, Rhode Island, in sixth grade, then started playing with the SouthCoast Buzzards, who featured another elite goalie in Nate King.

His first two high school seasons were spent apprenticing behind Neal Canastra, who now plays at Wheaton College.

“He kind of took me under his wing and taught me a bunch of things in practice. Watching him play was so fun,” Charlie says. “He was always so positive. That was something I struggled with in middle school. I would get down on myself a little bit. He was always so positive and I thought that was a good thing to have. That grew on me in high school, not worrying about letting in goals because you have another one to save.”

He finished his junior season with a .650 save percentage and was named a Standard-Times Super Teamer.

“He’s just a great kid,” says Dartmouth boys lacrosse coach Peter Crane. “Whatever he was doing was full-steam ahead. There’s no taking days off. I can’t say enough good things about Charlie. He was a great leader.

“He’s just focused the whole time. Even when the ball is in the offensive zone, he’s still focused. He’s there to pick the team up. If someone misses a slide, he will tell them in a nice manner. He captained the defense every time he was on the field.”

Charlie’s senior year opened with three wins in Dartmouth’s first five games. But at halftime of the sixth, he was in an ambulance, headed to St. Luke’s.

*****

As she drove him, Leslie held her hand to Charlie’s ribcage.

“It was like nothing you’ve ever felt,” she says now. “I put my hand on his chest and it was like ‘BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!’”

As they neared the hospital, Charlie started pleading for his mom to turn around.

“I think it’s back to normal,” he said. “I want to go back and play.”

“We’re still going to the ER,” she told him.

When they arrived, his heart was going 176 beats per minute, leading Leslie to believe it was over 200 at the field. Sixty to 100 is considered normal and 170 would be considered very high even for an 18-year-old actively exercising, according to heart.org.

Doctors and nurses were able to slow his heartbeat to normal levels, but they were unable to diagnose the underlying issue.

“I was like ‘What’s going on here?’ We had no idea,” Leslie says. “They thought it was caused by the hit. But nothing added up. Most people who get hit by a ball will go into cardiac arrest. His was elevated.”

Overnight, Charlie was transferred to Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence, where the next morning he underwent an electrocardiogram, or EKG.

“Once anyone gets transferred to Hasbro, that’s something serious,” Crane says. “I have four kids, so I’m putting myself in that spot. What are D.J. and Leslie thinking? As a parent, it hits home, this is pretty serious.”

Following the EKG, the doctor came into Charlie’s room, cracked a few jokes, then left to get his clipboard.

“He came back and told us and it was like ‘Oh, man.’” Charlie recalls. “That was the one moment...” he trails off.

The doctor informed him he had atrial septal defect (ASD), a hole in the wall between the two upper chambers of his heart. It had been present since his birth, and is often discovered through a heart murmur, but Charlie had never displayed any symptoms, other than those racing heart beats, which he had chalked up to adrenaline.

There are several types of ASD — 1 in 100 babies are estimated to be born with some type of septal defect — and Charlie was diagnosed with “septum primum” a more complex defect that requires open heart surgery.

“They said in the next decade of his life he could suffer congestive heart failure,” Leslie says.

It turns out that hit might have saved his life by uncovering his unknown heart condition.

“It was a blessing in disguise,” Charlie says. “At first everyone was pretty pissed at the kid, but it was a blessing in disguise.”

*****

For a while, Charlie tried not to think about it.

“I wasn’t phased when we found out,” he says. “I didn’t really want to think anything of it. I was like ‘This is crazy. This sucks. I just want to go home.’ I’m fine, just send me home.”

But he knew that wasn’t happening. He assumed he would undergo surgery in the next few days, but he was offered another option.

He could postpone the surgery. That meant he could attend prom. He could walk at graduation. And he could finish out his senior lacrosse season.

His coach couldn’t believe it.

“I was completely shocked,” Crane says. “He’s really going to be able to come back? I was very surprised. You put the trust in the doctors.”

That’s precisely what Charlie was doing.

“You’re the same kid you were two weeks ago as you are today,” he remembers the doctor telling him before he left. “Now, you just know about it. You’ve been playing with this your whole life.”

“That was good to hear going into the rest of the season. It reminded me, nothing really changed,” Charlie says now. “Lacrosse is a big part of my life, but at that point there were bigger things. I was really happy it was able to work out the way it did.”

Charlie only ended up missing one-and-a-half games. Because the game was during April vacation, he didn’t even miss a day of school.

“At the beginning it was a little nerve wracking watching him in practice, warming up, just taking shots for the first time,” Crane recalls. “I think we were all nervous, except him. He goes out there the first game back and you would have no idea. Other teams had no idea. They would find out and they could not believe it.”

*****

His return to the field was so seamless, he was seriously considered for Standard-Times Player of the Year honors, making his second-straight Super Team after raising his save percentage to .684 and notching 221 saves.

He narrowed his college search to a couple of schools, including Bridgewater State and Plymouth State, before deciding to join the lacrosse team and enroll at UMass Dartmouth.

“Playing lacrosse in college was a huge goal of mine,” he says. “It was a perfect fit. I knew the coaches well.”

But less than two weeks after he enjoyed his college signing ceremony at Dartmouth High, he was going under the knife at Boston Children’s Hospital to fix the hole in his heart, as well as repair two valves.

Per usual, Charlie didn’t concern himself with things he had no control over.

“I had no choice,” he says. “If I was listening to them talking about cutting this valve or that valve or cut off this chunk of the heart and close this and do that, it would have been stuck in my thoughts and it sounds awful. So I would hear what I needed to hear.”

The surgery, performed by Dr. David Hoganson, lasted about six hours, and they only had to open three-quarters of his sternum (“You can still can wear V-necks,” Charlie was told).

“He said it was as close to perfect as you can get,” Charlie says, with obvious relief. “Everything did what it was supposed to do. My heart already shrunk considerably.”

But that didn’t mean those first few days were a cinch. He struggled to walk the day after his surgery.

“He was shuffling down the hall,” Leslie recalls.

“It was weird not feeling comfortable walking,” says the lifelong athlete. “I remember getting up and my legs felt like they couldn’t work. I hadn’t stood up in more than 24 hours. It was bizarre. It was a slow process.”

Two days after his surgery, he watched his beloved Bruins lose to the St. Louis Blues in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals. A day later, his friends came to visit. His brother joked that he looked like Billy Madison, the only 18-year-old in the children’s ward.

Each day something was removed. The breathing tube. The chest tubes. He was able to walk up to the roof deck.

“It was tough for a few days, but it got better,” Charlie says.

Still, when he was discharged, Leslie described it as akin to “bringing a baby home from the hospital.”

They set up a recliner in the living room and Charlie feasted on History Channel for the next couple of weeks; lost in World War II documentaries and old episodes of American Pickers and Pawn Stars.

“The first two weeks were so boring,” he laughs.

When he got the stitches out from where his chest tube had been, he was finally able to break out his guitar again. He loves to play classic and indie rock, everything from the Grateful Dead to Tame Impala. He started writing music and recently posted six new songs on Soundcloud.

“Once I could play the guitar, that was all I did, non-stop,” he says. “My daily routine has been wake up, play and then have dinner and repeat.”

When he saw some of his extended family in Maine this summer, he played them some tracks.

One of his cousins exclaimed: “This heart surgery might have been the best thing for your music career!”

*****

Charlie has been shocked by how minimal his rehab process has been. He doesn’t have another appointment for six months.

“It’s weird because you see people with ACL tears and they go through physical therapy,” he says. “These people go through all this rehab and I thought ‘A heart thing seems pretty big, I wonder what I’m going to have to go through?’ And they’re like ‘Nothing.’”

He is still learning his limits, however. Ten days after the surgery, he overdid things and ended up back in the ER. But that didn’t dissuade him from attending a Grateful Dead concert at Gillette Stadium two days later.

“It was wicked worth it,” he says. “They played with John Mayer. It was super good.”

His dad emailed Tedy Bruschi, who has a different form of ASD, who responded by sending Charlie a personal video.

But all the attention makes him a little uncomfortable, like a full-bodied blush. He thinks back to the other kids he met in the hospital in Boston. The ones who didn’t get to go home and enjoy the Feast and afternoons shooting video of his buddies surfing.

“Getting all the attention wasn’t my thing,” he says. “Part of me felt bad, because it seemed like a lot (of attention) on me.”

It’s that unique combination of modesty and confidence — he seems to live at their meeting point — that has propelled Charlie thus far. It’s why when asked to have his chest scar photographed for the world to see, he initially grins sheepishly, then shrugs his shoulders and pulls up his shirt, as if to say ‘Who me? Ah, why not?’

“Even without this happening,” Crane says. “He has a great future. I can’t say enough good things about Charlie. I don’t think there’s a mean bone in his body. But that doesn’t mean he’s not a fearless competitor. He’ll only get better.”

In more ways than one.

Brown Juice and Beyonce: The superdopekickassinvincible life of a bar band

By BRENDAN BURNETT-KURIE

It’s 4 p.m. on a Friday in an apartment two blocks from the Metrodome as Tyler collapses into bed after another shift of spinning pies at the neighborhood Italian joint. There’s just enough time for a nap. When he returns home next it will be in a race with daybreak.

It’s 5 p.m. in Bloomington and Jeff The IT Guy is punching the proverbial clock at the end of another week. A single dad with two kids, he’ll be spending his Saturday riding slides at Edgewater Resort with hundreds of other middle-aged men and their tykes. Unlike them, he’ll be peeling off purple pants at 4 a.m.

It’s 8 p.m. and Derrick is kneeling over a metallic case filled with microphones resting on the corner of a small stage in the back of one of the endless historic bars, with their walls of a thousand stares and tin roofs of a thousand tales, sprinkled across Southern Minnesota. Derrick was in sixth grade when he played his first show -- in between sets by a group churning out hits from the 50s and 60s -- and later put out two albums with the heavy metal band Cain’s Alibi before his health failed him and he became a sound tech when he wasn’t roofing. Ask him how many bar bands he’s seen and tilts his head back with a thoughtful grin.

“Thousands. They either have all their stuff together or nothing together, there’s no in between,” he says as he clears the remnants of last week’s band -- an empty bottle of Stage Haze and a ripped set list that includes one song simply titled “Something in Your Mouth” -- off an upturned table.

Derrick has worked shows with Eric Church, Luke Bryan and KISS, but tonight’s assignment is a four-piece 80s-90s-and-today style cover band called Junk FM from Minneapolis. They’re scheduled to take the stage in two hours and there’s no sign of them. Not unusual in this biz, he notes.

His fingers twist out a few more tweaks on the massive soundboard, which looks complicated enough to land on the moon, and he’s in waiting mode. His mind drifts back to his own days banging out staccato drums in the corner of countless hazy bars.

“We never made any money,” he says wistfully, then by way of explanation, “we played heavy metal.”

As if on cue a gray van pulls up to the curb; drum kits, guitars, amps and pedals packed together like the 3D jigsaw puzzle your grandma thought was a hip gift when you were 14. It’s 8:35 p.m. and out of the van spill three guys, all not far from being 30-somethings, but none looking the part. Tyler sports thick glasses over close-cropped blonde hair to go with his blue zip-up sweatshirt, gray V-neck T-shirt and jeans. His look is as understated as the handful of emails he’s sent confirming the gig.

George and Mo manage both understated and overstated. George, with shoulder-length black hair in a three-quarter part and a scruffy beard, is sporting a nauseous red sweater that Macklemore would be proud of, sleeves achingly short, and a pair of black jeans over massive high tops. He’s shed the camouflage cap he was wearing when Tyler pulled up outside his Stillwater apartment.

Mo is hitting on orange, the color of his garish rip-away track pants under a brown zip-up and a V-neck dipping deeper than necessary. It’s hard to tell if they’ve tried for this look or fell into it accidentally. George notes they don’t wear “costumes,” but it’s hard to tell.

The fourth, the self-described “grandpa of the group,” who joined up less than a year ago, is still missing. He’s a fixture in the Southern Metro bar band scene, and when asked can start rattling off band names like a waitress listing salad dressings.

“Is Jeff in your band?” asks Derrick.

“Yeah,” says Tyler. “He always shows up in the nick of time.”

It’s 8:45 p.m., about 90 minutes to showtime, and Jeff walks in the side door, looking distinctly un-rock star other than a pair of epic blonde sideburns that occupy most of his face. His Wal-Mart jeans are tucked into a pair of black boots and when he takes off a fleece he’s wearing a gray striped T-shirt that also probably saved him money every day.

They get to work, setting up drums and testing levels and calibrating pedals and firing off the smoke machine and doing all those other things they’ve done thousands of times before. “I don’t know which part I like less, setting up or tearing down,” Tyler mumbles. They talk about Avril Lavigne’s upcoming nuptials (“A nice Canadian wedding”) and things that make life easier (“Like a personal self-masturbator”).

*****

It’s 2003, and in one of life’s chance encounters, two freshmen sat next to each other on their second day at the McNally Smith College of Music in St. Paul. Tyler had just started a band called This World Fair (they will prove when listing off all the bands they’ve played in that any combination of words can be considered a name) and he needed a bass player. George played bass.

By 2007, the “music school geeks” hooked up with a guitarist named Mo who had been doing the music thing since middle school (“I don’t think I’m very good at everything else, except juggling”) and a singer named Bryan and a guitarist named Patrick to start ReadyGoes, which just released a new EP in 2012 and has enjoyed some modest hits, including play on MTV’s “Jersey Shore” and “The Hills”, E’s “Keeping up the the Kardashians” and Oxygen’s “Bad Girls Club.” They’ve played on the same stages at festivals with Augustana, OneRepublic, The Fray and Kings of Leon.

“I’m always surprised how much they’re just dudes,” George says of meeting the big-label boys. “You think they’re rock stars and then when you’re standing there having a beer with them they’re just like the dudes I know in Minneapolis.”

As ReadyGoes rode life on the cusp of making it, stealing those moments of success then watching as airplay came only in the wee hours of the morning and videos were shot on shoestring budgets, Mo started an acoustic gig at the Ugly Mug -- now Jackson’s Hole -- on Third Street in Minneapolis.

“But he didn’t like playing alone, so he called me,” Tyler remembers. George wasn’t far behind and they soon decided to plug in the instruments. Needing a name, they considered calling themselves Junk Drawer in homage to the eclectic cover songs they would play, but decided drunk patrons wouldn’t be able to understand them, like naming their band She Sells Seashells. They settled on Junk FM, which they admit isn’t much of a thinker. “There was no great epiphany,” Tyler chuckles.

Soon, despite some trepidation (“I always say I don’t like cover bands,” George says), they started booking gigs at bars around the state, mixing in weddings and company functions. They learned to love their Thursday-through-Saturday side gig that helps pay the bills.

“It’s a totally different game, but I have no complaints about this band, it’s a blast,” Tyler says. “I’m playing music with my three best friends. This is our bread and butter.”

They work hard to keep their two incarnations -- ReadyGoes and Junk FM -- in different worlds. Junk FM doesn’t play ReadyGoes songs and ReadyGoes don’t perform Junk FM’s covers.

“We keep ‘em separated, as The Offspring would say,” George grins.

But despite reticently coming to grips with their life as a cover band, principle refuses to allow them to lap into commonality.

“A lot of times people stand there and do gimmicks with loud amps and loud guitars,” Mo says. “We try not to be that.”

So they play a range of music wider than Kirstie Alley in a bad month. Hours later Derrick will remark with an impressed intonation on their variety of songs. One piece starts as Sublime’s “What I Got,” hangs a right into “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” takes a left into Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” and rolls on home with more Sublime.

“We don’t take ourselves too serious, but our level of musicianship is high,” George says. It’s only a brief moment of braggadocio.

“The biggest plus of this is keeping up with the craft,” George adds while smoking a cigarette in his last break before taking the stage. “This band plays so much.”

Tonight it’s Faribault. Last week it was Brainerd (“That’s where we have to update our will”). Next week it’s Maplewood. The April calendar reads like a tattered Rand McNally: St. Cloud, Grand Forks, Fargo, Savage, Maple Grove, Hopkins, Inver Grove Heights.

*****

It’s 9:25 p.m. and Mo retreats down a narrow carpeted stairway into a tiny 4-by-8 room furnished sparsely with a pair of battered end tables and a peeling banquet chair. Where the plaster hasn’t chipped away the walls are a garish yellow and on one side is a mesh door that leads into a darkness they become convinced can only hold Sloth from “The Goonies.” All the groupies that have dreamed of being beckoned backstage cringe together.

Mo slips a flask out of his bag. It’s filled with Jack Daniels -- “a brown juice break,” as they call it -- then rips off his track pants like he’s been called off the bench in the Final Four. Soon his hair is teased and parted across his face, with a wide headband and a sleeveless American Flag shirt. It’s Russell Brand in a basement in Faribault.

It’s 10:10 p.m. and they take the stage in five minutes. Jeff, now wearing a black fedora, black vest and a sleeveless black T -- it quickly becomes obvious they hate sleeves but love black, presumably to hide the profuse sweating that will follow -- as he takes part in a sausage Heggies pizza with a pair of bar patrons.

It’s 10:15 p.m., and the opening B and G chords of Franz Ferdinand’s “Take Me Out” rattle around the room. The tiled dance floor is embarrassingly empty. The bar on the other side is mostly full, but the unfazed faces are paying more attention to the Gophers basketball game on the big screen than the four guys jumping around on stage.

“It’s always interesting playing a new place,” Tyler had predicted less than an hour ago. “You’re not well known. You hope to keep the patrons there.”

But these guys aren’t going down without a fight. By the third song -- The Black Crowes’ “Hard to Handle” -- Mo has crossed the room and is screaming out “That ain’t nothing’ but drugstore lovin’” while kneeling on the bar, slamming a shot of brown juice. Suddenly, they have everyone’s attention. The game ends and the girls start dancing. Inevitably, the guys follow.

The first set lasts an hour and it’s back downstairs -- the “fungeon” they’ve dubbed it -- for more shots of brown juice (George is swigging from his own bottle of Jamison). By the second set the dance floor is knock-your-drink-over full and the crowd is sold on a good time. Mo, George, Tyler and Jeff plug along, blasting out rap songs and R&B and country and classic rock. There are rock star moments when they leap off the drum stand or writhe around on the floor while singing Cee-Lo’s “F You.” But there are also decidedly normal moments. Mo accidentally hits a circuit breaker while trying to find a light switch and panics. Jeff runs off stage to grab his gray striped T-shirt and hands it to a patron whose overexcited beer overflowed onto her arms.

During the second break, Mo takes his gallon of Ice Mountain water – he goes through two a night, and no, it isn’t filled with vodka -- outside to smoke a cigarette. A young man who has spent most of the night in the middle of the dance floor comes over and compares his singing to Adam Levine. Mo’s face lights up; he’s sincerely complimented.

“Thanks man, thanks.”

He didn’t even sing until he was 20, when his friend Mike Murphy, who he describes as an angry Republican, tells him if he’s writing his own songs he needs the balls to sing them. He’s had no formal training.

“Just a lot of whiskey.”

The third set starts. The crowd has fallen in love. In the men’s room, one middle-aged man wobbles up to the trough.

“You ready?” He slurs to no one in particular.

“For what?”

“For more of these crazy motherfuckers.”

*****

The show is winding down and Junk FM is mashing Eminem’s “My Name Is” with Green Day’s “Basket Case.” While their set list – never the same, never written down, Tyler just calls out each song from behind his drums – is hackneyed, they’re obviously children of the 90s. They follow up with Garth Brooks, Blur, Beastie Boys and after a genuine plea for “one more song!” close it out with House of Pain.

Mo, George and Tyler escape outside for cigarettes or down to the flask of brown juice (they get free tap beer, and thanks to the flask their three tabs total just $9.50 at the end of the night, plus Mo buys four cigarettes off some woman for $3) but Jeff, the only one with a career outside music, heads into the last remnants of the crowd, getting a few more minutes with his newfound Heggies buddies.

“I love what I do,” he says. “I love both my jobs. I couldn’t ask for a better deal.”

Jeff was a fulltime musician for eight years in his 20s. Now it’s a hobby.

“This is my release,” he says, tugging at his purple pants. “I’m a single dad. A 9-5er. I can’t stop. Music is in your blood. It’s part of you. I love the volume. I love the music. I love this bar.”

Then he stops with a Cheshire grin.

“That would be a good chorus, wouldn’t it?”

It’s 2:44 a.m.

Riley Schultz and the tale of the perfect swing

There are those swings so sweet you can taste them. There was Ken Griffey Jr.’s effortless swipe, Hank Aaron’s whipping wrists, Barry Bonds’ compact cut.

Close your eyes and imagine them unleashing those smooth swings like a graceful ballet. Is there a smile on your lips? Riley Schultz’ swing can impart that same grin.

From each side of the plate, his body works like a concerto: the front foot tapping, the back elbow rising, the hips swiveling, the shoulders torquing, the wrists snapping, the back foot pivoting and finally the arching follow-through, carrying the bat up to the heavens; the only place that swing ever truly belonged. The adjectives sound vicious; the swing is anything but.

Faribault High School baseball coach Brent Hawkins didn’t tweak it. Legion coach Charlie Lechtenberg claims no credit for it.

The tale of Riley Schultz’ swing is one of the oldest known to mankind.

It is the story of a father and a son.

•••

If Riley is the son with the sweetest swing, Terry Schultz is the dad with the rubber arm. One begets the other.

When Riley was a kid, he would happily trundle along to his dad’s Waterville amateur baseball games, darting around as a bat boy. Terry’s love of baseball was quickly endowed on his only son.

“I always had a bat or glove or something,” Riley says, sitting in the quiet dugout at Bell Field as a light rain falls on the tarp-covered field in front of him. “Since whenever I could hold a bat; one of those big, orange wiffleball ones. My dad got me into it.”

Like the age-old debate of nurture vs. nature, a baseball swing is equal parts natural coordination, repetition and instruction. Riley had a couple of huge advantages. Not only does his family have a batting cage in the backyard, but Terry works at Faribault Middle School and the two spent hours inside the gym hitting balls in the winter. Whenever a wrestling practice wasn’t using the space, Terry would toss 500 pitches to his son — mixing in changeups and breaking balls, working on the outside corner or hammering him inside so Riley would learn to keep the ball fair.

“We would always get in there as much as we can,” Riley says. “It’s a good thing to have. I’m lucky.”

“Usually it was up until the time that his hands would get blisters,” Terry says. “He would keep swinging as long as he could.”

When asked what aspect of his swing he focused on the most, what adjustment he’s made that all those hits flowed from, Riley doesn’t have an answer. He rattles off a string of cliches. A level swing. Timing. Trigger. Consistency.

“I think a lot of times as a coach or a parent you’re trying to tell them too many things,” Terry says. “I just wanted him to use that talent and skill and repetition. It’s not something I wanted to take and break.”

Riley, a lefty, wasn’t just learning a consistent swing, once he reached ninth grade he spent those hours in the cage learning to bat right-handed because he hated facing lefties so much. By 10th grade he switch-hit for the first time in a game.

“I had to work on that,” he says. “It wasn’t too hard. It’s just kind of different. I started golfing left handed and then I golfed right handed. I shoot a basketball both ways.”

From the left side, he has a better eye and a little more power. His right-side swing is more compact and he gets the bat through the zone quicker.

•••

In order to spend that many hours perfecting his swing, Riley had to love baseball. Not love it in a ‘I want to spend time with my dad’ or a ‘I want to make him proud’ kind of way, but in the truest sense of the word.

“It just came natural to him to keep working at a game he loves,” Hawkins says.

“I like everything about baseball,” Riley says unequivocally, then he realizes how serious he has gotten and starts to joke. “It’s outside. You can eat while you play. You can spit.”

He chuckles, then realizes he can’t trivialize his one, true love without giving it its proper due: “It’s the challenge. It’s hard to hit a ball going that fast. It’s a team sport, but it’s also that one-on-one battle between the pitcher and the hitter.”

Ah, the battle.

For all the baserunning and fielding and defensive shifts, baseball can be simple. A battle between men and minds. A pitcher and hitter, 60-feet, six-inches apart with a ball and a bat.

“That’s probably the best part,” Riley says. “You get in that box and you have to beat him. You have to get a hit.”

More often than not, Riley got a hit. He hit .330 for the Falcons as a junior, his first year on varsity. He led the team in runs, RBIs, home runs, walks and slugging percentage. He was named the team MVP in 2010. As a senior he hit .358 and led the Big 9 conference in triples and was selected All-Conference and All-Section.

“When he puts a swing on it, he doesn’t get cheated,” Hawkins says. “This year was a little tougher, he didn’t get as many pitches to hit because he was so good last year.”

After his senior season, Riley was selected to play in the 37th annual Lions All-Star baseball tournament in Chanhassen which showcased the best senior baseball players in the state. Then he pulled back on his stirrups and took the field for Faribault’s Post 43 legion team over the summer.

“All the work and time he’s put in and how hard he’s worked, it makes you feel good,” Terry says. “It feels very, very good.”

•••

Riley’s love for baseball is no secret among those who coach him. Neither is his baseball IQ.

“He’s like a sponge,” Hawkins says. “He can’t get enough of it. He knows the game. He just absorbs everything. He loves the game so much he just builds on stuff. He’s a very smart young man both on and off the field.”

“He’s a smart, smart player,” Lechtenberg concurs. “He’s thinking all the time. He knows what he’s going to do if the ball is hit to him. He’s a heads-up ballplayer.”

Baseball isn’t the only place Riley applies his smarts. After his senior season he was was named a Big 9 Scholar Athlete and Academic All-State. He plans on pursuing his loves of science and math by majoring in plastics engineering at Division III University of Wisconsin-Stout, where he will also suit up for the baseball team.

“I thought he could have played somewhere even higher,” Lechtenberg says. “I think he’ll fit in well at Stout and be a good ballplayer for them. They’re lucky to have him.”

“He’s just a top-notch young man who has a very bright future in whatever he does,” Hawkins says. “He works hard at everything he’s done, classroom and athletics.”

As Riley finishes up talking about his baseball career in the third-base dugout at Bell Field, he’s headed off to work at Faribault Rental putting up party tents. Then it will be back into the batting cage in his backyard, Terry’s rubber arm firing buckets of pitches. Inside. Outside. Fastball. Change up. Riley will offer at each one of them, shifting his weight back and then transferring through that scintillating swing.

Two men, a father and a son, sixty-feet, six-inches apart with a ball and a bat.

A day for Dale

It’s the kind of sultry day that makes catchers shudder.

Which makes it just the kind of day Dale Borgstahl would have slapped his shinguards on with a smile and trotted out behind the plate.

It’s the kind of sunny day just meant for baseball.

And baseball was the kind of sport just meant for Dale Borgstahl.

Borgstahl and baseball run deep, and that connection was honored on Saturday afternoon at Bell Field with the first memorial in the history of the Faribault American Legion baseball program.

“We’ve never had a memorial until today,” said baseball chairman Ray Sanders. “God bless you Dale and Norma.”

•••

Dale Borgstahl was born on October 24, 1923, in Howells, Neb., to Walter and Matilda Borgstahl. At a young age, he was sent to work in Faribault. He never left. Dale played baseball for Faribault High School from 1940-42, always as a catcher, then played for the Elysan American Legion team with his best friend, Buck Burkhartzmeyer, because they couldn’t make the Faribault semi-pro team.

“We had a lot of fun,” Buck remembered. “Dale loved baseball. It was his sport and he excelled in it.”

He spent his life as a farmer and township clerk in Cannon City Township, where he was a founding member of the National Farming Organization in Rice County. He raised pigs and grew grains.

With all the loves in his life — farming, his wife Norma, his children, Trinity Lutheran Church, music and wood puzzles — there was always baseball. Baseball and Borgstahl went together like a ball and a glove, one just slipping into the other with grace and nestling into that perfect pocket.

“He just liked to watch the game,” his son, Scott, who played for FHS, Post 43 and the Lakers. “He didn’t even need to know anybody. It’s just the idea of going out and watching a game.”

•••

Dale’s eldest daughter, Sharon Smith, remembers going to games her dad was playing in until she was 8.

“When I was little he was still playing ball,” she recalled. “I’m glad I got to see some of that before he quit playing.”

But even after he graduated from his playing days, baseball was never from Dale’s heart, and Dale was never far from baseball.

Even after Scott finished his playing career — which included playing for Concordia College — Dale remained dedicated to his evenings at Bell Field, sitting in front of the press box behind home plate.

Dale’s daughter Sandra remembers she always needed a solid excuse if she wasn’t going to attend a game.

“I definitely went to a lot of baseball with my dad,” she said. “If I wasn’t at the game, it was like, ‘Gee, why aren’t you at the game, Sandy.’ And it better be an excuse like work.”

•••

When Dale passed away on Feb. 27, 2011, at the age of 87, he did something no one had ever done before. He put the Post 43 baseball team in his will. Instead of flowers, he asked mourners to leave memorials to Faribault Legion baseball or Trinity Lutheran Church. With some of the funds raised, Sanders bought new hats for the players to wear this year, embroidered with the initials DB over the left ear.

“We appreciate his work and everything else,” Sanders said.

But that wasn’t enough for a man who dedicated his life to improving baseball in Faribault. Each year he hosted a hog roast and corn feed on the family farm for Legion players. So Sanders decided to hold the first memorial in the 59 years he has been associated with Faribault Legion ball.

•••

So on a sweltering Saturday afternoon, Dale’s family converged from their stations across the midwest: Sharon and her husband Bill and son Chris from Stanley, N.D.; Scott and his wife Kim from St. Peter; and Sandra and her husband Dave from Annandale. They watched stoically as the Post 43 Color Guard posted the colors.

Then Sharon took to the microphone and showed off that Borgstahl family musical prowess with a sparkling rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner.”

“That was quite an honor,” Sharon said. “It was a big honor to be able to do something like that and honor dad and his memory in a place that I grew up.”

Each of the family members was presented with a cap and program honoring the man they called “dad” and a poem was read in his honor.

“Wasn’t this special?” Sharon said. “It’s fun to see somebody be recognized for the little parts. He did a lot of little things to help baseball in the town.”

Then she remembered her thoughts from when Minnesota Twins great Harmon Killebrew died this spring: “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, dad is going to be so excited to meet him up in heaven. He was a such a fan of Harmon’s. Baseball has always been a wonderful thing for my dad.”

And dad has always been a wonderful thing for baseball.

Excellence endeavor

Twenty-one years after embarking on a visionary hockey plan that reinvigorated the school, a new tradition has set foot on the Romanesque campus of Shattuck-St. Mary’s.

The school is adding golf to its prestigious Centers of Excellence, joining hockey, soccer and figure skating as elite 10-month programs that compete at the highest levels of prep athletics.

And one man has been charged with building this elite golf program: Mike Higdon.

On April 18, SSM’s new Director of Golf began the unenviable task of building a national program from scratch.

•••

Higdon sat at his desk in the athletic office on his second week of work, dressed in a green shirt and khakis. The shelves behind his head lay bare save for a couple golf trophies and a scattering of three-ring notebooks. He’s obviously been too busy to decorate; too intent on spreading the word out about this new enterprise.

“I think there’s some challenges as far as letting people know what we have going,” Higdon said. “That’s the main thing we need to focus on right now, is letting people know what we have here and the opportunities that we have on hand, which I think are phenomenal.”

The foundation of his plan is to build off the success of the Centers of Excellence, which have created national championships in hockey, U.S. National team members in soccer and National Champion figure skaters.

“It’s going to help me in the recruiting process for me to be able to say, ‘Look, this is what we’ve been able to do in the past with these other Centers of Excellence,’” Higdon said. “This isn’t going to be any different. We’re going to have the same expectations. In 20 years you’re going to be looking at 20 golfers here who are highly-ranked, nationally-competitive golfers.”

His plan is nothing if not grandiose (he said he’s expecting “success on a national and world basis”), but this is a man who has done this before.

•••

In 2009, Higdon was hired as the men’s and women’s head golf coach at Valparaiso University in Indiana. The only problem? Valparaiso didn’t have a golf program. There had never been a women’s team, and the men’s team had been cut in 1992. By the fall, Higdon had the Crusaders competing in the Division I Horizon League.

“It was an extensive process of putting that program together that I think will help me in designing this program,” he said. “Obviously, one of our main goals here is to get these golfers onto the collegiate level and beyond and I have the experience and the contacts I’ve gained at the collegiate level.”

“We’re going to be starting a new program and he’s been involved in starting them and he also has the golf experience and the background,” SSM Athletic Director Scott Curwin said. “Both of those things, I think, made the difference as far as Mike becoming a part of this program and this school.”

Higdon has also spent five years as general manager at The Course at Aberdeen and been both a head pro and assistant pro in Palm Beach, Fla. He graduated from Western Kentucky University with a degree in marketing, then spent a couple years at a marketing firm before returning to his true passion: Golf.
Higdon was one of three candidates an advisory board — made up of town residents, SSM alumni and board members — brought to campus for interviews after posting the job on the NCAA job market.
“Mike ended up being the best choice,” Curwin said.

•••

The new golf program will begin in the fall of 2011. Curwin said he hoped to have three to six golfers the first year. The school will continue its boys and girls golf teams that compete in the Minnesota State High School League. The Center of Excellence Golf Program will run nearly year round, competing in nationally-ranked junior events in the fall, winter and spring. The team will practice in the Dane Family Field House in the winter, as well as the pavilion at The Legacy. Even when students go home for the summer, they will still be training.

“They’ll go through all summer,” Curwin said. “Mike will put together a schedule for where those kids are from. If there is an event that maybe five of our kids are going to, Mike will probably show up and see how our kids are doing over the summer.”

As Higdon starts a rigorous recruiting process, he will begin by searching Minnesota and surrounding states for interested prospects. He will offer them a new level of one-on-one attention.

“The good golfers throughout the Midwest that are dedicated to becoming national golfers may work with their golf instructor once a week during the wintertime, whereas here they’ll have the avenue to work with me on a daily basis,” he said. “Having that exposure and experience will help elevate their games even more. You can’t measure what the advantages of that are."

••

It’s hard to ignore the question. What brought a man who has worked courses in sunny Florida and coached at the Division I level to take on such a hallenge at a small private school in the chilly Midwest?

“When you see what they’ve been able to do in the past, that was key to see that they’re truly dedicated to allowing kids to pursue their passion,” Higdon said. “Whether it be hockey or figure skating or academics or singing, seeing that a school is dedicated to that and education at the same time. Kids can get a great education while doing their passion. Seeing the rich history here of what the school is about really attracted me.”

A few minutes earlier, standing in the doorway of his office, Curwin had expressed the same sentiment when describing the driving force behind the Centers of Excellence.

“What we do here at the Centers for Excellence is allow kids to pursue their passion,” he said.
And thus the journey begins.