PROFILES
The Great Communicator – Columbia Daily Tribune, Feb. 21, 2009
Superintendent says retirement will be his last – Columbia Daily Tribune, July 31, 2009
Former POW shares experiences living with McCain – Columbia Missourian, Nov. 2, 2008
Jan Mees gives insider perspective – Columbia Daily Tribune, March 8, 2010
Hurdler doesn’t sweat it – Omaha World-Herald, July 28, 2008
Closer fashions a big season – Omaha World-Herald, June 23, 2008
The Great Communicator: Superintendent Chris Belcher is off to a good start
BY JONATHON BRADEN
jbraden@columbiatribune.com | 815-1711
Around 10 a.m. on a recent Friday, kids trudge through the hallways of Paxton Keeley Elementary School, dragging sidewalk slush onto the gray and green carpet in the school’s wide entryway.
The students complain that they’re even there on this day, considering they woke to a fresh layer of snow in their yards. But Chris Belcher could not be happier.
It is his favorite time of the week — the half-hour or so that the Columbia Public Schools superintendent gets to “aimlessly wander” around one of the district’s 30 schools. On this day, Belcher has chosen Paxton Keeley as his surprise destination. He never tells the schools he’s coming.
He strolls around the building, stopping by classrooms and peering over children’s shoulders.
After a few stops, Belcher walks into Sally Widbin’s room full of fourth-graders.
“I came out to make sure you’re learning,” he says. “Do you like Paxton Keeley?”
“Yeah,” some of the students say.
“Oh, come on,” Widbin says. “We need some enthusiasm!”
“Yeah!” the class replies.
Belcher’s presence in Columbia’s schools represents what teachers, board members and residents say they enjoy most about the new superintendent: his communication skills.
A year after the Columbia Board of Education voted 6-1 to hire Belcher instead of former Assistant Superintendent Skip Deming, the community also has had time to observe Belcher’s management style, to see how he has transitioned to a school system about five times the size of his former district and to see how he interacts with an independent school board.
Residents have chatted with him out in public and learned more about Belcher’s vision for the Columbia school district.
So far, even one of his first critics approves of his performance.
“I do think there’s been like a sea change,” said Ines Segert, the lone school board member who voted against hiring Belcher a year ago. “I feel like we’ve gained back a lot of credibility.”
MORE COMMUNICATION
Belcher’s communication efforts with staff and the community have been wide-ranging and frequent.
He records and sends videos to teachers every couple of weeks and updates board members and other staff with an e-mail every Friday. He makes it a priority to visit schools, meet with parents and talk with whatever group will have him.
“Any time leaders are willing to sit down and listen to ideas and talk with folks, that gives you a positive impression, and that’s what I have of him so far,” said Mary Ratliff, president of the Columbia and Missouri chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
As Columbia superintendent, Belcher succeeded Phyllis Chase, who retired in August 2008 after voters rejected a proposed 54-cent tax levy increase that April. Residents’ concerns about poor communication were among the complaints that hampered Chase’s tenure and led to the failed tax measure.
Chase has since come out of retirement and works as the associate superintendent of teaching and learning in the North Kansas City School District. Jim Ritter led the Columbia district on an interim basis last school year.
After once saying no to a search consultant last year, Belcher agreed to talk with the Columbia school board. At the time, he was superintendent of the mostly homogenous Kearney R-I School District north of Kansas City.
The Columbia board interviewed Belcher once and named him one of two finalists for the job.
But it wasn’t until the public talked to Belcher that it become obvious how hungry people were for a communicator who could lead. At his interview at Paxton Keeley, he had the crowd of 100 or so laughing, clapping and complimenting him — an outsider they had just met who had nothing to do with past criticisms over poor communication in the district.
Hickman High School Principal Mike Jeffers said Belcher has been available, visible and approachable.
“Those three things have led people to believe that they can follow him,” Jeffers said.
West Boulevard Elementary Principal Peter Stiepleman recently complimented Belcher on his communication skills.
“I like how open you are with us,” Stiepleman told him.
Belcher responded, “I’m too stupid to manipulate things. I figure I’ll just tell the truth.”
LESS BUREAUCRACY
Belcher’s past, including his time at Kearney, has dictated many of his actions here.
When he worked in the Blue Springs and Warrensburg school districts, he hated how long it took plans to gain multiple committees’ approval — only to watch the school board table the idea.
But in Kearney, a school district about five times smaller than Columbia, he loved how quickly items were conceived, approved by the school board and implemented.
In other words, he loathed bureaucracy.
Then Belcher moved from Kearney, a district with 3,600 students and about 280 certificated staff, to Columbia, a district of 17,200 students and more than 1,570 certificated staff — a bureaucracy.
To negotiate the bureaucratic tangle of Columbia schools, though, Belcher has established three advisory committees: one with elementary school staff; one with secondary school staff; and one composed of middle managers, such as principals and district subject coordinators.
He meets with them about once a month. The committee members mostly choose the discussion topics.
Mary Margaret Coffield teaches drama at Rock Bridge High School and represents the school on the secondary advisory committee. “I really appreciate that for the first time since I’ve been in this district, I have an opportunity to represent my school directly to the superintendent,” said Coffield, who has been with the district for seven years.
As a leader, Belcher pushes the idea of ownership — removing layers and making teachers and administrators take responsibility for the programs they use and the scores their students produce.
“We can easily disassociate ourselves from responsibility,” he said. “But when it’s ours, we can take responsibility.”
The community already has seen an example of Belcher trying to nudge ownership to the schools, although they might not have liked the change.
This month, the Columbia Board of Education cut $5.2 million from the district budget, including about $625,000 that paid 11 elementary science specialists. For the past 50 years, such specialists have exclusively taught science to fourth- and fifth-graders twice a week.
Of all of the district’s reductions — the equivalent of some 75 full-time positions and cuts to several other programs — no other cutback garnered more public discussion than the specialists.
Next school year, without the specialists, classroom teachers will teach science. It will be implemented back into the regular school day, similar to how instructors teach math and language arts.
Instead of specialists being responsible for fourth- and fifth-grade science, Belcher wants principals and classroom teachers to seize responsibility for ensuring science is taught and for the subject’s test scores.
“They will become more in control, and it will work because they created it,” Belcher said.
But the data show otherwise.
Sandra Abell is the director of the science education center at the University of Missouri.
She has pored through studies that show science is the least-taught subject in elementary schools, regardless of whether classroom teachers and principals are supposed to own the results.
In Columbia, lower-level elementary teachers have said they’ve been instructed to focus on math and language arts, not science.
“It’s a nice sentiment that the buildings might be taking more responsibility,” Abell said, “but they haven’t as of yet in terms of grades K, 1, 2, 3. So I don’t know why we would expect that to happen in fourth and fifth grade.”
‘I’M GLAD TO BE WRONG’
Belcher has used the word “independent” to describe his bosses, the seven school board members who govern the district. And no board member is more independent than Segert, who voted against Belcher a year ago.
She was nervous about how well he would adapt to a multicultural and larger Columbia, coming from the mostly homogenous, smaller western Missouri community of Kearney. She wondered about his ideas to fix the achievement gap between groups of students.
But mostly, Segert said, she voted against Belcher because she worried how much he would be able to change a district in which almost all of the assistant superintendents have close to 30 years of experience.
“He’s been really good at balancing his authority as superintendent with letting them keep some responsibility and autonomy,” Segert said. “He’s not afraid to be a superintendent.”
It is a role Belcher feels comfortable in as CEO of a larger school district. He terms his time in Columbia as the start of the “best year of my professional career.”
He enjoys not having to worry about whether the substitute teachers will show or whether the schools will cancel class because of snow. His wife, Jackie, also said Belcher vents less about work at home.
“It’s been amazing to realize how much that stuff was a part of being stressed in a smaller system,” Belcher said.
Segert also has been pleased. “I’m glad to be wrong,” she said.
Of course, seven months is a short time frame on which to judge a leader.
We haven’t seen a year of Missouri Assessment Program scores while Belcher has been in charge. As a new superintendent, any program or curriculum that has not produced results has not been his idea.
“He’s on his honeymoon period, too, and he knows that,” Jeffers said.
Jeffers also remembers Columbia’s former superintendent. “Dr. Chase was in the buildings quite a bit,” he said.
He recalls Chase giving building leaders some freedom over which programs they use, just as Belcher does. “I’m not sure it’s changed; we’ve always had a degree of autonomy,” he said.
And after a year with Chase, some had expressed satisfaction with her communication skills.
“I was very impressed at the way she made such an effort to reach out to the community when she first came to town,” said Cheri Ghan, then the outgoing president of the Columbia Council of PTAs, as reported in a Tribune story published June 30, 2004.
As Ratliff said, “We always have to wait and see.”
Coffield said teachers plan to do the same. “I think teachers went through a year of some reassurance and healing while” former interim Superintendent “Jim Ritter was in charge” last school year, Coffield said, “and now they’re waiting and wondering how things will be.”
Back at Paxton Keeley, Assistant Principal Patti Raynor persuades Belcher to make one last stop to hear students sing a Valentine’s Day jingle. Belcher hears the tune before he opens the door to Room 124, where Beth Luetjen leads the chorus.
“Be my Val-en-tine. Be my Val-en-tine,” the students sing to the tune of “B-I-N-G-O.”
Luetjen stops singing and shuffles over to Belcher, who’s observing near the door.
“What’s the real name of this song, Dr. Belcher?” she asks.
“ ‘Bingo,’ ” he says.
“All right, you pass,” she says, writing a check sign in the air. “A-plus!”
Reach Jonathon Braden at 573-815-1711 or e-mail jbraden@columbiatribune.com.
Superintendent says retirement will be his last
BY JONATHON BRADEN
jbraden@columbiatribune.com | 815-1711
You could call him Columbia Public Schools’ bailout officer.
Twice Jim Ritter has left the school district, only to return when it needed his help. The first comeback was in 1998, ending in 2003. Last year, he returned again as interim superintendent after the retirement of Phyllis Chase.
“I felt that it was important to do it simply under the circumstances in which the district found itself,” Ritter said last week.
His career began with an August assignment in 1959 to teach American history at Hickman High School. Throughout his tenure, Ritter has affected nearly every area of Columbia’s schools, with time as a teacher, guidance director, transportation director, assistant superintendent, associate superintendent and superintendent.
Finally, after 45 years of public education and two previous retirements, Ritter, who will turn 72 next week, serves his last day in Columbia Public Schools today.
“My career hasn’t ever really been planned out,” Ritter said. “I will tell you it’s been one of the most challenging and rewarding years I have had.”
In 1991, Ritter first retired from the school district. He had spent much of his career working with Russ Thompson, Columbia’s superintendent for 18 years.
“First of all, I thought he was very competent in the responsibilities that he was assigned,” Thompson said of Ritter. “Secondly, I thought his personal skills, working with people, was exceptional.”
With Thompson in charge and Ritter as associate superintendent, the district was named one of the nation’s top 16 school districts in the 1980s, prompting President Ronald Reagan to visit Columbia. The administration also had not seen a significant bond issue or tax levy increase fail.
After Ritter left in 1991 and Thompson in 1994, though, not only could the school district not settle on a leader, but it seemed Ritter couldn’t settle on a job. The district had four leaders in four school years. Ritter had four jobs with four companies until he became superintendent for the first time in 1998.
In 2003, Ritter retired for the second time, and Chase took charge. But to many, Ritter still represented Columbia Public Schools.
“People would corner me regularly and say, ‘What’s going on here?’ ” he said.
Then voters rejected a tax increase last year, and Chase later announced her resignation. The community confidence Ritter had built up his entire career had disappeared.
Ritter agreed to serve for a year, as long as he could push the district forward.
“I thought Dr. Chase really came into a very strong school district,” he said. “The school district that I had left behind was not the school district that I inherited.”
He found a school board and administration that didn’t trust each other, Ritter said. The board wanted to be more involved and have more say on decisions, which “had come across in some ways as not trusting us to do our job,” he said.
These days, Ritter said, the administration and the board work together. “Compared to a year ago, it’s a total change in attitude,” he said.
Board members agree. “When we ask for information, the administration is much more willing to provide it,” member Ines Segert said.
More than anything, though, Ritter wanted to pass a tax increase. The downturn of the economy in the fall prevented that.
But starting tomorrow, Ritter won’t have to worry about district finances. He’ll spend more time with his 95-year-old mother, whom he sees every day. Ritter takes care of the little things for her, such as opening a can of peaches. Every Thursday afternoon, he drives her to get her hair done and to the grocery store.
Retirement should also mean more rest for Ritter, which could help his Meniere’s disease. Less than two weeks ago, Ritter missed a school board meeting after being hospitalized because the disease had affected his stomach lining.
Although Ritter didn’t achieve all of his goals with the school district, the community has approved of his career. The school board is even contemplating naming a building after him.
Tomorrow, Ritter will have retired for the third time — and this time, he says, it’s final.
“I’ve worked 34 years for Columbia Public Schools,” he said, “and I didn’t get up a single morning not being proud of that.”
Former POW shares experiences living with McCain
By JONATHON BRADEN
News@ColumbiaMissourian.com
About two years ago, John Clark hollered at Republican presidential candidate John McCain at a convention of American prisoners of war. He walked up to the senior senator from Arizona, shook his hand and exchanged a few pleasant words.
After a brief visit with his fellow prisoners of war, McCain was on his way.
Clark’s relationship with McCain is distant these days. The two haven’t talked much since McCain was elected a U.S. senator in 1982.
But there was a time when the two men were closer than either would have liked. Clark and McCain were prisoners of war together at the Hoa Lo prison, or the “Hanoi Hilton,” in Vietnam.
They endured solitary confinement, the cement slabs the North Vietnamese called beds and the torture inflicted upon them. They also experienced the camaraderie that is borne out of captivity.
They played bridge. They shared story after story. And they made it home to talk about it.
Clark calls the 30 or so men who were held at the Hanoi Hilton toward the end of the Vietnam War some of the “meanest and ornery” Americans captured during the war. He speaks of McCain with the highest regard.
Yet, as McCain and Barack Obama vie for every last vote as Election Day draws near, Clark isn’t saying whether he’ll be voting for McCain or Obama.
“I know there can’t be anybody that cares about the country more than John McCain,” Clark said. “I have great regard for him as an individual and as a patriot.”
In May 1972, the North Vietnamese moved a large group of American prisoners to near the border of China and Vietnam from the Hanoi Hilton. But almost 30 of them remained at the Hanoi Hilton, Clark said, including himself and McCain.
Clark said the North Vietnamese held back the chosen American prisoners of war to guard against U.S. bombing of Hanoi, which, if it was Vietnam’s strategy, didn’t work. But he excludes himself from the group’s tough distinction. Clark said he was held back because of his illnesses.
“I just wasn’t as tough and mean as those guys,” Clark said.
For most of the almost six years Clark was a prisoner of war, he battled the occasional severe cases of asthma and malaria.
The native and resident of Columbia said he acquired malaria in the summer of 1967, a few months after his RF-4C fighter plane was shot down near the border of Vietnam and Laos. The asthma started during the winter of ’67.
“I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t talk and I was very weak. I was pretty close to dying,” Clark said. “I didn’t have any medical care. I just had to survive on my own.”
Fellow prisoner of war Dan Glenn lived with Clark for a time in Vietnam.
“The first few years you sort of lived in terror of somebody coming in and taking you out,” Glenn said. “You never knew what was going on.”
He wasn’t held back with the last Hanoi Hilton group. But he remembers well the 20 x 60 foot room they stayed in.
A 14 x 45 concrete slab rested in the center of the room. Initially, all of the prisoners were to sleep there. But some offered to sleep on the concrete floor, so each prisoner on the slab had about 28 inches from side to side.
Busted up concrete exposed the aging prison. Grease spots soaked the slab, places where other bodies had laid for years.
“You knew you weren’t the first person that lived there,” Glenn said.
Plain, whitewashed walls symbolized the dullness of the prison. Straw mats blocked the view of the outside world through the arched windows with metal bars.
“But it was good to have roommates,” said Glenn, who lives in Cuchara, Colo., and sees Clark at least once a year.
The men taught each other foreign languages, such as Spanish, French or German. At night, someone would tell the story of a movie, Glenn said.
They also fixed things, or at least Clark did. He earned himself the nickname of “Gyro,” after Disney’s “Gyro Gearloose,” because of his mechanical skills.
The prisoners stayed in Hanoi until American B-52s began heavily bombing the city around Christmas 1972. Clark and others remained inside the Hanoi Hilton during the air raid, peeking out the windows and often cheering the American forces.
In February 1973, after five years and 11 months as a prisoner of war, John Clark regained his life.
He returned to a wife who had moved on, but Clark had new freedom. He earned his M.B.A. from MU, eventually retiring as the water engineer for the city of Columbia.
He has been awarded two Purple Hearts, two Legions of Merit and an array of other military honors. His home office is chalk-full of military books. As he talks, he thinks about penning one himself about all of his experiences, something he’s been approached about in the past. He says he’s OK for now, though.
Since McCain returned to the states, he’s written articles and books about leadership and his experiences. He eventually pursued the career that has him days away from possibly winning the presidential election.
At the time, in the Hanoi Hilton, Clark said he didn’t see McCain as a future senator or president. He saw a comrade struggling to survive like the rest of them.
“You were respected for that time, that place and who you were,” Clark said. “(McCain) was just another one of the guys who had overcome enormous difficulties.”
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Jan Mees gives insider perspective
BY JONATHON BRADEN
jbraden@columbiatribune.com | 815-1711
The little hand of the clock rested at 4 on a Friday afternoon, the time for weekend relaxation to begin.
But for Columbia Board of Education President Jan Mees, it was time to get serious.
She was surrounded by three students, locked in a game of bridge in Room 303 at Grant Elementary School. The sleeves of her purple hooded sweatshirt had ridden up her arms. She crossed her hands, keeping her cards close. It was her play.
“OK, now I’m going to have to act like I know what I’m doing,” she told the students.
Before serving a three-year term on the school board, this was the type of setting Mees was familiar with for 21 years: being surrounded by students.
Now, seeking another three-year term on the school board, she cites her experience in the schools as a strength of her campaign. More than anything, she said, those years spent chatting with kids and learning from teachers have helped her form decisions on the school board. If elected again, she said, they also should inform her future decisions.
“I truly understand what the educators have to do every day in the classroom,” Mees said.
Mees and her husband of 39 years, Bill, raised two sons in Columbia, and both graduated from Hickman High School.
She started working formally for Columbia Public Schools in 1985, spending four years at Fairview Elementary School as a library clerk. She worked the next 17 years as a media specialist at three elementary schools, Lange Middle School and Hickman before retiring in 2006.
She won election to the school board in 2007, earning the most votes and raising the most cash of any candidate.
She is the only board member and candidate to have had such roles in the school district, giving her experience similar to that of Columbia teachers that no other board member can claim.
Mees also is the only candidate running this year who has more than one year of school board votes to examine.
Her “yes” votes have included:
* Giving former Superintendent Phyllis Chase a 5 percent raise in May 2007.
* Using $10 million of the district’s reserves to fund 70 new positions and bump teacher base pay by $1,000 in June 2007.
* Placing a 54-cent tax increase on the April 2008 ballot, which residents rejected.
But having served three years on the board, Mees said, “I have become much more financially responsible.”
Mees often does go along with the administration’s recommendation and rarely criticizes the district in public as other board members do, such as member Ines Segert, a Mees supporter.
“I don’t always agree with her,” Segert said.
When Segert joined the board in 2008, she said that year that Mees “seemed very uncomfortable questioning some of the cuts from administration.” But Segert recently said that Mees has changed. After Mees recently voted against some $440,000 in program cuts, Segert said, “I think she has evolved.”
As board president, Segert said, Mees always responds to residents’ concerns. And, Segert said, Mees now seems comfortable questioning the district in public.
But Mees still often takes the side of teachers and administrators when other members shy from that position, such as when the board in December was nearly unanimous in its disappointment about student achievement data.
Some board members pointed out the positive aspects of the data, but Mees alone defended the data that showed the district had failed to meet many of its long-term goals. “This is not what’s truly going on in the classroom every day,” she said at the Dec. 14 board meeting. “I truly believe that.”
Other Mees supporters include former Columbia schools Superintendent Jim Ritter, who serves on the “Citizens for Jan Mees” committee. “As I look at the board, generally I think Jan really provides a nice balance,” he said.
Ritter rejects the notion that Mees might be a “yes” vote for administration.
“While she’s been an advocate for teachers, I think she’s been very responsible in her decision-making,” he said. “She is not as outspoken as some on the board. But when she does speak, I think it shows some depth of knowledge on the issue. And to me, that’s a valuable person to have on the board.”
Reach Jonathon Braden at 573-815-1711 or e-mail jbraden@columbiatribune.com.
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Hurdler doesn’t sweat it
JONATHON BRADEN
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER
Booker Nunley was strolling to the water cooler with a smile wider than his 6-foot-2, 160-pound frame.
His fan club of Track Eastern Carolina teammates, stationed near the finish line in the northwest corner of Burke Stadium, was still showering him with praise.
Still walking, Nunley turned to his fan base, removed his sunglasses with his right hand, then used his left hand to ceremoniously wipe imaginary sweat off his forehead.
The 18-year-old had earned every clap and cheer after setting a meet record of 13.41 seconds in winning the Young Men’s (ages 17 and 18) National Junior Olympics 110-meter high hurdles. The mark also will be considered for listing as the national youth record because the current mark of 13.4 was a hand-held time run in 1978 before electronic timing was used.
But Nunley had hardly perspired in the less than 14 seconds it took him to get from his starting blocks to the finish line despite temperatures in the high 80s and a cloudless sky.
His fellow hurdlers didn’t provide much opposition for the South Carolina recruit, who’s only run the hurdles for two years. Since February, Nunley has been competing against collegiate athletes after being declared ineligible from North Carolina high school competition.
“If I would have known, I would have taken the right amount of courses,” Nunley said. “I mean, I’m a smart kid. I’ve taken advanced classes ever since high school.”
It was just two days before the North Carolina high school indoor championships in February when Booker’s mother, Jacqueline, received word that Booker couldn’t compete in the spring season of high school track and field.
“It was kind of devastating,” she said Sunday from their North Carolina home.
In the fall, Booker dropped two of his four high school classes. Only needing English to graduate, he thought everything was fine.
But athletes have to pass at least three classes to be eligible the following semester, according to North Carolina High School Athletic Association rules.
Nunley, who has a GPA of 3.5, said he had no clue about the rule, and his counselor, who was also his high school track coach, also hadn’t informed him of the regulation.
Just like that, his high school track career was over.
But his hurdling career was about to hit new strides.
Local universities, such as Wake Forest, North Carolina State and South Carolina, where he’ll run both the 110 and 400 hurdles next year, let him compete in meets unattached.
“I actually ran a lot more than the school season would have allowed me to,” he said. “I probably ran more than any hurdler this year.”
Nunley got used to competing in big meets every few weeks.
“Right now there’s nobody around him that affects anything about his psyche,” Track Eastern Carolina coach Dave Simpson said.
He also had more time to focus on his technique rather than try to win high school contests, and that helped him become a stronger hurdler.
At the collegiate level, the hurdles go up to 42 inches, three inches higher than high school hurdles. The 39-inch hurdles had become easy for Nunley, but the 42-inchers presented a challenge.
“Forty-twos actually helped me become a better hurdler,” Nunley said. “You had to get stronger. You had to do things a different way. You had to be technically sound.”
Nunley’s dedication was on display Sunday for the finals crowd at Burke Stadium.
“That’s the best high school race I’ve ever seen,” Simpson said.
But, Nunley said, Sunday’s record-breaking time wasn’t even his best.
“Actually, I probably could have gone a lot faster,” Nunley said. “I haven’t really been practicing lately.”
About three weeks ago, before he won silver at the IAAF World Junior Championships in Poland with a time of 13.41, he was bothered by some knee tendinitis.
Since he returned from Poland, Nunley had only practiced hurdles a couple times before the Junior Olympics in Omaha.
With his win Sunday, Nunley has replaced the North Carolina state championship he likely would have won this past spring with an even more prestigious prize. Simpson teased him about it after the race.
“I guess you’ll trade in a state championship for this championship anytime, won’t you?”
Closer fashions a big season
BY JONATHON BRADEN
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER
A fistful of sunflower seeds fills his right cheek. His hat is shoved down tight to his head, its bill hiding his eyes. As he glares in for a sign, his longish brown hair ruffles in the wind. The top button of his jersey is unbuttoned, and his necklace dangles.
Georgia closer Josh Fields has “the look.”
“Hopefully, my presence out there is intimidating,” Fields said.
If the look isn’t scary enough, Fields has the numbers in 2008 – 17 saves and 62 strikeouts in 36 innings – to scare the begeesus out of hitters.
As Georgia goes for its first national championship in baseball since 1990, Fields, whom the Seattle Mariners made their No. 1 draft pick earlier this month, is one reason the Bulldogs have a chance to win it.
“You wanted to see him finish his career on this type of season,” Georgia coach David Perno said. “Not the type of season he had last year.”
His spotty 2007 season was precipitated by a 2006 summer spent in the prestigious Cape Cod League, where he was named the outstanding relief pitcher. Upon returning to Athens, Ga., in late August after a summer of work, the coaching staff shut him down for five months’ rest.
But as his junior year began, Fields struggled. The Bulldogs opened against eventual NCAA champion Oregon State. Fields pitched one inning; he walked three, hit one and gave up five earned runs.
The slow start took a toll. “I didn’t have much confidence,” Fields said.
Georgia finished with a 23-33 record. Fields ended 1-6 with a 4.46 ERA. He almost blew more games (6) than he saved (7).
In 2006, Fields was earning the label as one of the best closers in college baseball. With his live arm, a new necklace and wavy hair, he saved 15 games with a 1.80 ERA.
In 2007, though, he was more style than substance. Still, the Atlanta Braves chose Fields with the 69th pick in the 2007 Major League Baseball draft.
Fields, however, decided to come back to Georgia, becoming the highest pick of the draft to return to college.
“The team coming back was a very, very veteran team for the most part,” Georgia pitching coach Brady Wiederhold said. “He wanted to be a part of that.”
The summer before his senior year, Fields decided to stay in Athens. This year was to be different than 2007. The 6-foot, 178-pound right-hander met with Wiederhold to develop a plan for 2008.
In high school, Fields threw a curveball. But he had since switched his off-speed pitch to more of a cut fastball or slider-type pitch, Wiederhold said.
Both, however, were still fast pitches. They didn’t differ much in the eyes of the hitter, Wiederhold said.
Fields mentioned bringing back his curveball, which he throws in the low 80s, and Wiederhold jumped at the idea.
“I said, ‘By all means,’” Wiederhold said. “I thought that that was a great idea, and that’s when we started working at it.”
Besides the return of the curveball, Wiederhold also wanted to improve Fields’ mechanics. He grabbed his stopwatch, and Fields starting hurling.
The goal was to speed up Fields’ windup to have his momentum moving faster to the plate. They agreed on 2.3 or 2.4 seconds, from the time Fields begins winding up to when the ball dents the catcher’s mitt.
“He’s always thrown hard,” Wiederhold said. “Mechanically, he’s got back in line.”
Other little things started popping up for Fields, letting him believe that his senior year would be successful.
He found a necklace he’d purchased in Myrtle Beach, S.C., and wore all of 2006. The necklace had gone missing the entire 2007 season.
“I just felt like this was one of the little markers that helped it get going,” he said of his necklace. “This year, trying to get that confidence going again was huge for me.”