Transfer leads way as Huskies look to make their mark
STORRS — David Smith was hoping to get his sophomore season started at La Salle when he got an urgent group text from his coach.
“It said we’re going to be having a meeting with our AD,” Smith said. “It was out of nowhere, 10 o’clock in the morning, 45 minutes, mandatory meeting, everybody has to be on there.”
On that Zoom call in September 2020, Smith learned baseball was one of seven sports to be discontinued at La Salle.
Uconn soon contacted him. Smith decided to transfer in midyear, even though it meant sitting out the 2021 season and being ready to go in 2022 with three years’ of eligibility. Like so many of the transfers starting for the current Huskies, Smith needed a home and found it in Storrs.
“The biggest thing he was concerned about, ‘Can I get into the batting facility on my own?’ ” Uconn baseball coach Jim Penders said. “I said, ‘24-7, you’re going to have a code,’ and he said, ‘I’m coming.’ ”
Smith and catcher Matt Donlan, another midyear transfer, were often in the batting cages early in the morning and late at night as Uconn made its run to the Big East championship and the NCAA Tournament last spring. Turned loose on the field this season, Smith is hitting .313 with seven home runs and 41 RBIS, showing a knack for clutch hits and plays, too, with an inside-the-park homer to win an extra-inning game at Butler. He also had a 9-for-16 performance against Xavier to helping the Huskies clinch the regular-season title. He was named Big East player of the week on May 16.
“It’s been more than I’d hoped, for sure,” Smith said. “Coming in midyear, I didn’t really know what to expect, but I found a great group of friends with the junior class and it was an easy transition. The coaches made it easy, too.”
For much of this season, things looked easy for the Huskies, who were 43-10 going into the final weekend of the season. But at Georgetown this past weekend, they were swept. Now with their RPI at No. 49, they may need to win the Big East Tournament in Ohio this weekend to secure their spot in the NCAA field of 64.
The top-seeded Huskies begin play in the double-elimination format against No. 4 Georgetown in Mason, Ohio,
on Thursday at 10:30 a.m. in a start time that was moved up four hours due to anticipated bad weather. The day’s second game between No. 2 Creighton and No. 3 Xavier, the host team, will now start at 2:30 p.m.
“It’s baseball, right?” Smith said. “That’s the first time we’ve faced adversity all year. That was the first series we’d lost the entire year, which is pretty impressive, honestly. Sometimes something like that needs to happen to get a team fired up.”
The 5-foot-11, 180-pound Smith, a three-sport athlete in high school in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, brought versatility and durability to Uconn, starting 55 of 56 games as lead-off hitter and second baseman. He’s posted a .412 on-base percentage with 20 steals in 24 attempts and 55 runs scored. He made only seven
errors all season, a .990 fielding percentage.
“This kid just wants to get better,” Penders said. “And he’s using this spring as a launching pad to improve his skills.”
Uconn will line up its pitchers as it has all year, with Austin Peterson (9-2, 3.46 ERA), Pat Gallagher (8-3, 3.38) and Enzo Stefanoni (6-1, 2.91) to start the first three games. The Huskies’ ERA, 3.48, grew after they allowed 33 runs in three games in Georgetown’s hitter-friendly park, but the team has a huge run-differential at 455-231.
The Huskies hit 69 home runs in 56 games, depending heavily on the middle of the order, with Ben Huber and Casey Dana each hitting 11 and Donlan and Erik Stock nine.
Peterson, Gallagher, Donlan, Stock and freshman Korey Morton, who hit .443 in 26 games, were all named to the All-big East first team on Wednesday, Dana, Smith and Stefanoni were named to the second
team.
The Huskies’ postseason resume has been hampered by a schedule that turned out to have less strength than anticipated, but after their sweep of Creighton in late April it looked as if they could be an at-large candidate without winning the conference tournament, or perhaps even a candidate to host one of 16 NCAA regionals. The Georgetown series changed the outlook but not the approach Uconn will take this weekend.
“It’s the next championship we can win, and we’re in the championship business,” Penders said. “We’re going to manage it to win it. I can’t be concerned with RPI or what a [selection] committee is going to say on Sunday night. We’ve got a tough bunch of guys. We’re going to bounce back just fine. We got hit in the chops. we’ve got to get up off the mat.”