’Runners seek balance of local and global recruiting
Nic Anderson-Vine has not taken the archetypal route to a Division I baseball career. Originally from Umina Beach, New South Wales, Australia, the outfielder was reared in the nation’s close-knit, developing baseball culture — ”It’s not big by any means,” he said, “but the people that are in baseball are very passionate about it” — and represented his country at the youth level.
But he knew he’d need to come to America to take the next step, and started at Iowa Central Community College in 2018.
“In terms of pathways back home,” Anderson-Vine said, “there aren’t any.”
As atypical as his chosen path was, it was the right one to get him the attention of Cal State Bakersfield coach Jeremy Beard. Australia to Bakersfield has in fact been a veritable pipeline in recent years, with Beard’s connection to a former teammate Down Under giving him the inside track on some of the country’s best young players. And Beard’s decade-plus coaching in the JUCO ranks means he remains well-connected there too.
This created what Beard calls a “triangle” of insight that fueled CSUB’s signing of Anderson-Vine, even as he recovered from an Achilles injury that had hampered his 2020 season in Iowa.
More broadly, this year’s class of newcomers — who hail from Bakersfield, Delano and Fresno, yes, but also Coquitlam, British Columbia, Canada, Honolulu and Umina Beach — is emblematic of the program’s desire to strengthen its local roots, while, emboldened by augmented scholarship funding, looking increasingly far afield for hidden talent. It’s what Beard calls the “short arm” and the “long arm.”
“We were in a position where we had to rely a lot more on local, to where we saved money,” Beard said. “But now, with some increased dollar amounts, we’ve been able to extend our arm even into other countries in order to go find the players that we need to compete in the Big West Conference.”
A newly minted under-18 European champion when he arrived at CSUB, Cody Hendriks also represents the reach of that “long arm.” For the Dutch-Canadian infielder, whose American-sports-loving father introduced his sister to softball and him to baseball as he grew up in the Netherlands, playing here is the culmination of a longtime goal.
“That was a huge, huge dream of mine, to go to the U.S. and play baseball,” Hendriks said. “I always wanted to go D-I, play for a nice school, but at points it didn’t seem super realistic.”
His vision came sharply into focus when he joined the Okotoks Dawgs Academy in Alberta, just south of Calgary. On a trip to visit college baseball programs, Hendriks was immediately enamored at the atmosphere he encountered at CSUB. Fast forward to 2021 and he’s angling for playing time in the Roadrunners’ spring season.
To be sure, Anderson-Vine and Hendriks remain outliers on the CSUB roster. The Roadrunners feature 32 players from California, including eight from Kern County. One key element of Beard’s local strategy is the program’s connection with Bakersfield College and its coach Tim Painton. Pitcher Gabe Ulloa is one of several Roadrunner newcomers from the Renegades program, where he said it feels like Beard is “just one phone call away.”
Originally from Delano, Ulloa has found that plenty of teammates, regardless of origin, can connect with his smaller-town experiences.
“You get to hear their stories,” Ulloa said, “you get to hear everything they’ve been through, and what their town was like, and it’s almost relatable to where I’m from.”
He summarized the clubhouse’s makeup with an analogy: “Not everybody has the same cards to play with — they were dealt different hands.”
Beard said he’s very focused on cultivating this sort of diversity of backgrounds in his clubhouse, fleshing out a culture he calls “the No. 1 thing we have going for us in this program,” while maintaining its local ties. He has his sights set on a variety of areas around the country that were previously inaccessible to the Roadrunners
— Orange County, the Pacific Northwest, Arizona and more. The start of the signing period on Nov. 10, which included the signing of Oregonian two-way player Ky Hoskinson, indicates he’s making progress in at least one of those regions.
“We’ve never had the ability to get into some of these areas,” Beard said, “and since I think our reputation and our culture has improved dramatically the last few years, I think that the secret’s getting out that this is a great place to be.”