Bowling Green alumni step up to save baseball
About 250 private donors rescue program cut over shortfall
When Dave Litzenberg woke up on June 1, he knew there were about two days left to save the Bowling Green baseball program. It wasn’t his job alone, of course. But the former player and 1981 graduate of the school, who had admittedly grown disconnected from the program over the years, had found himself in the middle of a fairly remarkable movement that was either going to succeed or fail on the thinnest of margins.
Two weeks earlier, Bowling Green had announced that it was discontinuing its baseball program as part of a $2 million budget cut for athletics, a scenario that has played
“I think the pitch (to fellow alumni) was how important the program was ... how your time at BGSU shaped you.” Andy Tracy Former Bowling Green player and MLB infielder who is now manager of the Class AAA Columbus (Ohio) Clippers
out at roughly 20 Division I schools so far this year amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Though Bowling Green had some history behind it, most notably producing standout pitchers Orel Hershiser and Roger McDowell, it wasn’t a huge surprise to anyone paying attention that the program might be on the chopping block.
“It’s probably like the old analogy of the frog in the pot of boiling water as it gets a little warmer and warmer the frog thinks, ‘What’s the big deal?’ but eventually it’s cooked and you didn’t see it coming,” said Litzenberg, a financial adviser in the Toledo area. “Were there signs
the baseball program funding was not real healthy? Absolutely. There were some groups previously that had done some donating themselves or talked to some people about organizing something, but it hadn’t had the same level of urgency.”
Shortly after the May 15 decision to cut the program, there was no mistaking the urgency from a large swath of Bowling Green baseball alumni to try to get the school to change its mind. A small group text of players from the late 1970s grew into an email campaign, which after just a week resulted in about $120,000 in pledges. But that was only enough to show the school they were serious about raising money privately to save the program. They were still a long way from pulling together enough money to actually fund baseball.
“On May 31st, it came back to us from (school president) Rodney Rogers that if we could get a three-year commitment at $500,000 a year that the university would reinstate the program,” Litzenberg said. “On Tuesday morning (June 2), it was pretty much last call: We’re either solving this by noon Eastern or we’re not. And between restructuring and new money, we probably put about one-third of the $1.5 million together in four hours.”
Thanks to roughly 250 private donors, Bowling Green baseball beat the odds. The school announced later in the day June 2 that it had reversed course and would continue to play, which began a process that would include a coaching change – 31-year old assistant Kyle Hallock was elevated to the top spot, replacing longtime coach Danny Schmitz – and bringing players back who had entered the transfer portal.
Amid a sea of bad news around college athletics, the resurrection of Bowling Green baseball stands as an example of what it takes to get a budget-strapped school to change its mind on eliminating a sport. It could even be a model other athletic directors study and follow if they have to cut sports. The risk, or course, is if there is not enough interest or action from alumni or boosters to raise the money to save a sport.
Bowling Green was fortunate. In fairly quick fashion, a network of wellheeled alumni led by Litzenberg and insurance company CEO Dana Dowers were able to pull together a significant amount of money, make a commitment to the school and save an institution that they considered a major part of their post-college success.
“It’s the oldest sport at Bowling Green State University,” said Andy Tracy, a former major leaguer who is manager for the Class AAA Columbus (Ohio) Clippers. “There’s massive amounts of tradition across the board and there’s a lot of really good alumni that have influence in communities and businesses across America. I think the pitch was how important the program was, how important Danny Schmitz was, how your time at BGSU shaped you. We just wanted to come together and get the program where it needs to be.”
Remarkably, most of the donors had not been particularly involved in the program. Litzenberg, who ended up organizing GoFundMe type campaigns into one effort, said he had taken his son to one game in the past handful of years but was not a regular on campus.
It’s not like Bowling Green baseball didn’t have needs. Athletic director Bob
Moosbrugger, who is also a former baseball player at the school, said there had been efforts in the past to fund upgrades for the program through private donations, none of which went very far. That’s why he was surprised as anyone when former players suddenly mobilized.
“I’m looking at myself in the mirror, too, saying us as alumni haven’t been as supportive of our program as we should have been,” Moosbrugger said. “Everyone has their priorities in life and people are busy and may not remembering to do it, and also, have we done the best job asking for it?
“But people I think had some frank conversations like, listen, that’s in the past and this is about our program and this is a different ask than what the ask was before.”
That’s why it was important for the school, if it was going to even consider reversing its decision, to have a multiyear financial commitment from donors. Without some assurance players wouldn’t have to go through this again, the initial push was only going to stave off the inevitable for a little while.
Litzenberg’s group, which has rebranded its efforts as “Extra Innings,” is now focused on building out its fundraising capability into the future since it’s quite possible the financial conditions that put Bowling Green in a tough spot to begin with will still exist after the initial three-year commitment runs out.
“Our expectation is that this is an ongoing process,” Litzenberg said.
Is that sustainable? Ultimately, baseball has been a money loser for Bowling Green’s athletic department. Eliminating it was a fairly efficient way to chop $500,000 a year off a shrinking budget. With this lifeline, Moosbrugger knows the school will have to do a better creating new revenue and generating donations so it doesn’t have to make another tough decision at a school that can’t count on a huge influx of football money and isn’t likely to get more funding from student fees. The athletics department already receives nearly $13 million a year in student fees according to data compiled by USA TODAY in partnership with Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.
“We hold a little bit of the ability to fix the problem,” Moosbrugger said. “We’ve got to continue to tell our story, and the story we often tell and to the alumni I’m talking to is not many of these folks made it in professional baseball. They made their money in business, and they’ll all say it’s because of the life lessons I learned on the field and the education I got at Bowling Green that put me in the position I’m in today.
“The more that we continue to use our student-athletes, because they tell the story better than the athletic director or a head coach, and we have to be able to connect them to our alumni to tell their stories and I think people realize how important it is. It’s unfortunate that the discontinuation of baseball brought that to light.”
Despite the down-to-the-wire uncertainty of whether enough money could be raised to save the program, it seems that Bowling Green is back on solid ground with a legitimate future to look forward to. Nearly all the players who initially had to look for new homes are coming back, and Bowling Green is on to recruiting for future years.
“We feel like BGSU baseball is here to stay,” said Hallock, the new coach. “We don’t see the 2 1⁄2 weeks we were out as anything but something that is a part of our history.”