Players’ coach
Wake Forest’s Walter on cusp of baseball glory after donating kidney, other trials
Strange as it seems, the baseball part in Wake Forest coach Tom Walter’s career often has been relegated to a secondary role.
Walter has won more than 800 games in 27 seasons and is the rare coach to lead three schools to the NCAA Tournament. Now consider he donated a kidney to one of his players 12 years ago, an act that a decade later inspired the formation of a nonprofit organization focused on social justice.
Or that when he was at New Orleans, he brought together his displaced players and moved them 1,100 miles away to New Mexico State for classes and fall practices in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. That team went on to post the program’s first winning record in four years.
Or maybe look at his George Washington program in the early 2000s, which was underfunded and on the verge of being dropped as it played home games on a field 10 miles from campus. He met those challenges while holding his team together as the nation’s capital was reeling from the Sept. 11 attacks and the terror of the D.C. sniper slayings.
All that has led to Walter having what could be a once-in-a-career team. The Demon Deacons (47-10) are the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament, and five of their players are projected to be taken in the first four rounds of the amateur draft.
“They’ll be a great story a lot of people will be rooting for because it’s been so long since Wake Forest has been a nationally prominent baseball program,” said Paul Mainieri, the retired LSU coach who became friends with Walter during their time together in the Bayou State and recommended him for the Deacons’ job in 2009.
His team notwithstanding, Walter himself is easy to root for.
“When you think about all the things that happened along the way, things that could have totally sidetracked a career and sent it a different direction, I’m so grateful for all the people who stepped up to make sure I could continue this journey,” he said.
Walter grew up in Johnstown, Pa., and played catcher and outfield for Georgetown from 198891. He went into coaching, he said, as a way to serve others.
Kevin Jordan, undoubtedly, is the greatest beneficiary of Walter’s selflessness. He was a major league prospect who had a serious yet-to-be-diagnosed kidney disease when he arrived at
PARIS — Like many a kid, Peyton Stearns enjoyed participating in sports and tried her hand at plenty.
“Soccer, gymnastics, basketball, tennis, whatever,” the 21-year-old American said Wednesday at the French Open after eliminating 2017 champion Jelena Ostapenko 6-3, 1-6, 6-2 to reach the third round at a Grand Slam tournament for the first time.
Then Stearns paused, before adding with a chuckle: “Well, not so much tennis.”
By her own admission, she came to tennis relatively late for someone who would end up at its highest level, starting private lessons at age 8.
It wasn’t until about three or four years later, the 2022 NCAA champion for the University of Texas explained, that she decided to focus on holding a racket.
“Gymnastics was very structured. I didn’t like that so much. I liked to do what I want when I wanted,” said Stearns, who had never played in the French Open’s main draw until this week and next faces No. 9 seed Daria Kasatkina, a 2022 semifinalist. “I chose tennis because I loved that you can just hit the living daylights out of the ball.”So that’s what she does, and did quite effectively against the 17th-seeded Ostapenko, outhitting a big hitter — Stearns compiled more winners, 30-29 — and leaving the field at Roland Garros with just one remaining woman who has won the title there: No. 1 Iga Swiatek, the champion in
2020 and 2022, who plays her second-round match Thursday.
Barbora Krejcikova, the 2021 winner, lost in the first round.
“Sometimes I surprise myself with how lethal my ball comes off [the racket] sometimes for my opponents, and how it really puts them in trouble,” Stearns said. “Maybe I didn’t realize that earlier on, but playing against top players, I realize that it is true. It comes off pretty heavy and big, and that’s how I play. Definitely helps with confidence.”
Her victory over Ostapenko can be placed alongside a slew of other early upsets in Paris, where the sometimes-odd bounces of the red clay and the changing weather conditions can contribute to unexpected outcomes.
No. 5 seed Caroline Garcia of France was defeated by Anna Blinkova 4-6, 6-3, 7-5, and 18 of 32 seeded women already were gone before the second round was finished. In the men’s bracket, No. 2 seed Daniil Medvedev bowed out Tuesday against a qualifier ranked 127nd.
“I feel like at Roland Garros, it’s tricky with the clay,” said No. 3 Jessica Pegula, who advanced Wednesday when her opponent, Camila Giorgi, stopped playing because of knee pain after dropping the first set. “You can see — to me, it feels like — a lot more upsets.”
Do not tell Stearns hers was a stunning result, even though she is ranked 69th in her first full season on tour and carried a 0-1 career Slam record into this week.
“I expected this out of myself. Maybe not this early in my career . ... I’m ahead of what I projected myself doing,” she said, “but by no means cutting myself short.”
She had her own little cheering section at Court 14, a group that included her mother, Denise, Stearns’ coach, her coach’s girlfriend and a friend, which helped.
So did Stearns’ boundless self-belief, which she said allowed her to settle down amid some feelings she described as “crazy, nerve-wracking, overwhelming — all the emotions into one.”
Her tennis idol growing up was Maria Sharapova, who won five Grand Slam titles and reached No. 1 in the WTA rankings.
Sharapova was a powerful ball-striker who found her initial success on faster surfaces such as grass courts, winning Wimbledon at age 17, and hard courts, her next major championships coming at the U.S. Open and Australian Open. But Sharapova eventually did collect two French Open titles later in her career.
That’s not why Stearns came to be a fan, though.
“My mom and I loved watching her because of her outfits,” Stearns said with a snicker. “My mom’s a big shopper.”