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Marsh settling in as Anna Maria College baseball coach
Mooney graduate
hit ground running
By charles grove
Nick Marsh’s life has been scattered with moments where he’s not 100-percent sure about the destination, but finds the journey to always be interesting.
That was the case when the Cardinal Mooney and Urbana University graduate was coaching baseball at Liberty High School. His friend who was coaching at Wabash College called him and asked him to join him.
“They had a coach quit a week before winter practice so I pretty much had to withdraw from graduate classes at YSU, throw some bags in the car and drive out to Crawfordsville, Ind.,” Marsh said. “I got to practice and saw these guys needed some work, I knew what to teach them and once that kind of sunk in, I realized that’s what I wanted to do.”
That choice eventually landed him at Anna Maria College — in Paxton, Mass. — as the head baseball coach of the Amcats, an acronym for Anna Maria College Athletic Team Sports. On top of being a head coach of a collegiate program, Marsh is also the head coach and general manager of the West Hartford Thunder, a collegiate summer team.
“The best part of my job is I get to go to a baseball field every day,” Marsh said. “After graduating from college I remember thinking, ‘I can deal with not being around baseball in the winter, but once spring hits I don’t know.’ ”
The Amcats took their lumps and bruises in 2016, Marsh’s first season. The team started out 0-11 before picking up its first win and finished 9-28.
“It was a very challenging season,” Marsh said. “I got hired very late. I started in October and wasn’t really able to bring in a recruiting class. I had to deal with what I had there and many people there were still in favor of the previous coach.”
The team was so bare bones the entire roster included just 17 players and only four of them were pitchers before the season. At Marsh’s previous school, Castleton University, they made sure they had 19 pitchers at any time.
“Basically we had open tryouts for all positions and had a few guys who had never pitched before pick it up in college, which is not the easiest route to take,” Marsh said.
Before the team was able to string together some conference wins and make a run at the conference tournament, The Amcats were frequently losing by football-like scores during their March trip to Florida — including a stretch where they lost games 21-1, 26-9 and 19-7.
“I told my team after that stretch of giving up 20 runs a game that our goal was to not let them score 20,” Marsh said. “I said it mockingly like, ‘This isn’t something we should have to talk about.’ But the next game we only gave up 19 so we took a baby step.”
Marsh has a colorful resume that not only includes stops at several smaller colleges, but also a stint for Major League Baseball at a development center in China. Marsh worked at the Changzhou Development Center to help spread baseball to the world’s most populous country. Once again, it was on a whim.
“MLB was telling me they would like me to go after the college season, some time in June so I was thinking during the season I had some time,” Marsh said. “But I got an email on a Sunday telling me I had a plane ticket waiting for Tuesday so I had to throw clothes into suitcases and take a 14-hour flight to Beijing. I didn’t even know how long I’d be gone.
“Then once I landed I realized I didn’t even know how to say ‘Hello’ in Mandarin.”
Not only did Marsh have the difficulty of getting around not knowing the language, but also had to teach a western game to a country not incredibly welcoming to western culture.
“China will look at Japan or Korea for instance and kind of look down on them for accepting a western game,” Marsh said. “So baseball had a slow start over there, but it is growing.”
Back in Massachusetts, Marsh is hoping the more recruits he brings in to the program, the less his team will feel like the guy known for throwing suitcases together and taking off somewhere new.
“We’ve won here in the past and we can get back to that,” Marsh said. “Some of the roles will be a little more defined this year so we can have some of the position players actually focus on their positions instead of me pointing at them and saying, ‘Hey, you’re doing everything.’”