The Trinity baseball team, coached by National Division III Coach of the Year Bill Decker, reached unprecedented heights this spring with a record-breaking, win-loss mark of 45-1 (the best-ever winning percentage in NCAA baseball history at .978) including a second New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC) Championship title, a third NCAA Division III Regional Championship crown, and the first NCAA Division III National Team Championship title in College history in any sport. The Bantams breezed through the NESCAC East Division with a 12-0 mark and the regular season with a 34-0 record, and broke the Division III record for fastest start and longest winning streak with 44 wins to start the season. Trinity recovered from its first loss of the year, 4-3, to Johns Hopkins on the final day of the Division III World Series to score two runs in the bottom of the ninth inning for a national title-clinching, 5-4 triumph in the finals. Trinity finished ranked No. 1 in both the American Baseball Coaches Association (ABCA), and D3Baseball.com National Polls. For more information, go to the Trinity Web site at http://athletics.trincoll.edu/landing/index.

Louis Masur, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American Institutions and Values, is the team’s faculty adviser, has written the following essay about the final game of the year.

World Series Report: Trinity baseball and the habit of winning
by Louis P. Masur

No one packed a lunch. The baseball team needed to win one game to complete an undefeated season and become national champions. Should the squad lose, a second game would be played after the first, which started at 11 a.m. With ace Tim Kiely on the mound, it seemed inconceivable that Johns Hopkins, who had emerged from the loser’s bracket, and who Trinity had already defeated 8-5 two days earlier in a contest that catapulted the Bantams to the championship game, would win. Besides, you didn’t tempt the baseball fates by coming prepared to play two just in case you lost one.

But baseball is a game where the improbable comes to pass, where events that would be dismissed as implausible in a novel or a movie occur again and again. And so Hopkins, down 3-2, tied the game in the sixth on a two-out base hit, and then took the lead in the ninth on, of all things, a wild pitch from a pitcher with immaculate control: Kiely had yielded one walk in 79 innings during the season. Trinity went down in order in the bottom of the ninth. There would be a second game.

The players and coaches had 30 minutes to recover, to deal with defeat, to overcome sorrow and self-pity. A few wandered up to the concourse in search of food. We applauded, and bought them hot dogs or fries or whatever fuel might help propel them through one more game that no one expected to play. Most of the team settled for sunflower seeds. The players would have to reach deep for the energy to play with confidence, to “GID”—as coach Bill Decker’s e-mails say—Get It Done.

Perhaps inspiration would come from the landmark some of us visited the day before. Thirty-five miles north of Fox Cities Stadium, the site of the Division III World Series, sits sacred ground for anyone who thinks about competition and winning, whether in sports or everyday life. At Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Vince Lombardi led men to victory again and again. “Winning is a habit,” he said. “You don’t do things right once in a while. You do them right all the time.”

1 >