In high school, Chris Burke ’11 didn’t attract much attention from college baseball coaches, and his freshman year statistics at Bates were typical for an unballyhooed player. He played in nine games and made seven plate appearances, good for a single, a double, and a walk.

Still, the experience made him feel like a legitimate Division III player. Sort of.“I hit well in high school,” says Burke, who earned All-Catholic Central League honors as an outfielder at Austin Prep in Reading, Mass. “But you never know when you’re going to stop being one of the better players, or when you’ll get to that point when you’re in over your head.”

After a breakthrough 2009 performance at the plate, Burke is now head and shoulders above the competition.

In preseason last winter, Burke impressed rookie head coach Edwin Thompson enough that he was named the Bobcats’ starting right fielder for their opening game versus Alma (Mich.) College, which was played in Myrtle Beach, S.C., on Feb. 20. Against the Scots, Burke went 1 for 3, walked twice, scored once, and drove in a run. In fact, he hit safely in 18 straight games to open the season — believed to be a Bates record.

“He has a great presence,” says the 29-year-old Thompson. “It was the way he practiced: He did all the little things right. Those qualities really translate well to baseball.”

For the season, Burke hit safely in 29 of the 33 games he played in, batting .406. He hit some long balls (two homers) and a bunch of short ones (he bunted himself on “seven or eight” times, says Thompson). His 52 hits are a Bates record, and his 33 runs batted in are the most since Andy Carman ’85 had 41 in 1984. At season’s end Burke was named All-NESCAC, baseball’s first since 2005.

He had a pair of two-hit games versus Trinity, the defending NCAA champion, and went 3 for 4 against the University of Southern Maine, which at the time was ranked No. 1 by D3Baseball.com. “You have to believe that you can hit anybody in the league,” Burke says. “I tried to be confident going in to face everybody.”

Burke, who also plays football, entered the 2009 baseball season something of a known quantity because Thompson served as the football team’s running-backs coach last fall. Although Burke is a defensive back and special-teams player, he nevertheless caught Thompson’s attention. “He has a great presence,” says the 29-year-old Thompson. “It was the way he practiced: He did all the little things right. Those qualities really translate well to baseball.”

And because baseball is a game of little things done right, the best way to get better is through repetition. “With baseball, no matter who you are, you have to put your time in to hone your craft,” says Thompson, a former Division I player at Maryland and Howard. Even before he saw his players last winter, Thompson made his coaching presence felt by arranging for his players to compete in various summer collegiate wooden-bat leagues — the much-celebrated Cape Cod League being the premier version.

Eight Bates players are now playing summer ball in these leagues; seven more are competing in local town leagues. Thompson says that playing 35 to 50 summer games “is an important part of how we’re going to get somewhere. If last summer you faced a guy from Tennessee or Tulane, whether you did bad or good you’re going to feel more comfortable playing against NESCAC teams.”

To that end, catcher Jacob Simon ’11 of Waterford, Conn., and pitcher Ryan Heide ’11 of Medfield, Mass., are playing for the D.C. Grays of the Clark Griffith League, where stars like Jonathan Papelbon and Mark Teixeira once played.

Pitcher Paul Chiampa ’11 of Bryantville, Mass., and outfielder Pat Murphy ’11 of Cape Elizabeth, Maine, are with the Marion (Ky.) Bobcats in the Kentucky-Illinois-Tennessee League, second baseman Luke Wamboldt ’11 of Sunderland, Mass., is with the Iowa Snappers in the Mississippi River Valley League, and Karl Alexander ’12 of Cambridge, Mass., is pitching for Stockyard in the venerable Boston Park League.

Burke and pitcher/first baseman Noah Lynd ’11 of Meriden, N.H., are with the Maryland Orioles of the Maryland Collegiate League, now in its third year. They’re living with Burke’s aunt and uncle in Olney, Md., near their games.

Burke got off to a hot start, batting .440 in his first 25 at-bats, though he will have cut short his season in mid-July for another Bates priority: academics, which take him to the University of Perth, Australia, for the fall semester. That means no Bates football for the son of former football team captain Terry Burke ’79 and Melissa McCabe Burke ’79. Instead, he’ll wrestle with biology Down Under and, in the spring, return to help Bates baseball toward its goal: a first-ever spot in the NESCAC playoffs.

For Thompson, having his players pursue summer ball is a neat way to establish a new conference standard — not many NESCAC players choose to play in collegiate summer leagues — while moving his team up the conference ladder. “This is how it will be from here on out,” he says. “Bates baseball will be doing a lot of things differently from other teams in the conference.”

By Andy Walter, Photograph By Phyllis Graber Jensen

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Click on thumbnails, above, to view the slide show.

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Soon after students voted to make the bobcat the official Bates mascot in 1925, the Varsity Club stated its eagerness “to see a monument erected which will consist of a granite shaft with a life-size Bobcat in bronze before the present college year is ended.”

That year passed, as did 83 more, before Bates commissioned and happily dedicated, during Reunion 2009, the bronze Bobcat seen in this slide show. Designed by Maine artist Forest Hart, it’s atop a boulder near Leahey Field, where it exchanges greetings with people along the walk to and from Merrill Gymnasium and Underhill Arena.

The Bobcat Statue

• Artist: Forest Hart of Monroe, Maine
• Size: twice life size (60 inches long)
• Medium: bronze (copper, silicon, magnesium). The sculpture comprises 25 separate pieces welded together
• Thickness: quarter-inch
• Weight: 250 pounds
• Foundry: Lands End Sculpture Center, Paonia, Colo.
• Artist’s quote: “What struck me the most was the enthusiasm and passion of the Class of 2004. What wonderful, positive energy. I was proud to have been chosen and proud to be a part of the project.”

Making the Bates Bobcat real was the Class of 2004′s potent cocktail of organizational skill, passion, and perseverance. They raised about $27,000 for their Senior Gift in 2004, asking the College to use it to create a bobcat sculpture. (Other fundraising efforts raised the total to nearly $50,000 by 2009.)

At the time, Bates officials tried to refocus the class gift — a bobcat still wasn’t in the plans. “They asked us to choose something a little less ambitious,” class co-president Tanya Schwartz ’04 recalled during the dedication on June 13.

But the class didn’t yield. Instead, “we rallied,” Schwartz said. True, it was a long rally, at five years, but co-president Eduardo Crespo ’04 said he was always confident that “our class’s work ethic and passion for Bates would take us all the way to today.”

The soft-spoken Hart, having met Crespo and Schwartz at the Reunion dedication in June, was dazzled. “Seems to me they could do anything they set their minds to,” he said. “A Bobcat sculpture or world peace.”

Five years ago, faced with the Class of 2004′s high seriousness, Bates channeled their energy by forming the College’s first Public Art Committee, which in 2007 drafted a policy to guide all such projects. Then, a Bobcat Selection Committee of faculty, staff, and 2004 alums guided the process, including a public presentation in spring 2008 by three artists chosen by the committee, including Hart.

Each artist’s proposal was in turn shared with the Class of 2004, which embraced Hart’s realistic interpretation of an athletic predator on the move, one that echoed the College’s official Bobcat logo. “I love that the Bobcat is in motion — [it] speaks to the ever-evolving and dynamic nature of academics and Bates College,” wrote Julia Allen ’04 in an e-mail response to Hart’s presentation.

(Hart, who lives in Monroe, halfway between Bangor and Belfast, has a strong background in taxidermy but knows his live cats, too. “I’ve made five bobcat sightings in the last 10 months,” he said.)

Albeit long, the process was pure Bates, “democratic and egalitarian,” said Mark Bessire, former director of the Bates Museum of Art and chair of the Public Art Committee and now director of the Portland Museum of Art. When you have a solid process marked by “intelligence and spirit,” he said, “you end up with great art. Process equals excellence.”

In the end, the project’s success belies the 84-year-old notion of institutional rigidity, Crespo told the audience. “The one thing that was present all along [was] this institution’s capacity to welcome excellence and change.”

By H. Jay Burns, photographs by Phyllis Graber Jensen unless noted

Erika Bristol ’99 hugs her former throwing coach, Joe Woodhead, after she made one of the inaugual weight throws to help [intlink id="2147" type="post"]dedicate of the Joseph Woodhead All-American Throwing Area[/intlink] in Merrill Gym in February. The event also celebrated renovations to the gym and Slovenski Track that included a new Mondo surface for track and tennis plus much-improved lighting. Woodhead has guided Bates throwers to 39 All-America honors and six NCAA championships in a quarter-century.

Photograph by Louisa Demmitt ’09