At the time of finding information for our men’s sport, baseball, we found a plethora of information not only in the yearbooks, but also on the Internet. This team had been part of the BGSU sports family almost since the beginning: 1915. There were only two seasons where the Falcon Baseball team did not see action and those years were 1935 and 1937. Also, there were no records for the seasons 1916 and 1917. Since 1915, there have been ten head coaches, the most memorable being Warren E. Steller (below, middle) and the most recent Danny Schmitz. Generally, there are 25 men on the team. Back in 1921, there were only 14 and as of 2010, there are 31. The overall record for the team is 1441 wins, 1208 losses and 26 ties, this all being prior to the start of the 2010 season.
Danny Schmitz, current BGSU Men's Baseball Coach:
There have been some significant events in the baseball team’s history. In 1921, Bowling Green Normal College won its first championship when they defeated the Defiance Yellow Jackets on June 14th. In 1964, a new baseball stadium was constructed and named after Warren Steller, who coached the Falcons for over 30 years. Last season, in 2009, Danny Schmitz recorded his 500th career win as current head coach for the Falcons. While there have been several players that have played professional baseball, probably the most prominent is Orel Hershiser (see: photo, below, in BGSU Athletics Archives).
While we found the information for the baseball team rather easily, the women’s golf team held a few problems. After searching in all of the yearbooks since 1950 we were desperate for any information we could get our hands on. During this long and vigorous research process, we found that the women’s golf team had started in 1960, but there was no recorded evidence of this until the 1973 yearbook. Much of our research for this team was done in the archives in the library.Since its beginnings in 1960, women’s golf has had 8 coaches. Many of these coaches were also in charge of the men’s golf team as well. The coaches that coached the longest for the women’s golf team are Greg Nye, from 1985 to 1993, and Kurt Thomas, from 1998 to 2005. Currently, Stephanie Young (below) is the women’s golf coach. While looking for the records of the team we encountered another issue. When looking in the yearbooks, it does not say their wins and losses because in golf, many times rather than just winning or losing, you are ranked amongst your competitors. For example, instead of winning, they placed 3rd out of 5 or 1st out of 20. We could not find official records.
The women’s golf team has some significant history, like the baseball team. In 1960, the team was started as a spin-off of the intramural golf team when Lorraine Abbott won a competition between BGSU and Ohio University. In 1973, the team won the Ohio Intercollegiate Tournament. As of 1988, Bowling Green State University was the only school supporting a women’s golf team. They had no conference honors to earn and were not yet part of the Mid-American Conference. In 2000, Shelley Binzel, a freshman at the time, broke the school record for season average with a mark of 80.18 strokes. The research done for this project was extensive. By working closely with the people who work in the archives and talking to the people that have been directly involved with the sport, we accomplished what we set out to do. As a group we feel like we have learned a lot about the history of these particular sports at Bowling Green State University.
Members of this group include: Tim Bialecki, Mandie Carey, Carolyn Deas, Stephanie Fleming, and Hannah Perez.
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