As game time approaches on a recent Friday evening in White River Junction, Maxfield Sports Complex, home to the New England Collegiate Baseball League’s Upper Valley Nighthawks, is already abuzz with activity.
Down the right-field line, some players stretch or warm up with long-toss. Others throw a football around to kill time, or sprawl in the outfield grass, at the mercy of the still-sweltering July sun.
Mateo Wells, a towering freshman pitcher from High Point University in North Carolina, whose wide-eyed and soft-spoken nature gives the impression that he, too, is still getting used to his imposing six-foot, six-inch frame, fires another fastball into the mitt of his bullpen catcher.
Overhead, in the press box perched between home and third, Greg Fennell, the Nighthawks’ announcer, familiarizes himself with the lineups for tonight’s game against the visiting Danbury Westerners.
Nighthawks president Noah Crane, unmistakable in his trademark zebra-print sport coat, collar permanently turned up, is already prowling the grounds. He greets fans, checks in with the team’s mostly college-aged staff, grabs a late-arriving pizza delivery and shuttles it over to the concession stand.
He pauses only to stand to attention as the National Anthem is played, then continues with his ceaseless rounds.
Crane is in his mid-forties, but his loping gait, rangy physique, and closely cropped hair give a pretty good picture of the baseball player he once was. A local kid, Crane played three years of high school ball at Woodstock, graduating in 1997, and then went on to play for Furman University in South Carolina and at the University of Massachusetts.
After college he took a series of coaching jobs — first at Dartmouth, then at a junior college in South Carolina — before returning to the Upper Valley with even grander plans: to start a summer collegiate baseball team on his home turf.
“I always knew that the Upper Valley would support something like this,” Crane says. “But at the time, there just wasn’t an adequate field. So I was just kind of waiting, hoping.”
Crane launched the Nighthawks in 2016, not long after learning about the Town of Hartford’s plans for a new athletic complex on Route 5, featuring a state-of-the-art baseball diamond with seating for fans. Now in their tenth season, the Nighthawks have become a fixture of Upper Valley summers — just as Crane knew they would.
Summer college ball is as much of a baseball tradition as the hit-and-run and the seventh inning stretch. Top college players looking to hone their skills during the offseason — and maybe showcase their talents for scouts in advance of the professional draft. The oldest and still the most competitive summer league, the Cape Cod Baseball League, has been around since Babe Ruth’s day and boasts more than 1,600 alumni who have played in Major League Baseball, including current stars Aaron Judge, Pete Alonso, and Paul Skenes.
Wooden bats and a more rigorous schedule that has them playing games most days of the week give college players a preview of what the professional game is like. But it’s still amateur ball, which means that the players are not being paid. So they spend the season living in spare bedrooms and garage apartments with host families recruited by their local teams—doing what college kids do in the summer by day and pursuing their dreams of making the big leagues by night.
Upper Valley ambassadors
Greg Fennell moved to the Upper Valley forty years ago, to embark on a career in sports journalism: first at radio station WTSL in Lebanon, then for the Rutland Herald, and finally for the Valley News, where he stayed for 25 years, eventually serving as the paper’s sports editor until the position was eliminated amidst COVID-era staffing retrenchments.
Around the same time, he got into announcing work on something of a whim, after a friend who had been doing Dartmouth football games retired and recommended Fennell as a replacement. A few years ago, he picked up the PA job at Nighthawks games, too.
“I’ve known Noah Crane most of his life,” Fennell says. “I covered his high school baseball games back when he was playing for Woodstock High School.” So when Crane put out the call for local families to host Nighthawks players during their inaugural season, Greg and his wife Baar did not hesitate to offer up their home in West Lebanon.
“We like to think of ourselves as Upper Valley ambassadors,” Fennell explains. He can no longer keep track of how many times he has sent Nighthawks players to Four Aces Diner in West Lebanon, N.H. One of them, Keller Bradford, a pitcher from the University of Southern Mississippi who stayed with them during the 2017 season, got so hooked on the cinnamon roll pancakes at Four Aces that he later told Fennell they were the main reason he agreed to return to coach the team in 2019.
“For ten months out of the year, it’s just the two of us,” Fennell says, “but for June and July, this place is a lot busier. It’s just a great all-around experience.”
Christine and Scott Hamner, who moved to Norwich five years ago, also came to hosting Nighthawks players through a connection with Crane. The Hamners’ two oldest sons play baseball at Kimball Union Academy, and the family got to know Crane through local youth baseball.
Both the Hamners and the Fennells have made a point of keeping up with many of the players they’ve hosted. One of the first Nighthawks to stay with the Hamners, Ryan Ignoffo, is currently playing minor league ball in the Miami Marlins system. This year, the whole family went down to Florida to see him play during spring training.
“It doesn’t end on August 1, or whenever the last game wraps up,” says Fennell. Every year, he and Baar try to plan a trip to see one of last summer’s Nighthawks play during the spring college season. There are also the player weddings they have been to, and all the rest of life they have had a chance to see unfold.
Fuel
Mateo Wells grew up in Zionsville, Indiana, the oldest son of Colombian immigrants. Although he was a talented pitcher from an early age, he was not initially seen as “the guy” on his high school baseball team, which was stocked with older, stronger players. He still recalls the day his father told him he would never play college ball, after a poor pitching performance had left him overcome with emotion.
In the moment, he discovered something about himself. “I love having that feeling of people underestimating me and then proving them wrong,” Wells says. “That’s what fuels me.”
So instead of folding, he worked harder. In sophomore year, his days looked like this: wake up at 4 a.m. to go to the gym before school, go to class, go to practice, drive an hour to Kokomo to work out at a special training facility, get home at 11 p.m., do it again.
“That was terrible,” Wells recalls, “but it was worth it.”
At the Kokomo facility, the trainers had Wells do things he had never done before, like throwing two-pound footballs and medicine balls. Three weeks after he started, he noticed he was throwing harder on the mound. After six months, his fastball was clocking in 12 miles per hour faster than it had before.
“That was the moment where I was kind of like, ‘Oh crap, I can do this.’”
In the summer after his sophomore year, Wells started getting looks from college scouts. During his junior year, he committed to High Point, a Division I mid-major program.
This past spring, in his freshman season with the team, High Point won the Big South Conference tournament. Wells pitched eight and two-thirds innings all year.
Wells is spending the summer in Quechee at Nancy Curtis and Mark Sullivan’s house, along with another High Point pitcher, Charlie Jones. Now it’s Nancy’s “bacon alarm clock” that wakes him up most mornings — though he’s also finding the newfound independence of summer ball to be a useful education in its own right.
“I feel like I’m really maturing this summer: going shopping for myself, doing laundry, doing my own dishes. I’m getting a sense of what the real world is like.”
Wells has already exceeded last season’s innings total with the Nighthawks this summer. He’s also been used increasingly as a closer, which may point towards a more valuable role for him on High Point next year.
He’s also having fun. “During my freshman year, I was always having to prove myself to my coaches, that I deserved to be there,” Wells says. “But then I got to summer ball, and it’s just like playing with a bunch of random kids again. And that’s what made me love baseball in the first place.”
For a lot more about the Upper Valley Nighthawks, please see our July 17 edition of the Vermont Standard.
