By Paul Perillo

Like most baseball players growing up in the Boston area, Jeff Heriot idolized the Red Sox. A Franklin High School grad who transferred to Northeastern from UMass-Amherst, Heriot was obsessed with all things baseball. Particularly the home team.

So imagine the young outfielder's reaction last March when he stepped into the batter's box at City of Palms Park in Fort Myers, Florida, and stared out at right-hander Curt Schilling. A long-awaited exhibition game between the Huskies and the Red Sox was bringing Heriot face to face with Boston's celebrated off-season acquisition, in Schilling's first appearance with the team.

"It was the second inning," Heriot recalls of his lone at-bat, "and Paul Koslowski had just gotten a hit off of Schilling. All that did was upset him. He threw a ninety-five-mile-per-hour fastball on the first pitch. I swung so hard I came out of my cleats and missed. The next pitch was a splitter in the dirt that I took for a ball. Then he tried to pick off Paul and threw the ball over Kevin Millar's head-that just made him even madder."

Heriot regarded his opponent with escalating awe. "You know how Schilling gets when he starts stomping around the mound and you can almost see the steam coming out of his ears," he says. "He pulled the brim of his hat down over his eyes as he got back on the mound. I was like, 'Holy crap!' He threw me two more ninety-five-plus fastballs and just blew me away."

Despite the smackdown, Heriot can't wait to do it again. This year, come March 4 at City of Palms Park, the senior co-captain and his teammates will be taking on defending World Series champs.

That's enough to excite even a baseball lifer like coach Neil McPhee. "It's an incredible thrill for everybody connected to Northeastern," McPhee says. "It doesn't get any bigger in New England in terms of publicity, and this year it should be a notch up because of the World Series."

McPhee knows the Sox game bears many dividends for Husky athletics. Most major college teams play exhibitions against their Major League neighbors; this game telegraphs to potential recruits that Northeastern is a big-time program, too.

The match-up also gives Northeastern baseball a chance to shine in front of an enthusiastic crowd. Last year, 500 to 600 alums, university officials, and friends were on hand for the pregame cookout and the exhibition, which NESN televised live back home. For a school about to step up to a new competition level this summer, when it moves from the America East to the Colonial Athletic Association, such exposure is welcome.

"It's a great event for us and the university as a whole," McPhee says. "There's nothing negative about it. It's a huge plus."

And if the Huskies lose-as they did last year, 7-0-no one cares a whit. Playing the game is all that matters. Heriot will never forget arriving at the ballpark last March.

"I remember seeing the field and then turning toward the bullpen where Alan Embree was warming up, throwing ninety-five," he says. "I just thought, 'Holy cow, we're going to play the Red Sox!' We started stretching out and getting ready, and they were really cool, joking around with us and stuff. You don't feel like a fan when you're out on the field wearing a uniform, but, at the same time, these are the guys you've rooted for all your life."

Junior catcher Matt Morizio, a Waltham, Massachusetts, native, nabbed one of the three hits the Huskies managed to get in the game, all against Schilling.

"It was amazing how smooth Schilling was and how fast the ball gets on top of you," Morizio says. "He threw me all three of his pitches. I swung over a splitter, fouled off a fastball, and was lucky he threw a curve in the dirt. The count went to two-and-two, and I figured he'd just throw a fastball to a college kid. Luckily, I was right, and I grounded one between short and third for a single."

At the time, Morizio didn't think much about the game's impact, "but when we got home and about a thousand people came up to me to say they'd watched me on TV, I started to understand," he says.

He's ready to take on the Sox again. This year, though, he's thinking he might like to come home with a few spoils.

"Maybe this time," Morizio says, "I can get some autographs."

Laura Chmielewski (photo by Tracy Powell)

How to Be a World-Class Projectile

Laura Chmielewski didn't quite know what to think the first time she ran with a big pole toward a little hole in front of a large pad.

She had never attempted the pole vault before. But the minute her brother told her she couldn't do it because she was a girl, Chmielewski decided to skip the formal training.

"I was a high school sophomore, and he was doing it, so I figured it couldn't be that hard," she recalls. "But then I started running, and the pole is pretty big. They say it's going to bend, but you never know. It was exciting, and scary."

Within a year, Chmielewski was out-jumping her brother. Today, she's on track to qualify for the Olympics as the Huskies' best-ever woman pole-vaulter.

The junior from Monmouth, New Jersey, who transferred to NU from Rutgers, set school indoor and outdoor records (12 feet 9.5 and 13 feet 3.75, respectively) and qualified for the NCAA championships in her first season with the Huskies last year. This season, she's already smashed that indoor record, clearing 13 feet 6.5 last month.

Like many pole-vaulters, Chmielewski is a former gymnast who, after years of physical stress and pain, went looking for a new outlet.

"There are a lot of similarities between the two sports," Chmielewski says. "You need to have a really strong work ethic, because gymnastics requires a lot of hours in the gym. Also, being upside down in the air is normal for a gymnast, and that's how you end up when you clear the bar."

Assistant track coach Brenner Abbott, a former pole-vaulter himself, understands the various elements that underlie success in the sport. "It's a pretty strange event," he says. "It combines the speed of a sprinter, the ability of a gymnast, and the strength of a thrower.

"Mentally, vaulters are a different breed," Abbott says. "It's the only event where the person is the projectile. You have to be extremely confident or extremely stupid."

Abbott says Chmielewski fits the confident description perfectly. Already considered the best woman vaulter in New England history, she's improving with almost every jump.

"There's a great deal of technique involved, starting with the run and plant of the jump," Abbott says. "You have to introduce energy into the jump, and plant the pole into the hole to go from horizontal to vertical without losing energy. Then you have to press the pole away from you before flying away and cork-screwing over the bar.

"The partnership of energy seems pretty simple in theory, but there are so many parts involved, it's hard to get them all in," he says. "Laura does it very well."

On the men's side, Ryan Cahill, Aaron Hill, and Mike Couch have either cracked the 16-foot mark or approached it. But Chmielewski may have the brightest future of all the Husky vaulters. The graphic design major, who hopes to work in marketing someday, has designs on competing in the under-twenty-five meet in Turkey this summer before preparing for the Olympics.

"I'm training to be a professional athlete," Chmielewski says. "I've already reached the height requirement to compete," a mark of 13 feet 4.

She's also already the right combination of daredevil and technician. "Pole-vaulting requires such a combination of the mental and the physical," she says. "Every jump is different, but there's so much that needs to be the same."