By Paul Perillo

Behind every great man, there’s usually a great woman. Baseball coach Neil McPhee is glad this proved true for Justin Hedrick.

Hedrick’s a star pitcher on a Huskies squad looking to repeat as America East champs and take a return trip to the NCAAs. But Coach McPhee would never have made the ace’s acquaintance if Hedrick’s girlfriend, Kelly Martin, hadn’t intervened.

The young couple had grown up in Nebraska. When it was time to choose colleges, Martin decided on Northeastern, where she’d earned an academic scholarship. Hedrick opted to stay closer to home, landing a football and baseball scholarship at Hastings College, a National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics school near Omaha, his hometown.

So Martin traveled east while Hedrick began his baseball career. But after just one season and two trips to Boston to visit his girlfriend, Hedrick had a change of heart.

“After my freshman year, I realized the level of competition at Hastings wasn’t what I was looking for, and, when I visited Kelly, I fell in love with the city, the atmosphere, and the whole area,” Hedrick says. “I got a release from my coach, got my transfer papers ready, and basically everything worked out.”

That was mostly because of Martin, who’d knocked on McPhee’s door to ask if he’d be interested in having her boyfriend on the team. Hedrick is a 6-foot-3, 215-pound right-hander whose fastball ranges from the high 80s to the low 90s. McPhee didn’t need much convincing.

“She came in and told me the situation,” McPhee says. “I called some people and did some research, and found out he’d been pretty successful. It was clear the program he was in was pretty strong. There aren’t a lot of Division 1 schools in Nebraska. With Kelly here, it was, logically, a natural fit for him.”

Hedrick got off to a slow start in 2002, his first season at Northeastern. Just before starting school in January, he came down with mononucleosis, suffering from its effects for months. He eventually shook off the funk, though, allowing only three earned runs in his last 24.2 innings.

He carried that promise into 2003, when he was the Huskies’ strongest pitcher, going 7-2 with a 3.47 ERA and eighty-nine strikeouts in seventy innings. He began the season with an impressive complete-game win over Big Ten foe Indiana, and finished it with a three-hit, fifteen-strikeout masterpiece against Vermont to secure the conference title and a spot on the All-Tournament team.

Though he was roughed up a bit by Louisiana State in the regionals, allowing eight runs in five innings, he still received an invitation to pitch last summer in the prestigious Cape Cod League against the nation’s finest amateur talent. Playing for Harwich, Hedrick went 3-2 in 46.2 innings with a 1.93 ERA, striking out fifty-six, and earning a spot in the league’s all-star game, where he pitched a scoreless inning.

“Pitching down there was unbelievable,” Hedrick says. “The best players in the country are all there, and it was kind of strange because—unless they were from the area—some of them didn’t know much about Northeastern. I was telling people we have five people playing in this league, so we must be pretty good. People are starting to realize how good Northeastern is.”

According to McPhee, Hedrick’s strength comes from his ability to throw four pitches—fastball, curve, slider, and change-up—for strikes. He mixes his pitches well and, whatever the count or the situation, isn’t afraid to throw any of them. Plus, his size gives him the endurance to pitch deep into games; last year he racked up a team-leading seven complete games in eleven starts.

The Huskies’ season kicks off March 1 with a series of games in Bradenton, Florida. On March 5, the team gets a chance to stretch some serious muscle, playing an exhibition game against the Boston Red Sox in Fort Myers. The home opener comes later this month, a double-header against Harvard on the 27th.

Although Hedrick is entering his final year of eligibility for Northeastern, he hopes to extend his baseball career into the pro ranks. After his solid pitching on Cape Cod, where hundreds of Major League scouts descend each summer, he could easily have signed a contract rather than return for the chance to win back-to-back America East titles.

“I definitely want the chance to play professional baseball,” says Hedrick, a junior majoring in management information systems. “But having the chance to win another championship and get back to the regionals is something that is very important to me.

“This time, we have to get there and win a couple of games.”

Rowers Wanted, No Experience a Plus

When coach Ron Everhart goes looking for his next center, you won’t find him wandering through White Hall. But when it’s time to recruit new women rowers, don’t be surprised to see coach Joe Wilhelm out on campus, sizing up the options.

Because women’s crew isn’t widely offered at high schools, to fill out their novice roster Wilhelm and his staff hit the hallways and the sidewalks of Huntington Avenue, looking for students who have the right body type for rowing. They don’t care if these women have never stepped a foot into a boat.

“Campus recruiting probably started when rowing began, back in the 1800s,” Wilhelm explains. “Coaches would get whomever they could find and teach them to row. There really hasn’t been a lot of change in that regard.”

Women’s rowing has grown exponentially over the past ten years. There are now over ninety college programs across the country, more than triple the number that existed before the NCAA made women’s crew an official sport.

Like other women’s crew coaches, Wilhelm, in his fifth season at the Northeastern helm, spends plenty of time combing the high schools. But the size of that talent pool is still small. So coaches pound the pavement around their campuses, keeping an eye out for women who are six feet tall and athletic-looking. It doesn’t matter whether these potential “walk-ons” have a rowing background. In fact, sometimes less experience is more.

“There are a lot of great athletes who may not have the greatest jump shot but have the size and ability to work hard,” Wilhelm says. “Sometimes people just want to learn a new sport.

“Size is obviously an important physical attribute for us, because the longer the stroke, the better,” he explains. “We’ve also found that endurance athletes, like swimmers and long-distance runners, make great converts [to rowing] because of their work ethic. [Assistant coach] Shelagh Donohoe does a great job teaching them the skills necessary to compete at this level.

“Sometimes it’s better when they’ve never rowed,” Wilhelm says, “because then there are no bad habits to break.”

All incoming Northeastern freshmen—men and women—receive a letter explaining that rowing is a varsity program that requires no previous experience. Each year, about sixty to eighty newcomers express an interest in women’s rowing. Only about ten to fifteen last a full season, joining roughly the same number of recruits to form the novice crew.

It’s a team-building style that works, Wilhelm says. “Four years ago, our novice eight was made up of six walk-ons and just two recruits, and they had a lot of success,” he explains. “Now those same girls will be a big part of our varsity eight boat.”

One of Wilhelm’s current captains, Amy Lawrence, a senior from Millsboro, Delaware, was a walk-on. And perhaps the brightest example of a walk-on making good unfolded on the men’s side in the late 1980s, when Jeff McLaughlin showed up, learned how to row, and went on to win a gold medal for the U.S. National Team at the World Championships.

Even though women’s crew is starting to take off, Wilhelm believes campus recruiting will always be an important part of the sport. “I don’t see it ever getting to the point where we won’t rely heavily on walk-ons,” he says.

Which calls for clever point-of-sale strategies. “When the students hit town,” Wilhelm says, “we bring one of our rowing shells—a sixty-foot, eight-person boat—right into the middle of campus.”