FORT COLLINS, Colo.—Jarrod Flax remembers going to Fort Collins Foxes games when he was a kid, helping shag foul balls for the college-level summer baseball team.
Now, Flax, a 2011 Fort Collins High School graduate, is the starting shortstop and leadoff hitter for the Foxes after finishing up his sophomore season at Newman University in Wichita, Kan., where he basically did the same thing.
“It’s really nice,” Flax said. “It’s good to try to keep it the same.”
There are other versions of comforting sameness with the Foxes. Flax joins former Lambkins teammate Tyler Nesby and calculates five former Lambkins players among the three northern Colorado summer baseball clubs, which include the Loveland Blue Jays and the northern Colorado Beavers.
For Flax, who played in a Kansas league after his freshman season, it was just a matter of letting the Foxes know he was interested.
“I contacted (owner and GM) Kurt (Colicchio); I got his number from the Foxes’ website,” Flax said. “I talked to him a little bit and said I wanted to come back home for the summer.”
There’s no word on whether Flax’s superior ball-shagging ability as a kid influenced Colicchio’s decision to bring Flax back. Safe to say it couldn’t have hurt.
“We like to have local kids on the team for a variety of reasons,” Colicchio said. “One is to get local interest. The other is it’s good to have local kids to show kids from out of state around.”
Although a long way from boasting a 75-80 percent local roster like the Greeley Grays, Colicchio’s three teams do showcase 11 players from either Fort Collins or Loveland. The Beavers are hyper-local, with only three players from outside the state. Two of those are from Cheyenne.
There are impediments to making the Foxes and Blue Jays local from top to bottom, Colicchio said.
One of them has been a lack of talent in northern Colorado that Colicchio said is improving lately.
Rocky Mountain baseball coach Scott Bullock took exception to that, saying baseball has been solid in northern Colorado, and especially in Fort Collins, for some time.
More likely than a lack of talent is a lack of interest, Bullock and others have said. Colicchio and the Foxes coach, Brad Averitte echoed that sentiment as well.
“The path we deal with is again trying to get some of the local kids to stay home and play here because a lot of local kids might get invited to other areas,” Colicchio said.
Some would say invited. Others might say strongly encouraged. Flax, for example, said a lot of college programs want their players to stay around campus for summer ball so coaches can keep an eye on their players.
“That’s why I stayed (in Kansas) after my freshman season,” Flax said.
Still others, if they’re good enough, will choose to play at a higher level like the Cape Cod, North Woods or Jayhawk Leagues, Flax said.
For Averitte, every year is a challenge because he sees so much turnover. This season, only one player returned to the Foxes from last season. So Averitte gets busy filling the bases, and his roster shortly after the summer season is through.
To do so, Averitte, a native Texan, relies on his network of contacts that don’t always include Fort Collins-area coaches or players.
“There’s a lot of programs that I trust that have sent us quality guys in years past,” Averitte said. “As long as that happens, I’ll keep going to those programs.”
It will simply take more Fort Collins kids playing—and competing well—for the Foxes for Averitte to trust the talent in northern Colorado. In fact, despite coaching the Foxes for the past three years, Averitte said he has yet to meet any Fort Collins area high school coaches.
“Hopefully, I’ll get to meet them sometime soon,” Averitte said.
He most likely will. In the meantime, Averitte will build his team the way he has been—with the trust of his network but an eye for local players.
“Whenever I scour through colleges that border Colorado, I’ll always look for kids from Fort Collins and Loveland,” Averitte said. “And if it’s a fit, I’d love to have them. I think it’d be a good thing”
Flax relishes the opportunity to play with Fort Collins imports, saying it’s fun to see the different types of play.
And that’s what the Foxes have been doing with relative ease. Persuading out-of-state kids—who already want to go somewhere other than home—to come to Fort Collins is apparently a cinch.
“We get a lot of kids from around the country who want to experience something different,” Colicchio said. “Northern Colorado is an easy sell, if you will. It’s really easy to get kids coming here just because of the area.”
———
Information from: Fort Collins Coloradoan,
