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Ron Stinebaugh
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Location: Blogs . |
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| Posted by: Content Administrator |
1/21/2007 |
I must admit, I was very flattered to be asked to write a player spotlight for the Rice University Baseball Players Association. After all, I was a freshman walk-on for David Hall’s 1984 team, never lettered and left the team in the spring of my junior year to concentrate on my studies. That said: playing baseball at Rice has been a very important part of my life. My path also highlights the choices student-athletes in my position face relative to the time commitment of varsity intercollegiate athletics.
So, here is my story. I grew up in Houston, but came to Rice from Kent School, an eastern boarding school in Connecticut where I had gone chasing a dream to play ice hockey. Well, that dream didn’t work out so well, but I did star on the baseball team helping Kent win two league championships and I led the team in RBI’s my 6th Form year (that’s the stuffy British school system term for senior year). Anyhow, I decided to come back home to Rice for college, following in my father’s footsteps (class of 1954). So, the first day of fall ball in 1983, I showed up for practice as a walk-on. Coach Hall had expected me to walk on, but as I entered the dugout for the first day of fall practice, I noticed that my name was nowhere to be found on the practice BP line up. After hanging out in the outfield shagging balls batter after batter, I finally got up the courage to tell Coach that he had left my name off the BP order. Well, he inserted me as the last hitter in practice that day. I got up and Tim Englund, who was all SWC the prior year, was pitching. I proceeded to spray line drive after line drive and after I finished, Coach Hall looked at me and said that he would never leave my name off the BP list again. That is probably my fondest Rice baseball memory because that day, there was no doubt that I belonged on the team.
That season, up until the Wayne Graham era, was the most successful in Rice baseball history. We finished the year 41-14 and were ranked as high as #5, finishing around #19 if memory serves me correctly. We also finished second in the SWC to Texas during the conference regular season, beating them once at home in a game masterfully pitched by Norm Charlton. Unfortunately, we placed third in the SWC tournament and were not selected to go to the NCAAs. They took only the top two teams from the SWC tournament for the 32 team NCAA tourney (this was in the era before the current expanded 64 team tournament). I got into one game that year for the last inning in right field of a 21-3 shellacking of Southwest Texas State. I made one putout on a fly ball and got one at bat. That is it for my actual playing career. Nevertheless, I was very proud to have been a part of that team. As a freshman walk-on, just being on the team was for me a significant accomplishment, particularly for a team that was so successful.
The balance of my baseball career at Rice became increasingly colored with the tensions between the significant time commitment to varsity athletics and the pressure to perform well in class to prepare for life after college. My sophomore year, I hurt my arm early in the spring and sat out the season. In my junior year, I had my best fall since I enrolled at Rice. The highlight of that fall for me was hitting a home run in an intrasquad game. You have to realize that I was a 145-pound left-handed contact hitter. It was the only time I went yard in three fall ball seasons. As we prepared for the season in the spring of 1986, my studies were starting to take much more of my focus. I had just decided not to go to medical school and turn my back on two and a half years of pre-med coursework, where I had completed nearly all of the course requirements, to major in Economics and Managerial Studies. The prospect of playing time, despite my fall, did not look promising. My career as a student-athlete faced with the time commitment of intercollegiate athletics came to a head during a school week pre-season double header against Lamar. The allure of just being on the team was gone. I had an exam the next day and I was not ready for it. I knew that by the time we finished the double header I would not have time to study adequately and would likely do poorly on the exam. I called Coach Hall that afternoon and told him I was not going to play baseball anymore. I did fine on that test and successfully crammed the Economics and Managerial Studies majors into one and a half years, graduating on time in 1987. My remaining college career was not all work as I also went on to become Rally Club president my senior year. That is another story.
After I left Rice, I became an investment banker in New York for Kidder, Peabody, a venerable Wall Street firm. After two years of 80 hour work weeks, which is typical for Financial Analysts in what is a two year internship, I enrolled at Harvard Business School, graduating in 1992. After Harvard, I moved to Miami, got married, and worked brief stints as a consultant for a Big Eight accounting firm and in private equity at an LBO firm. I returned to investment banking in 1997 in New York with Prudential Securities in the Energy Group and moved back to Houston with Prudential in 1998. I am now Senior Vice President - Finance and member of the Executive Committee of Syntroleum Corporation, a publicly traded energy technology company.
As I said at the beginning, my time playing baseball at Rice had a significant impact on me. I cherish my time and involvement with the team. I made great friends, some of whom I still see today. I had the opportunity and privilege to experience varsity intercollegiate athletics, which very few high school athletes have the opportunity to do. Playing baseball has given me the ability to remain connected to Rice, a place that I love dearly, in a special way. To that end, I commend those who had the vision to put together RUBPA. It is a great forum to stay connected to former teammates and to create a network of former players to help each other in any endeavor that they might pursue. So, if I can be of any help to any of you who might read this, don’t hesitate to email or call. My contact information is in the RUBPA database.
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