Piedmont Pride back together for second summer

In their 2015 exit questionnaires, Piedmont Pride baseball players almost all agreed that staying together in the dorms at Winthrop University was their favorite part of playing for the summer college team.

The Pride, coached and organized by former Winthrop coach Joe Hudak, will stay together again this summer. Hudak has lined up York Place, a vacant former juvenile behavioral treatment facility in downtown York, to house his players. It’s at York Place, fishing in the stocked pond or messing around in the dormitory, that players from 17 different schools and 14 different states will get to know each other pretty well, a byproduct that helped the Pride to a Southern Collegiate Baseball League regular season title last year.

“It ended up doing very well for us,” Hudak said. “So we’ll always try to have them together. They bonded very quickly.”

Typical summer college baseball teams utilize host families to house their players and usually charge the players a fee to participate, sometimes as much as $800 according to Hudak. Cohesion among the players is generally fleeting as they go their separate ways after practices or games.

The Pride isn’t a typical summer college baseball team. Hudak’s organization, sponsored by the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, doesn’t charge its players anything to play. It also isn’t using host families, an idea that grew out of the inability to find any last year.

The Pride’s FCA association is also unique.

The team holds a Bible study each week and attends different churches together each Sunday. The Pride will also work with the Boys and Girls Club of York County throughout the summer, mentoring local youth and holding several baseball clinics. At the end of the season, some of the players and coaches will again go to the Dominican Republic for a mission trip.

Only a handful of summer college baseball teams across the country have Christian affiliations, but the Pride doesn’t require its players to sign any papers confirming they’re followers already like some do. Hudak is more interested in helping his already-Christian players grow in their faith, or helping those that aren’t Christian understand what it’s all about.

“We do play very hard on the field, our goal is to win the SCBL like we did last year,” said Hudak. “But more importantly we really want to try and help our players grow spiritually.”

Those end-of-year questionnaires didn’t reveal too much about the Pride players’ personal experiences with their faith. Those varied from player to player.

But living together in close quarters and discussing personal subjects such as faith and learning about each other created the unexpected bond that was partially responsible for the team’s success.

“Most summer league teams, kids want to get their at-bats or their innings,” said Hudak. “Our kids, if they weren’t playing they were all in. It was really cool to see.”

This story was originally published May 20, 2016 at 4:02 PM with the headline "Piedmont Pride back together for second summer."