The field was spotless on one of the prettiest days of the year. It was sunny and 70 degrees as the Flyers took the field hoping for their second home win of the season. The only real problem with this scenario was that it was April 1 and they had already played 22 games. This was not the season that the Flyer baseball team had envisioned.

It is never easy for a college positioned in the north to ready itself for the spring baseball season. With the unpredictability of the weather, the number of days that can be spent outside can be limited. The year 2003 however, could not have been worse weather-wise for the Flyers. Scheduled to take on Top-20 teams in Notre Dame and Arizona State on February 21 in Arizona, the Flyers never got to practice anywhere but in the Frericks Center before their flight to the desert.

Despite this huge disadvantage, UD took the Irish to extra innings before losing 10-9. That was the beginning of a 15-game road trip due to cancellation of home games during the next month. It wasn’t until March 22 that they would play their first game at Stuart Field. With the constant road games and inability to get ready as they would have liked, the Flyers have started the season 7-16. This is a far cry from what they have been able to accomplish during the last two years under Coach Tony Vittorio.

Being able to turn around programs has been Vittorio’s mark during his ten year coaching career. In just his second season at UD, he guided to Flyers to the A-10 tournament and a 32-win season and followed it up in year three with an identical result. This is not a man that is used to failure.

If you don’t know Tony Vittorio, he is a lot like Pete Rose without all of the baggage that Pete brings with him. Tony is the kind of guy that would run through a wall if he thought that it would help the team win. He is the classic overachiever and he expects the same results from his players. Only this year, they seem to be under achieving.

It is easy to be the man in charge when things are going well. It is easy to be everybody’s friend when you are on your way to the A-10 Tournament. It is not so easy when you are not. You can tell a lot about a person when things are not going as they would have liked. You can tell a lot about Tony Vittorio by how he is dealing with failure.

This is a team that lost its top recruit before the season started because of Tommy John surgery. One of the starters from last year tore his rotator cuff early in practice. One of the newcomers has undergone chemotherapy for Hodgkin’s disease. Vittorio doesn’t even talk about these difficulties; he talks more about how to make things better.

Vittorio related, “If you would have asked me at the beginning of the year how we would do this year, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. But one thing that I could say is that the program is in good shape for the future. I really didn’t look at this year as a rebuilding year, but more of a reloading year. We lost 14 seniors from last year and I knew that we would be inexperienced. We came in hoping that our inexperienced players would come through immediately. Past history tells you that this will not be the case, but under a certain set of circumstances the right mix gets you through the rough spots.”

If you try to compare this team with last year, you tend to see a number of problem areas. The hitting, pitching, and fielding are equally down. There is no one area that a good teacher can attack.

“Bottom line, what is happening to us right now is that the guys that we were counting on to perform just haven’t come through as needed. There is no leadership on the field through performance,” Vittorio says. “The inexperienced guys don’t have anyone to follow. We just aren’t competing at the division one level that I want us to compete at. The new guys just don’t know how to compete at this level yet.”

Yet, he comes to the ballpark every day trying to come up with a solution. He sits in the dugout when the Flyers are on the field and talks to those on the bench about what has gone right and what has just gone wrong. He challenges a pitcher that he has just taken out of the game as to what he did wrong. The pitcher responds, “I walked the leadoff hitter.” Tony goes on to talk not only to that pitcher but the rest of the team as to why you can’t let the rest of the team down by not giving them an opportunity to win. He is about teaching and making better players.

In Vittorio’s mind, winning is all about attitude and knowing what to do in a given situation. It is about leadership and who should be leaders. “Too many people today are afraid to be leaders if they are not performing well on the field. They worry too much about what people think of them. When I was young we didn’t worry about what people thought, we just did what needed to be done. My fear is that I now have to take the leadership role. You know you are in trouble when the head coach has to take on that responsibility. If you have a great team, the coach has to do very little during the game. It’s ironic, but the game is the easiest part of the job.”

As do most coaches, Vittorio worries. He worries about losing and he worries about his players and what it is doing to them. “We’ve got great seniors. They are great individuals that come from good families. You can just see it on their faces. They know they are not playing well and it really gets to them. We think they are good players; they just aren’t performing right now. You can see that they feel every loss. As a coach, you are proud of their reactions but at the same time you want them to have fun. When you are in a situation that we are in right now, it is not whether you won or lost, but if you really laid it out on the line. It’s more than a game to me because they keep score for a reason, but they have to put it in perspective and learn to relax and have fun.”

Vittorio continues, “We need to stop worrying about playing catch-up, worrying about what our record is and how many wins we need. We need to worry about the game today and every inning as it comes. If we win, we win. It is important for we coaches that our young players are getting better. Where we are today allows us to give our young players a little more experience, but at the same time we will not give up on winning now. I owe that to our seniors. I really didn’t get much sleep last night because I was thinking too much about our seniors.”

One has to wonder what the man does when he is not on the baseball field. Tony Vittorio is a throwback to the great days when baseball truly was the national pastime. He would fit perfectly into one of those Chicago White Sox uniforms used in the movie, “Field of Dreams.” He would be the guy just wanting to play a few more innings. Yet, he seems to have it all in perspective.

“It is very hard for me to lose. I’m a typical Italian in that I am very demonstrative, I yell, I scream, I hug. But when I go home after a loss, I tend to be quiet. I have to remember that I have a wife and two kids and family is the most important thing. My number one goal in life is to be a good husband and father. My number two goal is to win a national championship. You have to have your priorities in the right order.”

Today was one of those days that Tony didn’t have to go home quiet. The Flyers played one of their better games of the season and upended the University of Cincinnati, 4-3. Although it may have been a game between two teams that are having down seasons, you could not have guessed that by the style of play. Both teams played error free ball and left fielder Tommy Beechem and third baseman Joe McSoley both made outstanding plays to keep the Bearcats at bay. After rallying in the seventh to tie the score, the Flyers scored the winning run on a wild pitch with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning.

Sitting in the dugout throughout the game, you would never have guessed that the Flyers were a 6-16 team. They were up from the first pitch and never seemed to get down despite trailing for most of the game. When McSoley scored the winning run, it was if a huge weight had been lifted from each of the Flyers’ shoulders. The backslapping and smiles that followed might be something that this renewed Flyer bunch hopefully will see more often over the last two months of the season.