BY GEORGE ALBANO
Staff Writer
CHRIS KELLY staff Jersey Shore Tides’ pitcher Nick Amabile, Holmdel, fires one home during a recent Atlantic Baseball Confederation Collegiate League game in Lakewood.
It wasn’t that long ago Monique Koehler’s only involvement with the sport of baseball was strictly as a fan — more specifically as a mom, rooting for her two sons as they played.
Today, the Middletown resident heads up the premier summer collegiate baseball league in the state.
Koehler is the founder and president of the ABCCL — the Atlantic Baseball Confederation Collegiate League — which in only four years has grown into one of the top summer baseball leagues for college players in New Jersey and other parts of the country.
The eight-team league has an area flavor about it, too, with teams such as Jersey Shore Tides based in Holmdel, the Ocean Giants out of North Brunswick, the Piscataway Clippers and the Middletown Monarchs. A number of the players are from the area as well.
The season runs from Memorial Day weekend to Aug. 1, and games are usually played on Tuesdays and Thursdays with doubleheaders on Sunday. The league uses wooden bats and, as President Koehler likes to point out, "plays on real grass."
"It’s baseball the way people remember it," she said.
In fact, even the league’s mission statement on its Web site (www.abccl.com) refers to itself as New Jersey "baseball as it was meant to be."
They’re not far off, either. The league has grown in popularity and in skill level every year to the point where there’s now a waiting list for players wanting to get in. Even college coaches have contacted the league wanting some of their players to get on a roster, any roster, to get more experience.
"A lot of our players will go back to school and their batting average will double," Koehler said. "Our players win so many awards when they got back to college, and almost a dozen were drafted."
And almost everyone involved with the league points to Koehler when they talk about its success.
But how does someone with a name like "Monique" start up and preside over such a successful baseball league? It’s easy, Koehler said, when you have sons.
In her case, Peter and James both played baseball growing up, and their mom was always at every game rooting them on.
"My husband also played in school and was offered contracts by the Pittsburgh Pirates and San Francisco Giants," she added. "But he gave them up to marry me instead, so I tell people I’ve been trying to pay him back for that ever since."
It was about seven years ago, however, when she really got the bug.
"When my son James was 14, my husband coached his AAU baseball team," she recalled. "To keep me involved, my husband said, ‘We want you to be the general manager,’ and I said, ‘OK, what do I do?,’ and he said that I have to find the team games to play.
"So I called other AAU teams to see if they were available on certain weekends so I could make up our schedule. I kept calling people up and down the East Coast."
Koehler consequently filled her team’s schedule as well as helped other teams fill theirs.
"I kept a big chart of all these teams and when they were playing and what dates they were open. I was kind of acting like a dating service, matching teams up with other teams to play one another."
Throughout this process, Koehler made tons of baseball contacts. Always looking for ways to raise money for her husband and son’s AAU team, she decided that hosting a tournament in New Jersey would make a good fund-raiser.
"So I decided to put on a tournament in Manalapan, and we called it the New Jersey Shore Shootout and Showcase. I still do it every Labor Day weekend."
What’s all this got to do with a summer collegiate baseball league, you ask? Well, out of the annual tournament Koehler started came the Atlantic Baseball Confederation Fall League, which she was also instrumental in starting. High school players all along the Jersey Shore would play baseball right until mid-November, and the league would attract a large number of college coaches and scouts from all over.
As Koehler got to know many of the college coaches better through correspondence over the years, some of them told her of the need for a good collegiate baseball league in New Jersey during the summer.
"They said there was a need for it," she said. "Kids had to go away, far away, to play that level of baseball."
So Koehler decided to do something about that, too, and thus the ABCCL was born in the summer of 2001.
It’s been a huge success ever since.
"I think it’s the best league around for these kids," said Tony Danella, who’s both the manager and general manager of the Piscataway Clippers. "It’s predominantly New Jersey, but we try to attract out-of-state college players, too. It’s very competitive baseball and very good baseball. There’s a lot of talented kids in the state playing baseball, and it’s a great place for them to play."
Pete Kapsales, the GM of the Jersey Shore Tides, agreed.
"One of the things we do different than other leagues is we have a few rules that encourages all the coaches to use as many players as possible," Kapsales said after splitting a doubleheader against the Manchester Yankees on Sunday.
"Besides a DH, we also use an EH, an extra hitter, so you can bat 10 players. That allows one more player to bat.
"We also have unlimited substitution on defense, so you can move guys in and out, and give a lot of players playing time. And we rotate the batting order so no one gets stuck hitting eighth every game. You can hit eighth one game and second another game."
The purpose, Kapsales says, is so players improve.
"When a college coach sends us a player, we don’t want him to get 20 at bats. We want him to get between 90 to 110. We want to return a better product to that coach. That’s the goal of our league. While my team is in first place right now, I’m not really concerned with that. I don’t care if a player is hitting .210 or .310."
Although a college coach has to sign his permission for one of his players to join the league, they can’t line up fast enough to sign their players up.
"There are just not enough leagues like this around the country," points out Dave Bright, an assistant coach with the Ocean Giants last year and the GM of the Middletown Monarchs this season. "We hear from a lot of college players around the country. It’s certainly not hard to find players."
Or GMs and managers, either. Some get involved because of their own sons.
"When my son graduated high school a couple of years ago, we were looking for a place for him to play in the summer," Kapsales said. "We looked at some leagues but found them to be a little weak, so I asked around. I asked people who had experience, but mostly I asked umpires where they saw the best summer baseball being played, and the overwhelming consensus was that this league was the best league in the tristate area."
Danella was also introduced to the league through a family connection.
"My son had played in the league for two years," Danella said. "But this is my first year with the Piscataway team. I heard they were looking to expand, and I had told Monique I was definitely interested in taking a team. But then what happened was this team, which was the Central Jersey Clippers last year, moved to Piscataway, and I took over as GM."
Danella, who oversees the 18-team Middlesex County American Legion program, had another motive.
"I was also looking to get involved to give kids a place to play when they’re done with Legion," he said. "A lot of them didn’t have anywhere to go. Now, this league is just a natural progression."
Coaches come into the league for the same reason as players do: to gain experience against high-level competition.
"That’s another one of the things we do," Kapsales said. "The league is not only for kids. We also like to give a lot of college coaches experience. We have a young coach, Cory Allen, who’s only 24 and was an assistant coach at Central College in Illinois. He hopes to be a head coach on the college level some day, and our league will help him grow, too, as a coach and get experience. It sort of goes with our philosophy."
"I have a young assistant coach, Danny Mendoza, who’s only 25 and an assistant at Bloomfield College," Danella said. "He really runs the whole show. He does everything from coaching third base to making pitching changes. Plus, he’s young enough to relate to the players. He’s going to make a good college head coach some day."
"I hired the assistant hitting coach at Seton Hall, Jim Duffy, to be my manager," Bright, of the Middletown Monarchs, added. "We get dozens and dozens of résumés from all over the country from college assistants looking to get managerial experience in our league that they can put on their résumé, and try to get a head coaching job at the college level."
One such person is Ocean Giants manager Dave Yorke, who was the head coach at Cumberland County College in the spring and coached at Drew University in Madison last season.
"It’s good working with kids who aren’t your kids every day and are a little better talented," Yorke said. "I’ve got kids from Seton Hall and Lehigh, and two from Quinnipiac College in Connecticut.
"The league is just getting better and better," he added. "This is my first year, but I saw them play last year, and this year the talent is better and the coaching is also better. College coaches send their players toward this league because they know they’re definitely going to get playing time."
Jim Duffy and some of the Seton Hall players aren’t the only connection from the Pirates to the ABCCL. Legendary Seton Hall baseball coach Mike Sheppard, who retired last year, hooked up with the league this year as its new commissioner.
"I’ve always been involved with baseball," said Sheppard, who is also chairman of the Essex County American Legion. "When you’ve been in the game as long as I have, it’s hard not to be involved in some way.
"So when I retired from Seton Hall, the ABCCL asked me to come aboard. I’ve always been the benefactor of collegiate leagues, from the Cape Cod League on down, and I take my hat off to the people who run them. They have to love the game to do all they do."
"With Mike Sheppard as commissioner, it’s made an immediate impact," Yorke said. "He definitely gives our league instant credibility with his name and record."
And Sheppard’s salary for being commissioner is the same as everyone else in the league: zero. The league charges each player $315, which just about covers expenses.
"I have a dual salary of zero," laughed Danella, who doubles as manager and GM at Piscataway.
"We all do it for the love of the game," Koehler said. "Everybody, including coach Sheppard, loves baseball, and loves this particular kind of baseball. I sat with him at a doubleheader on Sunday and we saw two 3-2 games. There were great plays, blue skies, people were applauding, and the wooden bats."
Ah, yes, the wooden bats.
"The wood makes it a better game than aluminum," Kapsales pointed out. "The games go faster, and you don’t get those aluminum-bat hits, so the pitching is more effective."
Kapsales also likes having players from different parts of the country in the league, and not just for the baseball aspect.
"It’s good for the local guys to measure their talent against other players in the country," he said. "But the cultural experience is also good. We get kids from the Midwest spending their summer in New Jersey. They come here with this stereotype of what they think the Northeast is like, and they’re shocked. They absolutely love it. They love New York, too. Some of the local players take them to New York City to go sightseeing."
Koehler even goes one step further. She invites all the out-of-state players to her house for dinner during the season.
"I make whatever they want, too," she said.
"There’s been talk of trying to expand and bring in more kids from around the country," Bright said. "But we also want to keep that local New Jersey/Jersey Shore flavor."
Wherever the players come from, the league keeps getting better.
"It’s just my second year in the league," Bright said, "but I can also see it getting better. It’s a good quality league, and it’s only going to continue to get better."
"The level of play in the league is very good," agreed Yorke, whose team is made up of 60 percent Division I players. "I think it’s comparable to the NECBL."
Comparisons to the New England Collegiate Baseball League (NECBL) may indeed be fair, but the ABCCL makes it clear it’s not the Cape Cod League, probably the country’s most prestigious summer collegiate league.
"There you get the top players in college," Kapsales said. "We don’t consider ourselves at that level, and that’s not our goal. We can’t compete with them. They’ve been around for 50 years.
"The Cape Cod League will always be the top league around, and other top leagues will continue to be, too. We’re not trying to compete with them. We do things differently. We have a different philosophy. But we feel the program we have is very good, and every year it gets a little better."
"But when I look at the Jersey Shore, I think we should have something like Cape Cod," Sheppard said. "Of course, we have a lot of work to do, but the potential is there."
"The Jersey Shore is a resort just like Cape Cod," Bright pointed out. "So you get a lot of retirees and people coming for vacation who like baseball. Plus, a lot of our players from out of state get jobs at places like Six Flags, golf courses, restaurants and hotels, and on the boardwalk. So we have the allure of Cape Cod."
"And we have families of out-of-state players coming here every weekend or coming for a whole week to watch their sons play," Koehler added. "So our league is bringing in business, and it’s very good for the state.
"I’m so thrilled for them and for the league. I just love baseball. It’s part of the American fabric."