Scot Spotlight on Head Baseball Coach John Leister
By Nate Jervey
Sports Information Student Assistant
Coach John Leister is the Head Baseball Coach as well as the
Offensive Coordinator for the football team at Alma College. Coach
Leister played both baseball and football at Michigan State University.
He went on to play one season with the Pittsburgh Steelers of the NFL.
He followed that up with a stint with the Michigan Panthers of the
USFL. Following his football career, Coach Leister pitched for several
seasons for the Boston Red Sox.
“The education should be the thing that comes first and back when I
played, it wasn’t,” said head baseball coach John Leister. “Most of us
were using Division I ball as the minor leagues to get to the
professional ranks. At a school like Alma, the love for playing the
game becomes most important. Class time is never sacrificed for
practice time and rarely for games.”
“The
student-athlete is a dying breed at the Division I level, has been for
years,” said Leister. “Sometimes, you’re not in class because you can
hook up with a couple of teammates and throw the football around, or
the only time I can get a catcher is during my chemistry lab…Class was
perceived as a necessary evil.”
Some Division I athletes, especially in football and
baseball, have a hard time seeing the importance of a chemistry lab
compared to the prospect of a seven-figure contract and signing bonus.
It is this cavalier attitude, according to Leister, that can derail the
career plans of so many outstanding athletes.
“So many of us had these illusions of grandeur that clouded
our vision when it came to what we would be doing once our college
playing days were over.”
Leister is perhaps the poster-child for sky-high expectations that come crashing down.
Primed
to make it big pitching for the Boston Red Sox, he realized every
athlete’s worst fear. He blew out his elbow and his career in the
‘bigs’ was over. In one fell swoop, Leister went from professional
athlete to average citizen.
“I went from doing commercials in Boston to loading TV’s in
the back of people’s cars. It did not work out like the quote-un-quote
dream…” he says. “Nobody could have told me the day I went out to that
mound at Fenway (Park) that it was going to be my last day.”
And just like that, it was over. The fanfare that had
surrounded the two-time Michigan State football captain was not rivaled
by his exit from professional sport. There was no contingency plan.
Sure, there was college – but there was also the cavalier attitude
Leister had adopted throughout his college career in East Lansing.
With no degree and no credentials to work with, Leister was
left with a name but it was no longer stitched in the back of a
recognizable jersey. The name alone was not going to take him as far as
he had hoped.
“Oh, everyone knew me. But there is this little thing called
a degree that means a heck of a lot more than anything else. I came to
understand just how much that meant.”
Perhaps that is why Leister is the leader of so many
encouraging voices in the Alma College Athletics Department pushing
student-athletes to get to class, to put the time in now. Getting your
college degree never gets any easier. Leister knows that first-hand as
well.
It took Leister a year and a half of working at night, going
to school in the morning and taking care of two young kids after his
professional athletic dreams evaporated.
All these years later, Leister has coached hundreds of
students, winning four MIAA Championships – three in football (1999,
2002, 2004) and one in baseball (1999). But perhaps more meaningful to
him are the individuals who come back to him and say that he made a
difference by forcing them to go to class and not pinning their hopes
for the future on yesterday’s athletic achievements.
Posted: Mon, March 21st, 2005 at 5:47PM
