Range at the middle infield positions was an issue for the Elon University baseball team during the 2012 campaign. For a team that came one game away from winning the regular season Southern Conference title, head coach Mike Kennedy felt like the middle infield could get better.
“It’s not that we had bad players,” Kennedy said. “We were a game away from winning the conference championship again. We just didn’t think we were real good in the middle. We weren’t good enough for our standards.”
Associate Head Coach Greg Starbuck, the “unofficial” recruiting coordinator for the team [but “official” if you ask him] set out to rebuild the middle infield.
First on his list was replacing departed shortstop Garrett Koster. In 2009, Starbuck and Kennedy had their eye on a young shortstop from Florida Christian Academy, Antonio Alvarez. Elon was the first school to offer Alvarez a scholarship, but he passed after getting offers to play in the Atlantic Coast Conference at North Carolina State University.
“I got into the big deal of the ACC and forgot about Elon, really,” he said. “It was a really close race. I just ended up going with N.C. State.”
The decision came as somewhat of a surprise to Starbuck.
“We recruited him hard,” Starbuck said. “I really thought we were going to get him out of high school.”
Elon opened the 2011 season — Alvarez’s freshman year at N.C. State — against the Wolfpack in Raleigh. Though at this point Elon had given up on swaying Alvarez, Starbuck still watched him intently.
After the season, Alvarez made the choice to transfer.
“I feel like I didn’t get the opportunity to play,” Alvarez said. “I had to make the best decision for me and that was to move on.”
At the same time, a second baseman named Wil Leathers was redshirting at the University of South Carolina. Unlike Alvarez, Leathers was not recruited out of high school by Kennedy and Starbuck.
“We don’t recruit South Carolina high school a whole lot,” Kennedy said. “It’s just not a good area for us.”
While Leathers was at South Carolina, head coach Ray Tanner, now the school’s athletics director, led the Gamecocks to the national championship. Despite the title, Leathers transferred to Spartanburg Methodist Community College for the 2011 season — a place Kennedy and the Phoenix have had some success recruiting in the past.
Around the same time, Alvarez decided to transfer to Miami Dade Community College.
“As soon as I left N.C. State, I contacted a guy who’s really good friends with Coach [Starbuck] and I asked him very first off the bat, ‘Is there any chance to go to Elon?’” Alvarez said. “He actually told me right while I was talking to him that he had just got off the phone with ‘Coach Buck.’”
Having watched Alvarez at the beginning of the 2011 season in Raleigh, Starbuck knew what Alvarez could do.
“We didn’t need to see him again,” Starbuck said. “We actually ended up getting a commitment before we even saw him play again.”
Leathers wasn’t so easy, though. He originally wasn’t on Elon’s radar, but Starbuck received a call from Spartanburg Methodist saying, ‘Listen, we got a kid here I think you need to come look at.”
“We weren’t really going to recruit another second baseman,” Starbuck said. “But we went into our offseason last year thinking toughness was an issue. We were playing Wofford [College] when I got the call and we went and watched him. I actually missed a game to see him play.”
Starbuck liked what he saw, but with Spartanburg Methodist in the midst of a Junior College World Series run, Leathers didn’t make a decision on his next stop on the line until well after the deadline.
“It was tough at the time because my mind was on a championship,” Leathers said. “In the back of my mind, I wanted to play at the next level, but at the same time I didn’t feel like it was right for me to worry about where I was going next year with my team in the postseason.”
Leathers said Elon gave him time to process the decision after Spartanburg Methodist won the Junior College World Series. That, paired with the successful culture in place at Elon, is the reason Leathers made his decision.
“It’s a winning program,” he said. “I love winning. That’s one of the biggest things for me. I felt this program was my best opportunity.”
Current junior Sebastian Gomez had played second base his first two years at Elon. He even made the freshman All-American team at second base after the 2011 campaign. Displacing the second baseman came as an easy decision to Kennedy because of Gomez’s athletic ability.
“It’s like having two shortstops on the left side,” Kennedy said. “He can really move over there. Heck, just the other day I looked at him in practice and said, ‘Hey, Gomez, we might need you in left field.’ What does he do? He goes out and plays left field. That’s the kind of kid he is. He can play anywhere.”
To start 2013, Gomez moved to third base to allow Leathers to slide in at second base while Alvarez took over at shortstop.
“We’re doing what’s best for our team,” Kennedy said. “We went after both of those guys with that in mind. We felt like we didn’t cover enough ground out there. We wanted them to come in and anchor the middle of our field.”
The pair has done just that. Leathers had played in all 19 games this season, making 18 starts. Alvarez got a day off in Myrtle Beach, S.C. against then-No. 8 University of Kentucky, but has started the other 18 games. Alvarez leads Elon with a .387 batting average while Leathers places fourth with a .310 mark.