The latest guest on The Base Path Podcast lays out a different route for college prospects to achieve their dream of playing baseball beyond high school.
Northern Essex Community College coach Jeff Mejia, whose program is currently ranked No. 3 in the nation among JuCo schools, joined host Dan Guttenplan for a discussion on NJCAA in the midst of his team’s 23-game winning streak.
Mejia became the head coach at Northern Essex in 2013. Since his arrival, the team has been crowned New England regional champion six times and earned five bids to the NJCAA World Series. Mejia is a six-time New England Regional Coach of the Year.
NECC’s sustained excellence is all the more impressive when you consider that — because it is a two-year program — Mejia turns over 50% of his roster each season.
Since 2013 players have gone on to play at University of Maine, Canisius College, Bryant University, University of Maryland, St. John’s University, Hartford, UMass Lowell, UMass Amherst, Marist College, Ave Marie University, West Virginia Tech, Lynn University, Southern New Hampshire, University Franklin Pierce University, Southern Wesleyan University, UMass Boston, Salem State University, Framingham State University, UMass Dartmouth, Western New England University, Rivier University, and Daniel Webster College.
Mejia said his players travel all different paths to get to one of the top JuCo programs in the nation.
“It’s really all over the board,” Mejia said. “When I first got there, we really were getting guys that didn’t get the job done in the classroom out of high school, so they needed to go the junior college route before they could continue on. What I’ve noticed over the last five years, it’s really changed a lot. For instance, we have our athletic banquet next week, and we have nine or 10 baseball players receiving academic excellence awards. So, a lot of the things I’m looking for are guys that might be late bloomers or guys that aren’t getting the necessary opportunities at the Division 1 or Division 2 levels. They think that they are capable of playing at that level.”
Since Coach Mejia’s arrival, the Knights have produced 13 NJCAA All-Americans and 39 First Team All-New England players. Three players — Ryan Mcauliffe, Colby Maiola and Spencer Brown have gone on to play professionally.
Mejia was also able to successfully navigate the pandemic over the last two seasons. The Knights were the only NJCAA team in the New England Region to have a full fall and spring season during the 2020-21 school year. Through effective management of the players, coaches, staff and administrators, the Knights finished 22-12 and traveled safely out of state eight times.
“We played the full fall season, which is fantastic,” Mejia said. “We’re never going to meet our maximum games, so we can pretty much play all fall. What we do during the fall is we’re recording as much as possible. Plus, we play intersquads each week. Those are some of our best games. We put them on two separate teams. They’re on the same team all fall, and they battle. So, we’re we get as much game film as we can, and then each player can make a highlight reel that they can start to send out.
“We try to have our players narrow it down to about four or five schools that they’re really interested in and then a couple of schools that are maybe a little bit of a reach. We’ll start by sending some emails to schools with videos. I’ll follow it up with a phone call with the coaches. And if there’s any interest, we jump on it right away. We jump on it right away. You know, we want players to go visit schools before they have to make a decision.”
Listen to the entire podcast with Northern Essex Community College coach Jeff Mejia.
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