NOTE: The Senior Close-Up is an occasional feature on the Bard Athletics web site, with the focus being the life of a student-athlete at Bard. Here, every student must complete a Senior Project to graduate. The Senior Project is an original, individual, focused project growing out of the student's cumulative academic experiences. Preparation begins in the junior year, and our course each semester in the senior year is devoted entirely to the Senior Project. The student submits the completed project to a committee of three professors and participates with them in a Senior Project Review.
By Jim Sheahan
Director of Athletic Communications & Marketing
It is unlikely anyone can chronicle Alec Montecalvo’s story better than he can.
He is a writer, after all.
Since his childhood, he’s been carrying around notebooks so that when the mood strikes him, he can write. It's a passion fostered since his parents, Richard and Dawn, read him modified versions of epics like
Moby Dick or
The Three Musketeers as bedtime stories. He came to Bard knowing that he's a writer, and his love for it has been nurtured here.
Soon he will leave Annandale to pursue his fortune.
The anecdotes and memories from the last four years that are penned in those notebooks, though, are a veritable treasure trove. There’s an epic in there, and it has a hero … but it is definitely
not fiction.
Montecalvo had never heard of Bard College when he got a phone call from Jim Chambers, who was Bard’s baseball coach in the winter of 2011. Chambers explained that there hadn’t been a baseball team at Bard since 1937, and that a new field was going to be built, and that he was just the kind of player a new program could be built around.
Turns out Chambers really knew what he was doing, because he was absolutely right.
“I always knew that I wanted to come up North for college,” said Montecalvo, a Florida native. “After Coach Chambers called, I looked at Bard and saw they had a great writing program here. I visited, and I loved the campus and the mountains, and the general feel of Bard.
“I came and I was excited about the fact that I was going to be able to play baseball in college,” he added.
The twists and turns of the story from that point bring to mind Ulysses and The Odyssey. After just a few months as coach, Chambers left Bard. A new coach, Ed Kahovec, was hired. This happened before Montecalvo ever started his freshman year at Bard.
Once he got here, he realized there were no baseball fields on campus. Practices were held at a local recreational park, the promise of a $2 million facility hanging out there in the fog, date of construction
to be announced.
The team practiced at the local park, unless the local high school team needed the field, and also shared space with a high school team on the other side of the Hudson River.
Home games weren’t played at home. In fact, many of them were played far, far away from home. Some examples: Bard played ‘home’ games in Wappingers Falls, N.Y. (57 minutes from Bard), Oneonta, N.Y. (1:55 from Bard), Flemington, N.J. (2:18 from Bard) and Farmingdale, N.Y. (2:48 from Bard). In some cases, the ‘away’ team traveled a shorter distance than the Raptors did to get to the venue.
Kahovec needed his players to ignore how tough that first season was going to be. There were 14 players on the roster, a combination of the pre-existing Bard club team, and some recruits, like Montecalvo.
On the first day of the first season of Bard baseball in 76 years, Kahovec gave the ball to Montecalvo. It was March 3, 2013.
“I find out I’m going to pitch that first game, and I’m amped,” Montecalvo remembers. “That weekend comes and I get sick. I have a 103 temperature on the morning of the game. We go to the Bronx to play Yeshiva. It’s 25 degrees and sunny.
“During the warmup, I just couldn’t breathe,” he continued. “But I got up there and I just pitched. I was able to get that victory. It’s one of my top memories at Bard.”
To be specific, it stands today as Montecalvo’s No. 3 memory at Bard. The top two will be detailed later.
With Montecalvo as the catalyst, Bard won eight games in its first season, including a bizarre doubleheader in which they lost to Cazenovia, 26-1, in the first game, and then won the second game, 15-12. It’s a split that has become legend in Bard’s short baseball history.
“We had fight,” Montecalvo said of that 2013 team.
Of course, the 2013 schedule was built with a 14-man roster in mind. In 2014 the Raptors would move into the competitive Liberty League, facing a much tougher schedule with the new home baseball field still just a dream.
Bard went 3-26-1 in 2014 – winless in the Liberty League. But over the summer, trees started coming down in Annandale and construction of what was to be one of the finest baseball facilities in the Northeast had begun.
“The high school program I was in was going through a rebuilding process as well when I was there, so I was ready when I got here to grind it out every year, try to get better and hopefully see results,” Montecalvo said. “Some kids were complaining, but the field was promised, and I knew it was going to come.”
The field was dedicated that fall – called Honey Field in honor of Jim Chambers’ grandmother, Anne Cox Chambers – and Bard began hosting games in Annandale in the spring of 2015. The roster had grown to 19, and Montecalvo had developed into a fine player. The Raptors were still searching for their first Liberty League win.
They were 2-11 by the time they got to the University of Rochester in late March and lost the first game of a Liberty League doubleheader to the Yellowjackets, 12-4. Then Kahovec gave the ball to Montecalvo, with history once again on the line.
“I don’t think I’ve ever pitched better,” Montecalvo said. “It was freezing, but by the time I got out there, I didn’t feel any of it.”
Behind Montecalvo, Bard beat Rochester (Kahovec’s alma mater) 4-2 on another sunny, 25-degree day. He went 6 2/3 innings, yielding two runs on four hits and striking out three. He also went 1-for-5 at the plate with an RBI and a run scored. That’s his No. 2 memory at Bard.
Led by Montecalvo and a couple of great sophomores, Bard won 11 games in 2015, including six in the Liberty League.
Montecalvo batted .407 with 48 hits and 36 RBI. He was named All-Liberty League First Team, the American Baseball Coaches Association/Rawlings All-Region Second Team, and the d3baseball.com All-Region First Team, all at designated hitter.
This spring, his last in Annandale, Montecalvo is one of 34 players on the Bard roster. Some of the freshmen call him “Gramps.” He’s the only senior on the team, and the only member of the pioneering 2013 team to still be playing.
“I was always taught this old school way of playing baseball with a chip on my shoulder; almost like a hockey mentality,” Montecalvo said. “Control what you can control, and realize it’s baseball and you’ll always be humbled in some way. What’s success without failing?”
He still talks or texts with his father after every game. He still writes in notebooks, but most of his writing time for the last several months has been on his Senior Project, an epic fiction he expects to end in the 140- to 150-page range.
So what is his top memory at Bard?
“I took a writing workshop with Edie Meidav; my first interaction with a published, successful, acclaimed author,” Montecalvo remembered. Meidav has taught at Bard. “Well, they give out a crite sheet afterward – she looks at what you’ve written and offers feedback – and it said something like, ‘There’s real talent here.’ It made me realize I wasn’t just imagining this. That was real validation for me.”
He is a writer, after all.
