With Terps baseball, a higher calling

As the Terrapins baseball team heads into the heart of fall practice this week, much of its hopes for the season to come will rest upon the broad shoulders of Tim Kiene.

Those hopes sprouted more than 16 months ago when Kiene, now a sophomore first baseman, proved he's a man of his word.

Kiene had the rare opportunity to sign with his favorite MLB franchise when the phone rang at his Connecticut home in June 2010.

It was the Boston Red Sox. They wanted to pick Kiene, a three-time high school All-American, in the seventh round of the 2010 MLB Draft.

But Kiene had already verbally committed to play at this university, and he was set on keeping his promise. He turned down the Red Sox's offer, and his 30th-round selection by the Washington Nationals didn't change his mind either.

"Right when I turned down the Red Sox, I made my decision to come to Maryland," Kiene said. "I wanted to come here and make a difference. I wanted to make this program another winning program like it used to be."

Kiene's decision that summer afternoon was a pivotal moment for a program desperate to contend in the highly competitive ACC. He was the centerpiece of then-second year coach Erik Bakich's 2010 recruiting class, the first in program history to be ranked in the top 25 by Baseball America.

Bakich hoped Kiene — the son of former NHL player Chris Kiene — could bring a much-needed toughness to a team trying to learn how to win. Kiene had led his high school to three league championships and a regional championship, and was intent on bringing that winning mentality to a program that hadn't made the NCAA Tournament since 1971.

"While recruiting Tim, we learned a lot of things under the surface about him that separated him from a lot of players," said Dan Burton, the Terps' recruiting coordinator. "It was sort of like it was in Timmy's blood to come to a program like Maryland in a power conference, to help us turn this place into a national powerhouse."

Unfortunately for the Terps, Kiene's arrival didn't trigger an immediate increase in wins last season. Despite notching wins over several elite programs, the Terps ended the year in an all-too-familiar position: last place in the ACC.

And it hadn't helped that Kiene, a player Bakich hoped could fill the fourth slot in the lineup, struggled to produce early on. Kiene's batting average was well below .200 during the opening weeks of the season, and Bakich soon dropped his starting first baseman to seventh in the batting order.

"His statistics were worse than his performance [at the start of the season]," Bakich said. "He was hitting the ball and putting the ball in play fairly regularly, he just wasn't getting the hits to fall. So we kept playing him and continued to put him in the lineup because we knew there was a lot of potential there."

That decision ultimately paid off for Bakich. About halfway through the season, Kiene started proving why pro scouts left his high school games drooling. He hit .352 against ACC competition and finished the season with the sixth-highest inter-league batting average. Between April 2 and the Terps' last game on May 21, Kiene raised his average 161 points — from .118 to .279.

And while Bakich and his staff attribute Kiene's sudden emergence to their favorite trait, toughness, Kiene said he owed the turnaround to his teammates.

"Everybody was just there for me," he said. "We're a team, and if one guy's hurting or something's wrong with him, then we all pick him up. So that's what happened with me, and it paid off."

And it has continued to pay off. This summer, Kiene starred for the Newport Gulls of the New England Collegiate Baseball League, widely considered one of the premier summer collegiate baseball conferences in the country.

Through 37 games with the Gulls, including playoffs, Kiene hit .318 with 10 home runs and 31 RBIs. Those numbers earned him spots on the All-NECBL first team and Perfect Game USA's Summer-Collegiate All-American Team.