Published: July 03, 2008 11:27 pm            

Baseball takes ISU students north to Alaska

TERRE HAUTE — In his second consecutive summer of playing wood-bat baseball for the Alaska Goldpanners of Fairbanks, Terre Haute native Nick Ciolli doesn’t see many people from his hometown.

In fact, the Indiana State junior outfielder rarely runs into Midwesterners, let alone Hauteans, when he’s in Alaska.

But last weekend, Ciolli experienced a pleasant surprise.

Before the opener of the Goldpanners’ three-game home series against the Mat-Su Miners in the Alaska Baseball League (ABL), a Terre Haute resident — like Ciolli, a graduate of North High School — walked up to say hello.

It was Dale Long Jr., who combines with Aaron Watson of Farmersburg to broadcast Mat-Su games on the Internet this season.

Long and Watson, who alternate between play-by-play and color commentary during gamecasts and update the Miners’ Web site after games, are ISU students simply working a summer job … in Alaska.

“I thought it was pretty cool,” Ciolli said of the unexpected encounter.

The Goldpanners won two of the three nine-inning games by scores of 9-2 (Saturday) and 7-0 (Monday), while Mat-Su earned a 12-4 victory in Sunday’s clash.

“Nick hit the ball well,” Long mentioned. “He was on base a lot.”

Through Sunday, Ciolli was carrying a .373 batting average, second highest among regulars on the Goldpanners. He was 7 for 7 in stolen-base attempts while appearing in 13 of the team’s first 14 games.

“We’ve got a really good team,” Ciolli said of the Goldpanners (10-5 before Thursday night’s game at the Anchorage Bucs). “I’m starting to pick up again.”

Long and Watson don’t have statistics to back up their performances this season, but they believe they’re performing well in the booth.

A 2004 North graduate, Long has broadcast sporting events for ISU and Rose-Hulman teams on student radio stations in Terre Haute. But this is his first job of following a team on an almost day-to-day basis.

So far, he likes it.

“They just love the Miners up here [in and around the town of Palmer, Alaska],” said Long, who will return home next month and graduate from ISU in December with a degree in radio-TV-film.

“We usually get about 600, 700 fans for home games.”

Long, who did an internship with WTHI-TV last summer, learned about the Alaska opportunity from current WTHI sports anchorman Jamison Coyle, who did what Long is doing in Alaska back in 2005.

Long and Watson sent in resumés and got the jobs.

“It’s what I thought it would be,” said Long, who recently went through a stretch of 17 straight days of broadcasting a game. “I knew it was going to be tough. You’ve got to bring your A-game every day, even when you’re tired.”

For Watson, a 2005 graduate of North Central High School, this is his first broadcasting job of any kind. He’s also a radio-TV-film major ready to begin his senior year at ISU.

“I’d love to do TV [in the future] if I could,” said Watson, who arrived in Alaska on June 10. “But I want to do broadcasting either way.”

Long and Watson travel with the Miners on a bus to road games. The trip from Palmer to Fairbanks, for example, takes about seven hours.

“You see a lot of moose up here, which is cool,” Watson said.

Long and Watson live with a host family just outside of Palmer. When Watson gets some free time away from baseball, which doesn’t happen often, he plans to go fishing and climb a trail on one of the nearby mountains.

“If you like the outdoors, you’d fit in up here,” Ciolli noted. “Fishing and sightseeing are about your only options [for non-baseball activities].”

One adjustment that Midwesterners must make in Alaska is dealing with 24-hour daylight in the summer. The host family for Long and Watson helped make sleeping easier during light nights by putting tin foil and curtains over the windows.

“You can stay up a lot later because you don’t realize how late it is,” Watson pointed out.

Weather-wise, Long and Watson aren’t complaining about temperatures that usually hover in the 60s or 70s in Palmer, located in the southern part of Alaska.

They aren’t complaining about this once-in-a-lifetime experience either.

“This is what I wanted,” Long emphasized. “I want to do this [broadcasting] for a career.”

To listen to Mat-Su gamecasts on the Internet, go to http://www.matsuminers.org/console.htm and find the appropriate link.

The ABL season will end in early August, then Ciolli’s Goldpanners hope to play in a tournament in the contiguous United States.

        

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