March 29, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

Seward excels in baseball, track, school> Senior defends 800-meter EM title today

Armed with a competitive streak as wide as the six towns which make up Community School District 4, and a drive to excel at everything, Davey Seward is completing an unusual spring – pitching, running track and writing his valedictorian speech for his June 6 graduation.

“Some days, it’s absolutely crazy,” he said. “I go home and I haven’t been to bed before 12 in over a month.

“So that gets kind of rough after a while, but I’d get bored if I didn’t have a lot of stuff to do,” Seward said. “Especially at the end of your senior year, you need reasons to come to school. It’s tough to get up in the morning.”

Seward’s resume is impressive. He has a 98.5 grade point average at Sumner High School in East Sullivan. He missed one question on the Scholastic Aptitude Test’s math section. He is the National Honor Society’s vice president, an honorary member of student council, and he wrote a paper on the cadmium levels found in skate livers while working on a grant-funded internship at Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratories last summer.

The paper, which finished second at a regional science symposium for high school students from Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, earned him an all-expenses paid trip to the National Science Symposium in San Diego, Calif., this spring.

“The other kids at school just expect him to win all the awards just because he gets so many awards,” track coach Chuck Whitney said. “It’s like they believe he’s going to be prom king, he’s going to be state champion and he’s going to win the Heisman.”

The unusual case of Seward competing in two varsity sports became a reality when his coaches agreed to allow him to play baseball and run outdoor track if he agreed to only pitch for Sumner’s baseball team.

No missing track practices, no missing meets, and he couldn’t play baseball if there were any objections from his track teammates.

Those barriers cleared, the Sumner senior ran into another one – the outfield fence.

It seems the pitching agreement didn’t hold up.

“He’s not usually on my bench, he’s usually playing,” baseball coach Dana Smith explained. “We needed some arms and [the baseball team] said `great, let him come on out.’ It’s not like he’s taking someone’s job. We graduated a lot of seniors last year, and we have a lot of new faces.”

Answering the call of competition, Seward found himself in the outfield one game.

“[The game was at GSA], the bases were loaded and there were two outs, and I was playing right field and the guy clocked one,” Seward said. “I was just watching the ball, and I was running at full speed.

“And just before I jumped, I thought to myself `I didn’t think right field went out this far,” he said. “My back hit the top of the fence, and I got the wind knocked out of me, but I wound up catching it.”

It didn’t take long for word to get around the school of about 350 students of Seward’s catch.

“All these kids were talking about it, and [baseball coach Dana Smith] said to me, “All I could think of was `Chuck is going to kill me,” Whitney said with a laugh. “I told him that we’d agreed to pitch and not play the outfield, and Davey was very apologetic.

“I don’t think [Seward] looks on baseball as a contact sport, and where he would think `what could happen to me in the outfield.’ ” Whitney said. “I just respect him so much that I think he deserves it.”

Seward is the defending Eastern Maine 800-meter champion, and he will attempt to defend that title today in the regional Class C outdoor track meet at Hampden Academy.

Winning that race a year ago reveals a lot about what makes Seward tick.

“He’s up against Aaron Stupakewicz of PCHS, and he was ranked first,” begins teammate Emil Thomann, himself the defending 400-meter state champion. “Every meet Davey goes into, he never feels quite great…

“I almost threw up at the start of that race, at the starting line I could feel it,” Seward interrupts.

“And he said, `I don’t know about today, guys, I’m going to go and blow up,”‘ Thomann recalled. “That second lap, he was behind like by 50 meters, and we have the videotape, and you can hear his mom saying `he’s not going to get it, he’s not going to get it.”‘

“So the last 100 meters, Davey turns it up to this obscene level you’ve never seen,” Thomann said.

“I remember the feeling too, it was like nothing I’d ever felt before,” Seward said, taking over the story. “It was like the world slowed down and I was in fast forward.”

“Davey just lowered his head and that was it, and that’s Davey,” Thomann said. “If things look impossible, he finds a way.”

Which is exactly the reason he is trying his hand at baseball this spring, after three years away from the game which he played as a Little Leaguer.

“When I started coming up, everyone would say stuff to me like `Oh, you’re running track. Why didn’t you play baseball?,’ ” recalled the Williams College-bound senior.

“And I hated saying I wasn’t any good at it, so I would say it was just one of those choices,” Seward said. “I could see it in their eyes, `He’s just not any good at it.’ That’s always been my ultimate motivation.”

Strangely enough, his track coaches didn’t know what to do with him his freshman year.

“When he started as a freshman, he was good at everything but he wasn’t great, it was very frustrating,” Whitney said. “We didn’t even think he was going to make it to the regional championship because we couldn’t get him to qualify.

“He’s not terrific at anything, he’s just a great athlete,” Whitney said.


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