Vermont gets AE baseball tourney Decision disappoints Maine staff

ORONO – There was a hint of baseball nostalgia at Mahaney Diamond in May when the University of Maine played host to the 2002 America East Baseball Championship.

The feeling will be short-lived, as the conference announced Tuesday that Vermont has been selected to hold the tournament next year.

The Catamounts will host the baseball championship for the first time in school history. The four-team, double-elimination event will be played at 4,400-seat Centennial Field in Burlington, home of a Montreal Expos’ single-A club.

The facility also is Vermont’s home ballpark.

The news was disappointing to the folks at UMaine, where the three-day event attracted an average of 699 fans per session.

“I was disappointed, because there’s a part of me that would really like to see the tournament here,” said Black Bears coach Paul Kostacopoulos.

“I can honestly say in my experience here that was by far the best run tournament that I’ve been involved with, and it’s not because we won. We had a great atmosphere,” he said.

While the UMaine faithful might want to cry foul, especially after the Bears won the America East title and advanced to the NCAA Tournament, the decision wasn’t made out of jealousy.

The America East Committee on Championships, which is made up of one athletics administrator from each league school, has adopted a new philosophy about the baseball championship.

“The championships committee has pretty much gone ahead and recommended that they rotate the baseball championship,” said UMaine interim athletics director Paul Bubb, who explained the league’s baseball coaches were split in making a recommendation to the committee for a tourney site.

Previously, the conference had based its decision largely on the quality of the facility.

“We finally got a chance to host it, did a good job and then all of a sudden the recommendation is to rotate it,” said Bubb, who lauded UMaine’s staff and fans for making this year’s event a success.

In spite of the development, UMaine is still looking into the possibility of playing some postseason baseball at Mahaney Diamond.

“Paul [Kostacopoulos] and I have talked about the fact we want to give real serious consideration to bidding for an NCAA Regional site,” Bubb said. “We’re going to watch very carefully and see if we can put something together.”

This spring, no team from the Northeast submitted a bid to host one of the 16 Regionals. However, if UMaine can maintain its status as the team to beat in America East, it could receive serious consideration.

America East also chose Stony Brook as the softball host and Binghamton as the site of the golf competition for 2003.

UM makes football staff changes

The University of Maine football team has promoted assistant coach Jeff Cole and hired Robb Smith as the defensive backs coach.

Cole spent the last three seasons as a part-time assistant for coach Jack Cosgrove’s Black Bears. Now that he has attained full-time status, Cole will coach running backs, tight ends and serve as special teams coordinator.

Cole’s responsibilities had included the wide receivers and tight ends the last two seasons.

Smith joins the staff under defensive coordinator Rich Nagy, for whom he played at Allegheny College and with whom he coached at Fordham in 1998. Smith is coming off a two-year stint at Iowa, where former UMaine head coach Kirk Ferentz is the head man.

Assistant Jeff Comissiong also has changed duties, moving from running backs coach to the defensive line.