@MarkKnudson41
I never got the chance to play for Tom Petroff. I have many good friends who did. It’s unanimous. I missed out.
Petroff – the legendary baseball coach at the University of Northern Colorado – passed away this week at the age of 95 at his home in Pennsylvania. There’s a good chance he was watching a baseball game in his final hours.
For 15 seasons from 1970 through 1985 Petroff led the most successful Division I college baseball program in Colorado history. The Bears went to six NCAA regionals during that time, and advanced to the College World Series in 1974. If there was a Mount Rushmore for College Baseball coaches in our state, Petroff would be up there with the likes of Pete Butler, Sam Suplizio and Irv Brown.
I did have the opportunity to play for the man they called “Petey” but I skipped it. Sometimes I regret that.
Following my senior year of High School I was deciding between offers from UNC and Colorado State. Having picked a June day for my father and I to visit both campuses, we made an appointment with Petroff. When we arrived, he was no where to be found. We waited almost an hour before leaving to go to Fort Collins.
I ultimately chose to go to CSU not just because of baseball (then under the leadership of Petroff protégé Tom Wheeler) but largely because the allure of being in the Western Athletic Conference while also working in the school’s sports information department. Nothing against UNC, but for me, CSU was too much to pass up.
After I committed to CSU, an agitated Petroff called, explaining that he’d been called into a last minute meeting with school administrators that day and had left explicit directions with the athletic department secretary to explain his absence to me and my father, and to ask us to return in an hour.
Needless to say, we never got that message. But Petroff never forgot about it. In fact, I think he tried to have the secretary fired. In the years that followed, especially during off season’s when several of us who were preparing for spring training would meet at Butler Hancock gym for pre-dawn workouts with his current UNC team, the coach would bring up the subject of the secretary.
“That damn secretary,” he’d scowl. “If you’d come to UNC we’d have gone back to (the College World Series) Omaha.” I guarantee he said that to me 50 times over the years if he said it once.
It ultimately didn’t matter that I became a Ram instead of a Bear. Part of what made Tom Petroff special was his willingness to coach and mentor any player that he thought would really listen and benefit from what he had to teach. He specialized in teaching hitting, but we had numerous talks about pitching too, including many discussions that included my mentor, the late great Bus Campbell – whom Petroff convinced to come and coach at UNC during his final seasons in Greeley.
After he left UNC, Petroff spent time at the University of Iowa and even with the Detroit Tigers, teaching minor leaguers what amounted to an analytical approach to hitting some three decades before it became the norm. He was ahead of his time.
The last time many of us saw Tom was at the annual Colorado High School Coaches Clinic in January of 2020 – a few weeks before the COVID shutdown. At age 92 he looked great and was as enthusiastic about teaching hitting as ever. And when we got a private moment, guess what he talked about?
“That damn secretary.”
RIP Coach.