For the Love of the Game: SNU Baseball Team Demonstrates Healthy Sportsmanship

One win, one tie, and 265 losses over 35 years; since the SNU baseball team was first established, this has been its record. Before it achieved its first victory in 2004, the record was even worse, with one tie and 199 losses. Such a devastating record makes one wonder if they don’t get tired of losing all the time.

It is no wonder that the SNU baseball team is so bad. SNU does not specifically recruit students with special baseball talent, unlike other schools like Yonsei or Korea University that have an admission quota for students with special sports talent. They are not experienced in baseball either: many of the team members have never even played baseball before college. Moreover, as the SNU team members do not pursue careers in baseball, the sport for them is truly a pastime. Unlike many college teams that put baseball before their classes, the SNU team members study hard for their classes. As a result, they can’t practice as much as the others.

However, this doesn’t mean that they do not take baseball seriously. Practice hours are set for 3 hours, 6 days a week. With the effort they put in to academic classes, such a practice schedule is not easy. All members are required to participate in practice on Tuesdays, when they have internal practice games, and on Saturdays, when they play against other teams.

Recently, there was an event that greatly raised the team spirit: a prominent new coach came to lead the team last year. LEE Kwang-hwan, a retired professional baseball league coach who led the OB Bears, LG Twins, Hanhwa Eagles, and Nexen Heroes, took the position as head coach of the SNU baseball team. How did a prominent professional league coach come to decide to lead an amateur college baseball team? Before Mr. Lee accepted the position as coach for SNU, he was the head of “Baseball Academy,” which is an education program for baseball coaches, the headquarters of which happen to be located on the main campus of SNU.

With Mr. Lee becoming coach, the team is flourishing. The number of members has doubled, and they are more enthusiastically participating in practice. Before this May, the team didn’t even have a coach, with the older members teaching the younger ones without a particular system. “Before Mr. Lee came, even if we wanted to practice, we couldn’t, if an experienced member were not present. Now that Mr. Lee is always here to coach us, we can maintain an organized training system,” says MIN Hyun-ki, the team’s captain. Inspired, members are excited that they might even record a victory in the national college baseball league for the second time in history this season.

However, Mr, Lee says a second victory is not yet possible. “It is easier for a professional team to win 10 times in a row in the professional league than for the SNU team to win a single game in the college league,” he says. Actually, he says that winning is not the highest priority. Because the SNU team is not a place for training professional athletes, he focuses on creating an atmosphere in which the members can enjoy playing baseball. His ultimate goal is to make true team players out of the team members by teaching them how to cooperate with others. “I want to make a team so respected that whatever path the members may take in the future, they will be recognized just by being a former SNU baseball man, like Tokyo, Keio, and Waseda University baseball team members are in Japan,” says Mr. Lee. Let the SNU baseball team be a reminder for sport lovers that sportsmanship is not about winning.

Written by KIM Jaeseung, SNU English Editor, brainophone@naver.com   ?
Reviewed by Eli Park Sorensen, SNU Professor of Liberal Studies
Proofread by Brett Johnson, SNU English Editor