TALLADEGA – East Central Alabama has been known for fielding quality high school baseball teams for some time. Will Ramos, new baseball coach at Talladega College, hopes the same will be said of his collegiate squad before long.
Ramos, who hails from Puerto Rico, was hired at the first of July and didn’t waste any time recruiting players.
“I’ve got a team already,” he said Thursday. “Right now I’m working on getting all the paperwork ready, but right now we’ve got about 30 guys committed to playing here. We’re expecting a roster of 45 guys this year, the first year.”
In addition to recruiting players from his native country, Ramos said guys from Missouri, Texas, Florida, Maryland, Virginia, Georgia and Venezuela will be attending classes and playing baseball at TC in 2009.
So how does a coach sign so many players from such diverse places so quickly? Well, Ramos has another job that helps him with that a bit.
“I still am an associate scout for the Cleveland Indians,” Ramos said. “I’m working with the Cleveland Indians until December.”
While Ramos has signed players from all over the country and beyond, he hasn’t forgotten those people closest to the school. Two of Talladega’s own will wear the Tornadoes’ uniform this spring, and Ramos said they wouldn’t be the last players from the area to play at TC.
“I want to recruit players from the area,” he said. “I will be strong in recruiting players from Talladega. I know there are very good, talented players here. I have two guys from Talladega who are going to play here this year, possibly as starters.
“That is something that I want the student athletes – especially the baseball players – to look at Talladega College as a possibility for them to come play baseball.”
Ramos attended high school and community college in Puerto Rico before playing professionally for a short time.
“I played all my life shortstop and maybe third base now and then all the way through college,” Ramos said. “When I got to college they moved me to center field and I liked it and I was pretty good so I stayed there. I was a good hitter. In my college career I had an average of.401. I still have the record for stealing bases.”
After the short stint with professional baseball, Ramos then served as an assistant coach at a community college in his native country before moving to the states to take a similar job at Missouri Southern State University. After a total of eight years as an assistant, Ramos started looking for a job as a head coach, which he found at Talladega College.
“This has always been my dream,” Ramos said. “I was a finalist for three other jobs when I saw the advertisement for this job. One of the things that attracted me to the job is that everybody is new. I liked that I would be able to come here and build my program from scratch. That was something that was kind of unique compared to the other jobs.
“The other jobs already had a program; they just needed a coach. This one they need everything. They need players, they need a coach, they need equipment, they need to fix the field. The entire athletic department is new so I thought it was a good opportunity to learn every phase of building a baseball team. Not only by knowing about baseball and recruiting and knowing the game of baseball, but also it will allow me to learn about the administration part, the process of building an athletic program.”
While Ramos is excited about starting the program from scratch, he also admitted the task wouldn’t be easy.
“It’s gonna be hard,” he said. “It’s harder than having a team right there with you. I know that I can do this job and I know that they’ll need somebody special to do it. I know that it will be hard. We’re working very hard as an athletic department, but I think that it will pay off. We’re all going to look back, as a college, as a community, and we’re going to feel good about what we did.”
