The youngest is me, summer of 1970, documenting my participation in the Jim Kaat Sports Camp. Of course that's the Twin Hall of Famer to my left. To my right is my camp counselor, whose name I for some reason remember, and not because it was Eldridge Turkenfreiter: Doug Johnson. The tallest, wearing the sweatshirt, is Jim Dimick, who died earlier this week in Northfield, where he had been the head baseball coach at St Olaf College from 1967 to 1994. He also assisted in football and basketball. If I remember right, Doug (my counselor) was the shortstop on St Olaf's baseball team and the quarterback of its football team. He would have been the one handing the ball off to the legendary Ole Gunderson, who, despite the passage of a half century, and only three seasons' worth of games played (freshmen weren't eligible for varsity competition), still holds the school record for career rushing yards. His son, Shane, was a baseball all-American for the Gophers.
Back to Dimick. I used to go to a lot of high school basketball games in the winter, and once, arriving at Sibley High School well before game time, I idled for awhile in front of the trophy case. I noticed that they had been the baseball champ of their conference almost every season through the first half of the 1960s. All the team photos were there, and I recognized the coach: Jim Dimick. Then, suddenly, no more championship photos after the midpoint of the decade. The school would have needed a new coach, because Dimick moved on to St Olaf in 1967, and that's when the Oles' run of conference baseball championships began—fourteen of them in Dimick's twenty-seven seasons.
I don't know how he did it. I don't think he was an aggressive recruiter. He knew baseball, for sure, and was also a good and patient teacher, but that wouldn't necessarily distinguish him from a million coaches whose teams won only fifty-five percent of their games. His obituary says he was "called to be a coach," and whatever intangibles that mystical phrase is meant to indicate must have applied in spades. I suppose that whoever wrote the obituary could have said "born to be a coach," which would have left out the undersense of having a Christian vocation, something Dimick claimed to possess. I took a class from him in the Phy Ed department, and he was a kind of clean raconteur, a story to illustrate every point, lots of corn pone, but to dislike him even a cynic in training such as myself would have to have been determined. I remember we had an assignment involving the plan for a baseball practice, and he wrote at the bottom of my paper, "Not enough batting practice!" To defend myself I would have said that, in my experience, if you can't hit you can't hit and no amount of practice is going to help you—probably the kind of can't-do attitude that is a bar to getting better. Dimick's players got better.
Comments