EVERETT — The old brick building teems with youthful energy.
Bodies jump, pull, lift, throw, swing, run, stretch. There’s constant motion, no standing around. Sweat beads brows, drenches T-shirts.
On one side of the room, guys grab rubber straps attached to posts and pull forcefully as they spring onto rubber cushions several feet away. On the other side of the room, several pair of guys standing five feet apart toss 35-pound weight plates back and forth, never once dropping them.
In between all this, young men in three batting cages are hitting off tees into screens — the sweet sounds of spring, the sweet sounds of baseball.
Then someone shouts, “Clear the track,” and before you can say Carl Lewis, a tall, lean, broad-shouldered lad comes sprinting down a 60-foot rubberized runway.
Somehow, everyone in the room hears the warning — above the pounding music, above the grunting, above the cracking of bats hitting balls — and nobody gets run down.
It’s just another day of training for the Everett Community College baseball team. Head coach Levi Lacey stands watching all of the activity, a little smile on his face, a twinkle in his eye. “Pretty neat, huh?” he says. Pretty neat, indeed.
There can’t be many community college baseball teams in the country that have a facility like the one the Trojans moved into near downtown Everett several months ago.
The Trojans can do everything here they need to do to get in shape, plus the hitters can get in their swings and the pitchers can get in their bullpen work with rollaway mounds and two pitching lanes.
Not only that, but players can get treatment for injuries in another part of the building. Basically, everything they need is under one roof.
The man who runs the Trojan conditioning program is Lance Miller, a former Marine who leased this building to house his own Engineered Sports Therapy business. He then teamed with Lacey who was looking for a space where he could train his Laces Baseball Academy teams, as well as his EvCC squad.
Before they moved into the new digs, EvCC players had to drive to different locations around town to get their work done. They’d do their weight lifting in a downtown facility, do their hitting at the Rage Cage in south Everett, and if they were rehabbing an injury, they’d come back into town to see a physical therapist.
That required quite a bit of driving. And, as they were trying to squeeze several activities into schedules that included school and sometimes a job, it wasn’t unusual for a player to get pulled over for going too fast.
“They got a lot of speeding tickets trying to beat the rush-hour traffic,” said assistant coach John Jackson. Now, with the new setup, the Trojans won’t be contributing to city revenues this year.
“No more tickets,” Lacey beamed. But plenty of hard, fit bodies.
“This is the best conditioned team we’ve ever had,” said Lacey, who re-started the EvCC baseball program nine years ago and has had several players signed to professional contracts.
In previous years, the Trojans didn’t have the space either to lift or hit together as a team, so they would do it in groups of 6 or 8 spread over several hours. Now they can bring everyone together and complete their work in a couple of hours.
“It allows them time to get their studies done in the evening and put in a little extra work at their job if they have one,” Lacey said.
Having everyone under the same roof has been a blessing for Miller, because he can watch players coming off injuries perform drills and immediately assess where they are in their progress.
Lacey believes team camaraderie and work habits have also improved with everyone in the same room pushing one another. “I think it’s created a lot of team unity,” he said.
And, it’s easier on the pocketbook.
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