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A Historic Face Lift For Black College Baseball
Tuskegee University Returns Home Games to Campus
Many of the happiest days of my life are moments spent on a baseball diamond. Mostly sandlots: sometimes cow pastures turned into a ball field for Sunday baseball outings, some with meticulously kept lawns, and some in the oldest minor league ballpark in America, Luther Williams Field, in Macon, Georgia.
At least 365 of those happy days were spent on Washington Field, essentially a sandlot, on Tuskegee University’s campus. In the early 1970s, I patrolled all three outfield positions for the Golden Tigers, ending my collegiate career with a .1000 fielding percentage and still bearing the scar from a strawberry on the left hip I earned performing a fadeaway slide on the hard surface around home plate.
Like me, Reggie Hollins, Head Baseball Coach at Tuskegee, played home games during his collegiate career at the field named for the university’s first head baseball coach, James Washington, the brother of the school’s celebrated first principal Booker T. Washington.
In 2011, Hollins’ first year as an assistant baseball coach at Tuskegee, the university played its last home game at Washington Field. The playing surface had become so deplorable from tailgaters using it during the annual fall homecoming football game. The school opted to schedule…
