Smith throws away the pigskin

If you ever caught Kevan Smith crouching between taking reps at quarterback, chances are it… If you ever caught Kevan Smith crouching between taking reps at quarterback, chances are it wasn’t because he was tired. He might have just been practicing his other position. ‘He told me during football practices that he would squat down between plays to practice his catching,’ said Walt Smith, Kevan’s dad. ‘I don’t think he ever gave up the opportunity that he might be able to play baseball.’ Now Kevan doesn’t crouch between reps, but during them. After finishing last football season as Pitt’s third-string quarterback, his third year with the team, Smith decided his future wasn’t under center but behind the plate. He left the Pitt football team in January and will play this spring as one of Pitt baseball’s catchers. It’s an intriguing move on the surface, considering Smith was once Pitt’s starting quarterback with a cannon-arm and is a solid 6 feet 3 inches, 225 pounds of athletic potential with possibly two more years to play. What could be more interesting, though, is why Smith, a once-touted catcher who batted .450 or better in four years of high school, would have signed with Pitt to play quarterback in the first place ‘mdash; he was a prospect who drew scouts from six Major League Baseball clubs, and only played 12 games of football in his final two high school seasons. Or how Pitt even discovered his football potential after a wrist injury shortened his junior-year football season to two games. ‘I went to a couple different camps, one at Penn State and one here, and I guess they liked what they saw, and they offered me,’ said Smith. ‘They were taking a lot of quarterbacks … and I wasn’t really getting recruited by any baseball schools, which was kind of odd to me, but I talked with my dad about it and I knew that if I didn’t accept that offer that it might slip out of my fingers.’ Walt saw that eagerness come through in his son, who he’d seen star through every level of baseball and thought would pursue baseball in the future. ‘Football came along in his senior year when he went to a couple showcases and workouts, and that’s when things started blossoming,’ said Walt. ‘It took over his life for six to eight months, and I guess he felt like the opportunity with football was too good to pass up.’ Smith was a talented quarterback. As a senior, he threw for 1,538 yards and eight touchdowns for a 1-9 Seneca Valley team, and he was rated as one of the top 50 quarterbacks in the country by Scout.com. So his decision to follow football wasn’t outrageous when he signed his letter of intent in February 2006. But, he wanted to keep the idea of a baseball future alive. That meant one of two possibilities: try to play both football and baseball at Pitt, which Smith initially wanted to do, or be drafted high enough by an MLB club and be offered a contract juicier than playing college football and getting a free education. The latter might not have surprised Pitt baseball coach Joe Jordano, who was also recruiting Smith at the time. ‘He was a strong player,’ said Jordano. ‘I remember specifically sitting up in the press box, and after a game I spoke with his baseball coaches and said, ‘That kid’s going to be something special.’ And that’s when they had mentioned that he seemed to be leaning towards football.’ Jordano couldn’t compete with football. Pitt football can give out 85 full scholarships per year. Pitt baseball can give out 11.7 with a 33-player roster. Productive two-sport athletes are considerably rare at the NCAA Division I level, both because of the time and work commitment necessary for just one sport and because college coaches aren’t keen on sharing their players. But Smith was a rare athlete, and his senior baseball season statistics weren’t coincidence: a .517 batting average, five home runs, 20 RBI and 14 runners picked off in 20 games. Smith, who was then immersed in baseball through the spring, drew scouts from the Boston Red Sox, Cleveland Indians, Toronto Blue Jays and the Pittsburgh Pirates, who even followed him to road games. As close as the scouts got with Smith, though, he saw them back away upon mention of the ‘C’ word ‘mdash; college. ‘The word around the recruiting borough was that my education was important to me,’ said Smith, ‘and if they got me as a pick, the chance wasn’t real high for me to sign because of the whole football scholarship. ‘I was a little nervous because as much as I wanted to get drafted my education was real important to me,’ he added. ‘And I tried not to show that to the MLB scouts, because I didn’t want to limit my opportunities with that part of it.’ So with no guarantees from anybody in the MLB and his mind set on college, Smith still watched the amateur draft in early June of 2006. ‘I remember watching the MLB draft, and I was so gung-ho about going to Pitt to play football and I’m like, ‘I’m about to start my education here in two weeks and I’m watching the draft to find out if I’m going to be sent down south somewhere [to play minor league baseball],” said Smith. Fifty rounds passed, though, and Smith’s name didn’t appear on any team’s draft list. So it was Pitt football for him. He joined the team at quarterback and redshirted his freshman year, put on some muscle and showed a heap of promise, often labeled as Pitt’s strongest arm. In the spring of 2007, Smith and current starter Bill Stull jockeyed for the starting job. Though Stull won it out of training camp the next August, Smith started three games when Stull was lost for the season with a thumb injury in Pitt’s opener. He threw for 202 yards in the next game against Grambling State, and started at Michigan State and at home against Connecticut. He was eventually passed over, though, for highly recruited freshman Pat Bostick. And when Stull came back healthy for the 2008 season, Smith only played two series all year, and will be one of five Pitt quarterbacks competing for time next season. The Pitt coaching staff must have seen the quarterback clog, because in the weeks leading up to the Sun Bowl, they started asking Smith to learn tight end, fullback and linebacker. ‘I was floating around, seeing what [other positions] I would like, but I felt real out of my element,’ said Smith. ‘Nothing felt right, and that’s when I really started thinking about baseball.’ That traveled quickly to Jordano from Pitt outfielder Zach Duggan, Smith’s neighbor and teammate growing up. ‘Right after the Sun Bowl there was a little bit of dialogue between Zach and I,’ said Jordano, ‘and one thing led to another, and I approached the football people to get their permission to converse [with Smith]. Then we pursued it from there.’ Smith says Duggan’s been on him to play baseball since they both came to Pitt, but that he never seriously considered doing it until after this football season, when he felt like his opportunity to play quarterback, the only football position he’s ever played, had passed. ‘When coach Jordano approached me it sent a light bulb off in the back of my head,’ said Smith. ‘So I thought maybe this was my calling, this was my shot to go back to baseball. As much as I love football, I do think baseball is where my heart is and where I should be.’ He hasn’t been in baseball for years, though, and after talking with his family, weighing his options and finally making the choice to leave football and play for Jordano, he has to make up for lost time. Smith says he shows up for baseball practice an hour early and stays an hour late, works with first-year catching coach Danny Lopaze and takes plenty of extra swings in the batting cage. ‘We finally got Kevan committed to playing baseball and he kind of jumped right into it,’ said Jordano. ‘We got some individual work in and started seeing how it was going to come back to him.’ Smith says it’s all coming back, albeit slowly, and that not playing for so long helped him get rid of some of his bad habits he never had to confront in high school. He’s working on hitting live pitches and throwing a baseball, which throwing a football for three years definitely helped. ‘I was a little rusty, but it’s amazing how quick that feeling comes back, the passion and love I had for the sport,’ said Smith. ‘I was thinking that my arm was going to be real sore in the beginning and that it was going to be real hard for me to adjust to throwing a baseball, but I think football overall just got me bigger and stronger.’ Jordano says he can see Smith contributing at catcher this season, the first of his three he’ll have with the baseball team. The two years he played football, not counting the redshirt year that carries over, don’t count toward his baseball eligibility. So Smith, who will still have his full football scholarship through the end of the summer term, plans on taking a full course load in the summer so he can graduate with his business degree next December. He’ll then have two years to play baseball while working to get his Master of Business Administration at Pitt, for which he can apply for separate graduate student-athlete scholarships. So even though it took three years in Division I football, Smith finally sees his future in the sport he believes he was born to play. ‘I’m looking at it like I was meant to get an education ‘mdash; I was meant to get that first and that’s why football came into my life,’ said Smith. ‘I really think if football wasn’t there that I would have gotten drafted, and that I’d be somewhere right now in the mix [of professional baseball] and I’d be without an education. Now I only need 25 more credits, and now I finally get to play baseball. It’s like it was meant to be.’