My name is Mike Dietz and I am a senior at Baruch College located in New York City. This is my second year on the team after playing my first two seasons at SUNY Plattsburgh. I was born and raised in Queens, which was the main reason for me changing schools to come back home.
I loved my experience at Plattsburgh; winning two SUNYAC championships and winning an NCAA tournament game will stay with me forever. I’m still close with all the players and the coaches; I wish them nothing but the best! I still follow the team and will always consider myself a part of the Plattsburgh family.
I’ve had many interesting experiences playing basketball. I played my high school basketball at Archbishop Molloy in Jamaica, Queens. I played for Hall-of-Fame coach Jack Curran and many of our games were against future NCAA & NBA players such as Rudy Gay and Mario Chalmers. It was also nice playing alongside 2008 SEC Tournament MVP Sundiata Gaines (Georgia). We had a very strong team all those years, which was needed because the competition in the CHSAA is unmatched by any high school conference in the country.
I feel I should offer some insight on Baruch College and the CUNYAC (conference) as a whole. The CUNYAC is unlike any other conference in the country in my opinion. Unlike other conferences where road games involve jumping on a bus and traveling for at least an hour (I hated the bus trips at Plattsburgh), the CUNYAC games are closer in proximity. Tomorrow, we play in Brooklyn against Medgar Evers, which will be a 20-minute bus ride for some, while others without classes Tuesday afternoon will hop on the subway. That’s right, we take the subway to our games!
No conference game is further than 30 minutes away, and that’s when we have to go to the College of Staten Island every other year. There will be several instances when our whole team will take the subway to our games. It is very different than your normal D3 team.
Also, Baruch is a commuter school with no dorms, so everyone lives on their own. This forces us to have to deal with many obstacles not seen at your regular D3 programs. Each player has to travel to school everyday for practice, and for me that is 45 minutes on the R train. We have players coming from all five boroughs (Queens, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx and Staten Island for you people not familiar with the city), including Westchester County and nearby New Jersey.
Our season this year has had its up and downs losing two very heart-breaking games. We are 3-2 after beating Polytechnic, Immaculata, and Stevens Tech this past Sunday. Our two losses are to NYU and Farmingdale (OT Loss), and both were close games right down to the wire.
The Farmingdale game in particular is a heart-breaker because we had a 24 point lead in the first half before finally losing the lead in overtime. It was a crushing blow because we played so well in the first half, and we had the lead the entire game until the last 15 seconds when they finally tied it up. We had nothing left in overtime as we eventually lost by seven. We start our conference play tomorrow (Tuesday) versus Medgar Evers.
The 2008 Baruch Bearcats can be best described as what a team is supposed to be. If you were a coach, you would love coaching this group of guys. It really is a pleasure to play on this team because everyone is involved and everyone truly cares for one another. It is a selfless group, which is rare nowadays.
I’ll keep everyone updated on our team’s progress as we try and build on our big road win at Stevens Tech. Hopefully, I’ll have some good stories from our subway journeys. You can keep track of our team at www.BaruchAthletics.com, where our scores and statistics are always updated on the website before I’m done showering!
Talk to you soon,
Mike Dietz