Former Lancer coach, Sizemore, to manage Youngstown Express
By Steve Ames

Bill Sizemore

Special to the T.O.A.

Bill Sizemore, a former Thousand Oaks High School head baseball coach and currently a Los Cerritos Middle School physical education teacher and pitching coach at Moorpark High, likes coaching baseball, but the idea of player development may be even more appealing. This summer he will work with the Youngstown Express in Ohio as manager of a team of college students that play in the Great Lakes Summer Collegiate League.

It’s not unusual for him to work in summer baseball. He was pitching coach with the Utica Blue Sox, when the rookie level Florida Marlins team was in the New York-Penn League. He didn’t coach last summer.

"With the turnover in the Marlins organization, I found myself with a summer off," he said. "This position came available...I knew some people back there and ended up with a job."

The league is supported and sponsored by the NCAA and Major League Baseball. Teams in the league, made up of kids from all over the country, play more than 30 games.

"It’s a wood bat league so it’s going to be very much like professional baseball," Sizemore said.

While he was at Cal State Stanislaus, Sizemore played in the first-ever NCAA Division III College World Series hosted in Marietta, Ohio. One of the players who had just graduated from Marietta College was Jim Tracy, now manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

"His son, Brian, is going to be on our club back there this summer," Sizemore said. "He’s a red shirt freshman at UC Santa Barbara. He lives in Claremont.

"He was down throwing in the bullpen with his dad at Claremont College. My former roommate at Stanislaus is the head coach there. He saw him and said, ‘You’ve got to get this guy, he’s pretty good.’ My assistant who’s going to be back there also got to see him. So we signed him. That’s baseball."

Other players include two who played high school baseball at Thousand Oaks: Ian Corso, sophomore first baseman at Modesto Junior College, and Greg May, freshman pitcher who plays for Claremont-Mudd-Scripps.

He said that he wants to manage a winning team, but the No. 1 job is that when a player returns to his college campus in September, they can say they are better now than when they left. "That’s what it’s all about."

Sizemore said he likes to coach a winning team, but he is not going to put winning ahead of player development.

"I just don’t think that’s right or healthy," he said. "I’ve seen it all too often."

He’s happy that Moorpark High head coach Scott Fullerton asked him to be an assistant coach this season.

According to Sizemore, Fullerton said, "‘I just want you to come in and give me your perspective of what you see about our program,’ because of the time I’ve been coaching.

"I say, ‘Well, it’s my experience.’ That’s just another way of saying, ‘your older, you’ve been around a long time.’ So, it’s fun to be able to look at that and give him that perspective and see what we do."

Sizemore, who coached the Thousand Oaks Jammers, a team of local high school players that went 28-3 during the fall 2002, said that he enjoys all the levels of baseball and each for different reasons.

"When I was coaching at T.O. it was fun because I had a very competent staff in Rod Stillwell, Scott Mastroianni, Joe Garcia and Ed Kitchen. They were so good at what they did (that) it allowed me just to focus on the pitchers, and we had some pretty good pitchers there. From that aspect, it’s fun."

Sizemore said he enjoys the collegiate level because the players "have a little bit more talent and that’s fun to work with" and "at the professional level, I just enjoy the atmosphere of professional baseball."

When working at the professional level he goes to the ballpark everyday, getting there at 11 a.m. for a 7 p.m. game.

"I like it all. I’m just a baseball junkie. I always try to keep in perspective that I’m there to help the kids get better."