Don Freeman is on the move again.
The 64-year-old coach who led the rebirth of baseball at Clark College leaves this week for Germany to take over the Mainz Athletics. He will manage the club’s team in Germany’s top professional baseball league and also be responsible for its youth academy teams.
The move to Germany continues a career that has taken Freeman to Australia, South America and Europe to share his baseball knowledge and enthusiasm. Freeman was visiting Germany last summer as an envoy for Major League Baseball when he served as pitching coach for Germany’s national team in the European championships.
During that tournament, Freeman said he was offered several coaching jobs in Europe. He had planned to coach one more season at Clark, but the opportunity to manage such a large club was a challenge he couldn’t pass up.
At Clark, Brett Neffendorf, one of Freeman’s assistant coaches, has been promoted to head baseball coach.
“He’s a high-energy guy with lots of contacts in Washington,” Freeman said of Neffendorf.
Sounds a lot like Freeman himself, who over decades has established friendships around the world.
He coached USA Baseball under-16 national teams at two Pan American Games and two world Championships. In 2010, Freeman was the head coach for the USA Baseball women’s national team that finished third at the world championships.
“You meet so many great people anytime you go away to coach,” Freeman said.
Freeman will have about a month to prepare before the Bundesliga baseball season that starts in early March. In addition to coaching the Athletics team in the top professional league, Freeman will oversee a club that has high school and youth age-group teams.
He said he has seven assistant coaches, so the staff is busy on weekends when most of the games are played.
According to Freeman, who has made multiple trips to Germany to promote baseball, organized baseball has been played in Germany since just after World War II. The Mainz Athletics formed in 1989 and have played in either the top professional league or the second division.
Teams are allowed only three non-European players, Freeman said. And there are restrictions about how often Americans can pitch, play shortstop or catcher. Those are rules he embraces because to grow the sport, Germans need to play at a high level.
One of the three Americans on the Athletics this season will be Joel Johnson, an Olympia native who played for Freeman at Clark, is joining him to play shortstop for Mainz.
“That’s kind of neat,” Freeman said.
Freeman said the level of play in Germany’s top league is on par “with very, very good NCAA Division II (college) baseball.”
Freeman coached baseball and gymnastics at Prairie High School. In 2010 he retired from Prairie and began the process of building from scratch a Clark program that had folded following the 1992 season.
The Penguins went 11-29 in that first season. Last season, they finished atop their division before losing in the NWAC playoffs, finishing with 31 wins and 15 losses.
“That was pretty exciting,” Freeman said.
With his wife, Roxy, closing in on retirement from teaching physical education at Glenwood Heights Primary School, Freeman said he figured that 2015 might be his last at Clark anyway. The opportunity in Germany came about just as Freeman was planning to return to Vancouver for Clark’s 2014 fall season.
Freeman said his one disappointment from five season’s building Clark baseball is that too few Clark County high school players have joined the program. Then again, as his latest challenge reinforces, Freeman certainly appreciates the urge to leave home and experience something new.
