The 2022 FCBL Hall of Fame Ceremony is filled with Silver Knights, including the entire 2011 Nashua team. (Courtesy photo)

In November of 2010, Nashua’s B.J. Neverett, then the head baseball coach at Nashua South and teacher at Fairgrounds Middle School, got a message in his school mailbox to call someone named Tim Bawmann.

He had no idea who Bawmann, then the president of the Lowell Spinners minor league baseball team, was.

“I called him, and he said ‘Can you come down to Lowell?,’ ” Neverett said this week from his Florida home. When Bawmann told him who he was, his reaction was, “What does he want me for?”

Two days later, Neverett, went down to meet with Bawmann in his Lelacheur Park offices, and was there for two-and-a-half hours. Neverett had heard rumors of a potential summer collegiate wooden bat league baseball team possibly coming to Holman Stadium, and Bawmann confirmed those rumors – the Spinners would own and run the team – and he wanted Neverett to become the vice president of player personnel, which meant he would put the team together.

Mike Chambers would be the manager, Neverett told him, and Bawmann also wanted Neverett to be part of the coaching staff.

Neverett asked why him, and the response from Bawmann, who lived in Nashua, was that he was following local baseball and that Neverett’s South team had several players who moved on to play in college and that he would have college contacts.

And the rest is history. Nashua became the flaship franchise of the Futures Collegiate Baseball League, Neverett became the face of the Nashua Silver Knghts franchise, two separate stints as manager and had a direct hand in four of the six Nashua championships in the league’s 12 years. He was a coach on the 2011 title team and managed three title teams before retiring following the 2019 season.

Nevertt is the common denominator with five of the six the inductees this current weekend to the Futures League Hall of Fame, all with Silver Knights ties: Former Nashua and Seacoast slugger Ryan Gendron, former Silver Knights standout Mickey Gasper, former Nashua and Worcester manager J.P. Pyne, and the entire 2011 Silver Knights FCBL title team. Former Torrington Titans player and North Shore manager Mike Odenwaelder was also being inducted.

Neverett signed and managed Gasper and Gendron (Gendron also played for him at South), Pyne was his pitching coach and succeeded him as manager after Neverett went back to being just a coach so he could spend more time with his daughter, and of course he put the 2011 team together and was on the coaching staff under its manager Mike Chambers.

“It’s quite an honor,” he said. “I put in a good nine years there, came in at the very beginning. Who knew back then how far it was going to go? And it’s just getting better and better.

“I’ve always been proud of what we did early on to get the foundation going. … If I had to go in with a class, this would be a good class to go in with.”

•••

THE EARLY DAYS

Neverett indeed leaned on those college coaches who he sent his players to early to have them return the favor and stock the Knights early rosters. The 2011 team, he felt, “was a really good team and could compete in this league now. We had really solid pitching, a good closer (Cody Rocha) and the core of that team ended up coming back and playing in 2012.”

That 2012 team, which Neverett managed, lost just 13 teams and arguably was the best Silver Knights – and perhaps FCBL team – in the 12-year history of the league. Nashua, incidentally, is the only team remaining from the original four.

Neverett at the time felt he needed to make a choice, whether to stay at South coaching high school or devote his baseball career to the Silver Knights. He chose the latter.

“I had to make a choice, and I’m glad I made the choice I did,” Neverett said. “I learned a lot from Mike Chambers (now the head coach at Franklin Pierce) about the college game. He taught me what summer ball was all about.

“As much as we tried to have the kids play as serious as they are in the spring (with their schools), the summer is different. They do want to have more fun. You just have to try to keep them focus on the prize. We were fortunate we did have that opportunity a few times. If we didn’t have a good season, sometimes we couldn’t get them focused.”

Neverett said he also learned a lot from Pyne, who was the head coach at Daniel Webster College when the league began, and is now the head man at prestigious Amherst College. The two ran the Knights together in 2012-13 – Nashua made the finals in 2013 but lost to Martha’s Vineyard – and managed against each other in not one but two FCBL Finals, 2016 and 2017, with Nashua winning both times, when Pyne managed the Worcester Bravehearts for Worcester and current Nashua owner John Creedon, Jr.

“I also learned a lot from J.P.when he was with us, and I watched other managers in our league and how they handled certain things. It was quite an

experience.”

But that inaugural 2011 season was unlike any other in the league. There were just four teams – Nashua, Seacoast (in Rochester), and then Torrington, Conn.and Martha’s Vineyard.

Rochester was familiar territory for Neverett as the franchise for a couple of years used Spaulding High School’s field as its home before switching to Portsmouth’s Leary Field.

“I remember there were a lot of long bus rides,” Neverett said. “I used to look forward to the trip to Rochester, believe it or not, because between Torrington and the Vineyard, it was a lot of (long) rides.”

The infield from that team was superb – James Katsirouubas at third, Rob Benedict at short, Merrimack native Logan Gillis at second, and Mark Sanborn at first.

“Benedict, I don’t know how I got him, and he was a D3 kid from Delaware,” Neveret said. “He was a great shortstop.”

Sean Lyons of Bedford (Northeastern) and SNHU’s Jon Menucci were also keys. “He was a guy I loved to watch,” Neverett said, adding Menucci came back for the 2012 season after Neverett talked him out of going to the rival New England Collegiate Baseball League.

“To watch him hit the ball, I used to be so impressed with him, the raw power,” Neverett said. “It was impressive.”

But, as Neverett said, Torrington was a tough finals opponent – Nashua won in two games – and fellow inductee Odenwaelder was a key on that Titans team. However, he didn’t play in the finals as he had to leave just before the playoffs to join his college team, Amherst, on an overseas trip. “I’m not going to say that made a difference but it sure made us feel a little bit better.”

Neverett enjoyed winning the title at Holman in 2012 and ’17, but also being welcomed by fans when returning the nights of the 2011 and 2016 titles. “In 2016 we came back and the place (Holman) was full of fans,” he said. “There’s that core of fans that was there in 2011 and are still there. I went to a couple of games this summer and I walk in the ballpark and see them. It’s really unbelievable, it’s a real family thing to do.”

Could Neverett have ever thought that the Silver Knights would be as popular as they’ve become?

“I’d hoped it would be,” he said. “When they expanded the league to 10 teams (in 2013), we were beating everybody. Teams would come in late and not get good rosters, and we were beating everybody pretty good. I remember (Commissioner) Chris Hall saying ‘This is not good for the league, to have one team dominate.’

“And I kept saying, ‘Why not? It’s up to them to catch up to us, not up to us to slow down. If we want to be at a certain level, they’ve all got to do it. I think at this point in time, that’s what you see. Everybody’s kind of got it figured out and there’s more parity.

“Even Vermont, they had a great team this year – but they didn’t win it. That says a lot for the Nashua kids that hung in there. But that come with experience too, because they were plugging holes like we used to – they did a real good job with that.”

The ‘They’ were general manager Cam Cook and manager Kyle Jackson – and Neverett was responsible for having both join the franchise. Jackson, the Alvirne alum and former Red Sox farmhand, was brought in as pitching coach in 2014 and Neverett signed Cook as an infielder midway through the 2016 season.

In late June of that summer, Neverett knew he needed to stabilize third base. He made a call to Nichols and was eventually told that Cook was unhappy playing in the New York Collegiate League, and would welcome a stint at Nashua. Cook was a second baseman but Neverett put him at third.

“He said, ‘You know, I’m a second baseman,'” Neverett said, “And I told him, ‘Well on this team you’re a third baseman.’ And he would even tell me ‘I don’t have a third-base arm’. And I said, ‘I don’t care, just play in. You don’t have to play back, just play in.'”

And then Cook started hitting, Neverett had to move him up in the order and told him he had to return for the 2017 year. He did, and Nashua won another title.

“That’s how I got him, it was luck,” Neverett said. “The coach (at Nichols) said, ‘Hey, this kid wants out of New York’ and I said, ‘Ok, send him over here.'”

Fast forward two years when Creedon bought the team, he took Neverett and Jackson out to dinner, and asked Neverett who his top five Silver Knights were. He included Cam Cook, and Creedon and his father laughed. “We just hired him (for the front office),” Neverett remembered them saying.

“They’re in really good shape there,” he said.

•••

THE GOOD AND THE BAD

Neverett says the best part of the job was game day. The worst was finding housing for players.

“That was difficult, to manage the team and worried about housing, and put a roster together and worry about housing,” he said. “There were some unbelievable kids I couldn’t take, because I couldn’t find any place for them to stay. I had some good contacts going but I ran into that my last few years and that made it difficult for me. But I miss putting a roster together, it was fun. It was fun in the wintertime talking baseball with people. But I miss the games, miss being on the field, and working through a nine-inning game. That was fun.”

Neverett shed his coach label and became the team’s manager again for the 2016 season, and there was a sense of satisfaction seeing the teams he put together win. “I was always proud of that, that was always a great feeling,” he said.

While getting Cook was a huge move for the franchise, Neverett doesn’t list that as his best roster decision. That, he said, was signing Lowell’s Rays Roman, who was from Northern Essex Community College, at a league tryout just prior to the start of the season in 2012 when original plans for the position fell through.

“We had the starting shortstop from William & Mary coming, and he was really good, All-Colonial Conference,” Neveret said. “The last weekend series of the year in May he tore his rotator (cuff). So I find out a week before tryouts I don’t have a shortstop. So I go to the tryouts and I’m only looking at the infielders. And I liked this kid. He might have really been the difference.”

His favorite moment with the Silver Knights?

“I don’t know if it’s a moment, but it’s that week of the playoffs in 2016,” he said. “I’d never gone through anything like that.”

Nashua that year lost the opener at Holman of the semifinal series with Seacoast, but then won two drama-filled games at Leary Field – a game winning homer by Cam Cruz. And then Neverett recalls that the team had no pitching left for the finals vs. Worcester. Somehow they won Game 1 at Holman, rallying to tie it in the ninth thanks to a Gasper two-out walk and subsequent Ryan Sullivan two-run game-tying homer, and then won in extras. The Knights then went on to win Game 2 on a Friday night in Worcester to capture the franchise’s third championship – but the first since 2012, the last time Neverett had managed.

One of their pitchers used, Anthony Meduri, was on fumes but got a strikeout with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth to end it. In that game, Neverett had to start reliever Colin Duffley, who threw the most pitches – 97 – that he had thrown since prep school two years earlier.

Gasper is now a Yankees Double A farmhand for the Eastern League champion Somerset Patriots. In 2016, he was the FCBL’s MVP. “That spring-boarded Mickey,” Neverett said.

Gendron, meanwhile, hit over .320 and 20-plus homers and 50-plus RBIs for Seacoast in 2015.

“Mickey had one of the greatest seasons the league has seen when he was here in ’16,” Neverett said. “Ryan Gendron, I had him in middle school and he played for me in high school and his first year with us and moved on to Seacoast for two years. He had two seasons there that were as good as anybody.

“And J.P., after he left here we had a lot of good battles. I have so much respect for him and he’s become a good friend. And that 2011 team I put that team together. And Mike and Clay Jenkins the pitching coach, they’ve both moved on and done some great things.”

What does it say that the Silver Knights have all these ties to the so many

“I’ve had time to reflect on stuff,” said Neverett, who was unable to make the induction ceremony due to a family

commitment.

“The people I’ve met with other organizations. I don’t have much contact with former players, but I know they enjoyed their experience in Nashua.

Neverett almost stepped away after the 2017 title season, but gave it a couple more years. He retired after the 2019 season knowing he had built things from the ground up on the field.

“It’s quite a thrill to have that honor,” he said, “being in the Hall of Fame.”