When you follow an interest, you never know just where it’s going to take you. Back in 2000, Rick Benner ’88, a geography major when he was at KSC, started researching major league baseball players who had played college ball. It wasn’t long before he was the Chairman of the Collegiate Baseball Committee at the Society for American Baseball Research, a position he held until 2009. When the College Baseball Foundation was organized in 2004, he asked to be included. Since then, he has expanded his research to writing summary sheets for every college baseball program, past and present.
The CBF began researching candidates to selection to the College Baseball Hall of Fame in 2005, and Benner was a big part of identifying older (pre-College World Series) candidates such as Jack Coffey and Owen Carroll. He is now the librarian and historian for the CBHF, where his ongoing research is filling in the blanks in the college baseball history record.
As the CBHF librarian, Benner said he is collecting “media guides, books, masters theses, booklets–anything that covers the history of athletics, especially baseball at a specific college, although conference histories are also being collected. … The research library at the Hall of Fame Museum is intended to be the ultimate receptacle for college baseball artifacts and research.”
That sure seems like a lot of volunteer work. What does Benner do to pay the bills? “I work as a real estate paralegal/title examiner during the day.”