BASEBALL

Senior Chris Davidson learns in class about responding to change, assessing needs and problems, and leadership. But his most important experiences for a future job may have come on the mound.

It’s on the mound that he learns teamwork.

Davidson started his first game in more than three years in the second game of a doubleheader against Iowa on April 30. He pitched four innings, giving up five runs and earning a no-decision in the game, but Northwestern won the game 7-6.

“Chris did a great job of starting that ballgame and giving us innings that we desperately needed to keep us in the game and get us to the point where we could use other people and find a way to win the ballgame,” coach Paul Stevens said.

Davidson, a learning and organizational change major, said he relates his experiences on the baseball diamond to what he studies.

Davidson’s father, Rob Davidson, said his son’s major fits his personality.

“I wasn’t surprised because there is a lot of teamwork and leadership involved, and that fits Chris,” Rob Davidson said.

Those are concepts he also uses in baseball, and Davidson said the game has made parts of his major easier for him to understand.

“I apply (my major) to baseball every day, ” Davidson said. “Every time I’m learning something new in class, like mental models or system thinking, I can always almost immediately come up with a relevant example that I’ve experienced here in one capacity or another that helps me. It applies right away. It’s like a real-world case for everything we study.”

Before his unexpected spot-start last weekend, Davidson had only started one game, a 2002 midweek-game loss to Chicago State in which he gave up four runs in two-thirds of an inning before being relieved.

That was the only action he saw the entire year, and he missed all of the next year with tendonitis stemming from a rigorous offseason program.

Coming off the injury, he pitched eight innings in 2004, going 0-1 with a 6.75 ERA in 11 appearances.

“Well, it’s always hard,” Stevens said of a player sitting out a year. “But that fact of the matter is once you have that taste of competition and you have to sit, you’re chomping at the bit to come back.”

This year Davidson has more than doubled his career innings with 20.2 and has a 6.53 ERA in eight appearances. He has been more effective in relief, with a 5.40 ERA.

Stevens said he expects Davidson to come out of the bullpen the rest of the season.

And although Davidson uses baseball to help him in class, he probably won’t rely on it much longer.

He has a year of eligibility remaining and can return next season, but Davidson said has accepted a job offer from the management program at Wells Fargo Financial and will probably move on from NU after this season.

“At the moment I’ve accepted a job offer,” Davidson said. “And it doesn’t look like there’s going to be a place for me (here) next year, but we’ll see.”

Reach Abe Rakov at [email protected].