SPRINGFIELD – After 10 years as head baseball coach at Southwestern Oregon Community College, Dave Deutschman is ready for a new challenge.
The 38-year old has been hired as the inaugural director of the Springfield Drifters Academy scheduled to open later this summer.
“I really like what the Drifters are doing with community engagement and how they are promoting youth baseball,” Deutschman said. “That family-friendly atmosphere is what the Drifters are about in general, and also what I am about. The opportunity presented itself and sounded like something I wanted to invest in and see how to make it work.”
The Academy is set to open soon in the Memorial Building in downtown Springfield, 765 A Street. The three-story academy will provide year-round baseball training for youth baseball players in the area with multiple batting cages.
The Academy has an 11-Under team playing this summer and will soon have tryouts for 10-, 11-, 12-, 13-, 14-, and 16-under teams with the goal of having at least one team at each of those levels. Players who are not on those teams can also be members of the academy.
“We are trying to provide a structured environment where we will have a 12-month platform for sport-specific training,” Deutschman said. “Lane County is a great area and we want to offer an opportunity to be part of this academy to the entire county and the outskirts as well.”
Deutschman is a 2006 graduate of Junction City High School who earned all-state honors as a senior. He played college baseball at College of the Siskiyous and Western Oregon University before transitioning into coaching.
Deutschman was an assistant at Central and Harrisburg high schools before leading the Three Rivers AAA American Legion program in Florence. He was hired at SWOCC in 2016 and leaves as the winningest coach in program history, including a school-record 27 wins in 2023 at the Coos Bay college.
“It is an interesting challenge putting together a decade-long process of being a head coach and the day-to-day operations and back-end office work and now compiling all of that into a different piece of the sport,” Deutschman said. “But it is all baseball and I see this as a great challenge and an opportunity to get back to Lane County.”
Deutschman will be part of the coaching staff at the academy, but will hire coaches to lead the individual teams.
“What I am doing is overseeing the instructional piece of it for lessons and time in the batting cages,” Deutschman said. “I am not going to coach any teams specifically, but I will lead trainings in the facility and help with practice planning and being involved as much as I can on the instructional side of things. I will oversee the teams and put them together and hire the coaches and instructors. I will run the day-to-day operations of the academy and everything else in between.”
Those teams will practice regularly at Maple Elementary and Hamlin Middle schools in the fall and then do most of their work in the academy during the winter. The academy teams will play a travel ball schedule from June through August. Deutschman hopes the Drifters can start up a fall league down the road.
Drifters co-owner Ike Olsson purchased the Memorial Building — which was owned by Willamalane for much of its existence — last year and has been renovating it into the academy. Springfield is wrapping up its fifth season in the West Coast League and the academy is the next step toward growing baseball in the local area.
“We will put together a great overall academy experience,” Deutschman said. “We are diving into what some of our friends in the industry are doing and learning the ropes from them as we start from ground zero. We foresee this being around for a long time.”
