Kent Meador wants to leave his mark on the Monterey baseball program, and not just by adding to its winning tradition on the diamond.

He also wants the Plainsmen’s home ballpark to become a gem in and of itself.

Meador, who will begin his first season as Monterey’s head coach this spring, has some big dreams on both fronts. And he’s already putting one of his ideas to work.

Construction of the Bobby Moegle Wall of Honor, which will wrap around the back side of the bleachers at Moegle Field, began in December and is scheduled to be complete before the Plainsmen start the 2010 season in February. It will illustrate the storied history of Monterey baseball while also sprucing up the park.

“When I first walked into that locker room, I just really felt like it was a great opportunity to start a new phase of this program,” said Meador, a Lubbock native who spent the last nine years coaching in the Houston area. “I knew we would do it on the field with a new approach, new attitude, etc., but I thought this was the perfect time to have some physical, tangible changes as well.

“… I want it to look good, and I want it to play good. That’s my personality, I suppose.”

An artist's rendering of the Bobby Moegle Wall of Honor.

Employees of Knox, Gailey & Meador General Contractors of Ingram Concrete pour concrete in the beginning stages of construction on the Bobby Moegle Wall of Honor, for the Monterey baseball program at Moegle Field. The wall will recognize nearly every Monterey team in history along with some of the programs more prominent players. (Merissa Ferguson/Lubbock Avalanche-Journal)

The current face of the stadium

Meador

Lubbock ISD is not funding the project, which Meador estimates will cost between $50,000 and $60,000, but has signed off on it. So has the ballpark’s namesake, Bobby Moegle, who retired in 1999 after guiding Monterey to four state championships and 1,115 wins in 40 seasons.

Moegle seemed a little skeptical when he reviewed a sketch of the wall over lunch on Wednesday — asking Meador, “When are you going to have time to coach?” — but he was only giving the new Monterey skipper a hard time. The project, and Meador, has Moegle’s ringing endorsement.

“You’ve got to hand it to Kent to keep the whole thing going, because it really means a lot to me and the community,” Moegle said. “It’s really an awesome deal. It’s hard for me to believe it’s happening.

“Kent’s got visions of doing things outside the lines and inside the lines,” Moegle added, “so it’s going to really be fun to watch this thing go.”

If you build it, they will come
Meador said the wall of honor was designed by M W M Architects, Inc., and is being constructed by Knox, Gailey & Meador General Contractors — the company of Meador’s father, Don. A brick wall serves as the base of the structure, which will have four sections of aluminum panels.

The wall will include the starting lineups of every Monterey team from 1960 to present, along with their batting averages and pitching records, as well as a list of the program’s all-district, all-state and all-star selections. The Plainsmen’s statistical record-holders, and top hitters and pitchers from each decade, will be included, too.

Most of the information has been plastered across the ceiling in the team’s locker room on the Monterey campus, but now Meador is putting it out there for everyone to see. He’s also leaving enough room on the first-base side of the wall to cover every Monterey team through 2050.

“The number of people that ever set foot in our locker room is pretty few and far between, so I thought we needed to get this out to the ballpark,” said Meador, who constructed a similar wall at his last coaching stop, Klein Collins. “When people come to our games, they can reminisce and see the history. It’ll just be a special deal for a lot of people — a whole lot of people.”

The Monterey booster club took out a loan to cover initial construction costs, but Meador plans to fund the project through donations from former players, fans and other supporters of the program. Former booster club president Ron Bartley, who had two sons play for Monterey and was the program’s summer-league coach for 12 years, said they’ve raised about $5,000 so far.

Those who wish to donate can visit www.montereybaseball.org. They also can call Bartley at (806) 787-8785, or booster club vice president Bart Reagor at (806) 790-4593.

Bartley and Reagor said they expect the wall to become not only a signature feature of Moegle Field, but also a Lubbock landmark.

“It’s going to make that facility look so first class,” Bartley said. “It’s time for us to all pay back for what Monterey baseball did for all these hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of players.”

Reliving history
Former Texas Tech baseball coach Gary Ashby, who was the first baseman on Monterey’s first state-championship team in 1972, has been charged with compiling all the information. He said there might be some Plainsmen who are accidentally overlooked — and he hasn’t been able to track down information on the few Monterey teams before 1960 — but he estimated the wall would be about “97 percent accurate.”

“Every single player that was ever a starter at Monterey is going to be on that board, and that’s going to be neat,” he said. “They can bring their kids and their grandkids out there.

“Now, some of them might not have hit as high as they’re going to tell their grandkids and all that they hit. It’s going to be in writing, so that’s going to be the only negative. Some people may get called on that year they said they hit .400, and they hit .230. But for the right donation, we might get them up around .400.”

All kidding aside, Ashby said it’s been fun and rewarding to sift through the program’s records and find players who have become coaches, city councilmen, school board members and successful businessmen.

“Looking this stuff up, to me, it’s just interesting. It’s like reading history,” he said. “Monterey baseball is like Odessa Permian football. There’s really not many things you can compare it to, because it’s been so good for so long.”

Setting a standard
Along with serving as a source of pride for the Monterey baseball family, the wall of honor might have some intangible benefits to the current crop of Plainsmen. Bartley and Reagor said it could help Moegle Field regain somewhat of a mythical quality in the eyes of opponents, and Meador said he plans to use it as a source of motivation for his players.

“A plaque on a wall is not going to score a run for me,” Meador said. “But don’t think I won’t walk their butts around and look at that wall after a crappy day on the field and say, ‘You’ve got to understand where you fall into this mix.’ It’s an honor for them to put on a Monterey uniform, and if they don’t look at it that way, they’re in the wrong place.”

Along those lines, Meador said he plans to change much more on the field than off. The Plainsmen failed to qualify for the playoffs last year for the first time since 2000, and Meador is determined to start another streak of postseason appearances.

Bartley said he’s confident the former Coronado Mustang and Red Raider will do just that.

“When coach Meador came in and he first met with these kids, he challenged them,” Bartley said. “He said, ‘Look, I used to play against these guys, and this was feared.’ And he goes, ‘We’re going to do that again. When we bring people in here, they’re going to dread coming to play us.’

“From that moment on, I knew we had the right guy.”

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