College baseball returning to Denton

New TCL franchise could help UNT revive program


08:55 AM CDT on Saturday, July 17, 2004


By Mike McClendon
Denton Record-Chronicle
Staff Writer

The Texas Collegiate League is coming to Denton and it could signal the revival of college baseball at the University of North Texas.

The TCL announced an agreement on Thursday with an ownership group headed by Dallas-based entrepreneur Jim Leslie to add an expansion franchise in Denton.

The TCL is a summer wooden bat league that features some of the top college baseball players from across the country. It is currently in its first year of existence.

"The Texas Collegiate League is very pleased to reach an agreement to bring a team to Denton," said TCL Chairman Gerald Haddock. "We feel that Jim Leslie’s group will be a solid addition to our league in an outstanding market."

The TCL currently has franchises in Colleyville-Grapevine, Coppell, Highland Park, McKinney, Graham, Granbury, Mineral Wells and Weatherford. The teams play a 54-game schedule that begins in early June and ends in mid-August.

The Denton team is expected to begin play next season and the ownership group is expected to announce a nickname for the franchise next week.

"It’s great that we’ll have college baseball in Denton," UNT athletic director Rick Villarreal said. "For a lot of people, this is baseball country. Hopefully, this Texas Collegiate League team will help bring Division I-A baseball back to the University of North Texas."

Leslie and his group are currently working on an agreement with UNT that would result in the development and construction of a new baseball complex on the school’s property. The facility would be used by both UNT and the TCL franchise.

"The facility deal is still with the lawyers," said Calvary baseball coach John Hampton, a member of the Denton franchise’s ownership group. "[UNT’s lawyers] sent us something. We sent something back. Now they sent us something. The negotiation is going well and we have nothing but positive feelings right now."

"We’re still in the process of exploring what we can and can’t do as far as sharing the facility," added Villarreal. "I feel good about where we are. I feel like have had great discussions. Now we’re getting down to the specifics. There are a lot of legal things to go through. We’re probably looking at sometime in August when we can announce whether or not we can do this."

If the ownership group cannot reach a deal with UNT, Hampton said, the group would look for an alternative location for the facility within Denton, or pay a fee to the TCL to terminate the franchise.

Hampton said the TCL showed interested in the Denton market a few years ago, but was deterred by the lack of a suitable baseball facility.

"We couldn’t make it work the first time, but they [the TCL] came to us again and this time we had some land available to build a stadium on," Hampton said. "We were looking in to making it happen when UNT approached us about building a facility on their land. That’s when this thing took off and we knew we could do something special."

If an agreement between UNT and the ownership group is reached, Villarreal said, the school would have to deal with financing and Title IX gender equity issues before reviving baseball, which was last sponsored by the school in 1988.

Among the possibilities to conform with Title IX, Villarreal said, are adding a women’s sport or reducing scholarship numbers in other men’s sports.

MIKE McCLENDON can be reached at 940-566-6873.