Noah Monsour got up with two outs in the last of the eighth on Sunday for Christian Brothers Academy, a difficult situation with his team trailing by three runs against Cicero-North Syracuse. He swung hard and popped out, and the Northstars poured from their dugout to meet their teammates for a joyous infield jumble.
They had defeated the Brothers, 5-2, in an extra-innings showdown for the AAA sectional championship at Onondaga Community College. While CNS celebrated, CBA coach Pat Wiese jogged onto the diamond and threw his arm around Monsour, making sure a senior who had contributed so much to his team did not head back to the bench, alone.
The coach’s gesture was both an instant response and a statement of program legacy, reflecting what Tom Dotterer told Wiese in the dugout maybe two years ago, at a moment when CBA faced a key strategic decision in a game:
“It’s not my shoes,” Dotterer said to his successor as head coach. “It’s your shoes now.”
Wiese, grateful, saw it as classic Dotterer humility. The guy coached CBA for 44 years. While his teams won 12 sectional titles and a state championship, it was Dotterer’s utterly against-the-grain personality — the beautiful contradiction of a fierce competitor who insisted that winning was a secondary concern — that established him as a one-of-a-kind legend.
For Wiese and Colin Conroy, CBA’s longtime assistant coach, Sunday night was the ultimate test of how that ethic carries on.
Dotterer died last autumn, at 88. He was in the hospital a year ago when CBA defeated CNS for the 2024 sectional championship, and this season — the first one in decades where Dotterer never stepped onto a CBA field that was already named in his honor — was filled from start to end with a sense of mission, focused on the old coach.
“We wanted this one for him,” said David Curry, a senior infielder who explained how the Brothers were reminded of Dotterer, every day. From his hospital bed, not long before he died, Dotterer told Wiese his favorite tree was a purple lilac. After his death, the team planted one just beyond the outfield fence, and it was in bloom last Friday when CBA won a 3-1 home sectional playoff over Liverpool.
Senior Luke Becker recalled how Tim Scholl, a friend and teammate, remarked during that game on a collective intensity that everyone sensed:
On a beautiful spring day at CBA, it felt like Dotterer was there — a quiet presence so vivid it gave his old players the chills.
Becker said his mom is in treatment for cancer, and Dotterer would quietly ask about her, away from everyone else, after each practice. The coach gave Becker’s mom, Jackie Kowaleski, a homemade bracelet with a cross as a gesture of hope, which helps explain why Becker describes Dotterer as the greatest coach he’s ever met, an educator of such empathy it bridged a 70-year difference in age.
“He saw me and he heard me,” said Becker, who’ll attend Le Moyne College in the autumn.
Wiese, 32, keeps a list of the attributes – often doubling as nicknames – Dotterer assigned to every player in his dugout, a practice the old coach followed for decades. Becker was “Bud,” as in a blossom. Fellow senior Hector Gonzalez was “Persistent” – a quality he lived out this year by playing through a shoulder injury. Scholl was “Stone,” as in unshakeable, while senior Tom Menar was “Cataflier,” or a caterpillar emerging as a butterfly.
In tribute to the coach, the CBA uniforms were emblazoned with a cross and Dotterer’s initials. Before each game, when the players gathered in a huddle for a prayer, they would shout: “Coach Dott, pray for us!”
That intensity was compounded by the scope of Wiese’s own experience: He was a memorable player for Dotterer at CBA, then went on to become a superb outfielder and captain of the baseball team at Le Moyne.
During some summer league games, at a moment when he was playing the best baseball of his life, he began feeling intense pain in his leg. Wiese figured it was a bruise or a strain, at least until his dad — Dr. Mike Wiese, an orthopedic surgeon — did what they both thought were routine X-rays.
The father had to tell the son the pain was caused by osteosarcoma, a form of bone cancer.
As a player, Wiese’s baseball career was over — though the stakes were far greater than any game, a reality Wiese had to sort out as a 21-year-old. When all the surgery and chemotherapy was done — when Wiese finally walked out of Upstate University Hospital, fist in the air, after his last treatment — he already had the perspective of an elder.
The first great lesson was that whatever you love, give it every ounce of passion and commitment that you have, because anything can be taken from you, at any moment.
The second truth: If you lose one great passion in your life, it’s critical — for identity, for sense of purpose, for happiness — to find your way to another.
After college, Wiese took a desk job. It wasn’t him. In his hours away from work, he channeled much of his energy toward a foundation he started with his mother, Kathy Wiese, to help families affected by cancer. And with the support of his wife Alli —their young sons, Charlie and Benny, often trot around the CBA field, after practice — Wiese returned to CBA to become a math teacher and a coach.
Eventually, as Dotterer moved into his late 80s, he shifted play-by-play control of the baseball team to Wiese and Conroy, an assistant coach who played at CBA and was so moved by that teenage experience he wrote his college admission essay, for St. Lawrence University, about Dotterer.
“It was really about seeing the world differently,” said Conroy, whose dad had also been a CBA assistant coach — meaning that Conroy grew up around the program.
As Conroy cheerfully acknowledges, his use in the essay of the word “differently” understated the bigger-than-life reality of Dotterer, a voracious reader who was utterly one-of-a-kind. He ran a cluttered, old-school North Salina Street liquor store, where he taped little life messages to the wall as inspiration for his regulars. His older brother Henry, or “Dutch,” played in the major leagues and was a giant influence on Tom, who made his own journey through baseball’s minors — and would often read classic literature in small-town hotel rooms, while his buddies hit the bars.
Dotterer wore a long John the Baptist-style beard, and — in his sudden and explosive revelations — had a bit of that fiery saint’s demeanor. Each year, he would ask his players to do questionnaires, and teammates Curry, Becker, Jameson Walker and Michael Giamartino — each of whom paused to speak with me over the last few days — remember questions like, “What are clouds?” or “Do rocks have thoughts?”
It wasn’t just whimsy. In those essays, Dotterer sought hints of understanding about his players. Amid the wilder inquiries, Dotterer might also ask: “What’s your biggest problem?”
The answers sometimes pointed toward real-life struggles Dotterer wanted to know.
He used to say love of the game isn’t always tied to God-given talent, and baseball can mean as much or more on a spiritual level to a kid on the bench — or to kids who don’t even make the team — as it does for teens with more natural gifts. A big part of being a coach, he would say, is remembering that truth, which is why Walker and Curry say he was careful to avoid going overboard with either praise or a critique.
“It was really more about life than about baseball,” Walker said. Dotterer left it to his own players to choose the best moment to steal a base. If he wanted a player to sacrifice, Wiese and Conroy recall, he would shout to his batter from the dugout that “this would be a good time to bunt,” with no attempt at deception. The wondrous part of that instructional alchemy, over the years, was in just how well it worked.
Dotterer won more than 700 games. To say he didn’t love to win would be phony, but he defined victory by more of a “long game” philosophy, and what Wiese and Conroy and his players all emphasize is maybe Dotterer’s more important lesson.
“He understood,” Wiese said, “that sometimes the way you win is when you lose.”
The real triumph becomes who you are as a person, which has little to do with state or sectional baseball titles. Life inevitably involves coping with hard loss and disappointments – his own passing became the ultimate example – and the real trial is how you’ll respond when such things happen.
Sure, a championship is great. But even in the days leading up to Sunday’s game, the players were recalling what Dotterer would say if they made an error or struck out or especially after a defeat, as a team: He was a teacher above all else, and he wanted them to learn from those situations.
He would quickly remind them any setback — or victory, for that matter — was “yesterday’s news,” instantly gone.
Improvement meant pushing forward, not getting lost in numbing regret about what’s already in the past.
Walker is going to college in Florida, with dreams of becoming a commercial pilot. Curry is heading for Chicago, and contemplating neuroscience. They graduated Sunday morning with their classmates and then played for the sectional title on the same day, meaning for the two seniors it was probably the last game of organized baseball in their lives.
The way it ended could have hurt a lot more, they agree, except for how Dotterer prepared them — and how Wiese and Conroy coach them today.
“Our dad so appreciated and admired and loved Coach Wiese and Coach Conroy,” said Henry Dotterer, Tom’s son, “and he would be so happy and so proud of the way they’re leading the team now.”
Dotterer’s own great test came in 2013, when he lost an eye after being shot in the face during a robbery at his North Salina Street liquor store. He returned to work almost immediately, and he refused to fall into hatred or bitterness. Dotterer channeled the whole idea of “vision” into back-and-forth reflections on life and kindness and perspective with old friends who stopped by the store, and he focused on the many people he knew who rose to great lives despite harsh circumstance — refusing to see his wounds as a reason for despair.
Loss and triumph, pain and motion. His players watched him live it. As Dotterer neared 80, even after that attack, he stuck with coaching. He kept writing his mysterious reflections on each batter in every game in a little notebook, and his sheer resilience became the greatest lesson he could offer to Wiese and Conroy and the entire Syracuse community.
Sunday’s result, then, ended up as a primer on everything Dotterer taught. CNS was a tough, savvy and formidable opponent. CBA had a moment, early in the game, when the Brothers seemed poised to break it open. But Northstar shortstop Jaden Zimmer made a stunning play off a hard grounder, pivoting back to throw behind a runner at third to complete a double play, which wiped out a potentially big inning for CBA.
It remained 2-2 into the eighth, when CNS pulled away.
Once it was over, the players followed Dotterer’s longtime last-game-of-every-season tradition, the eight seniors lining up for a farewell from their coaches and teammates. Curry embraced Wiese and thanked him for his lessons, and the emotional coach looked around and realized just how many of his players were in tears, feeling they had somehow fallen short in this season they dedicated to a legend, and everything he meant.
It’s all good, Wiese told them. This is how to see it: It’s a sign of sincerity and passion about a cause, if you care enough to cry.
The real Dotterer legacy is to keep caring so much, far beyond baseball.
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