Stepping up to the plate
By Nancy Wesenberg He’s just approaching his 23rd birthday, and yet Kyle Buchmann has already learned how to take whatever life throws at him and come back swinging. And swinging is good, because baseball is at the center of Buchmann’s life. He’s been playing since he was 7 years old, and the UW-Eau Claire Club Baseball team was part of what attracted him to the university after he graduated from Spooner High School in 2001. During his freshman year, Buchmann not only joined the Club Baseball team as a second baseman, he also joined three campus religious organizations and in the spring of 2002 became a campus ambassador, giving campus tours to prospective students and their parents, conducting focus groups and planning fun activities. “My freshman year was just an all-around great year,” Buchmann said. But back home in Shell Lake the summer of 2002, he developed a persistent chest cold. When antibiotics didn’t help, his parents sent him back to the doctor. Just days before a planned family vacation, blood tests revealed that Buchmann had leukemia, the form of cancer that affects the bone marrow, where blood cells are produced. People with leukemia produce an excessive number of immature or defective blood cells that interfere with normal blood cell production. Buchmann was sent to Rochester’s Mayo Clinic for more tests, and doctors there told him and his family that unless he was treated immediately he probably had only two to four months to live. Within days he began chemotherapy at Mayo Clinic, and good news came almost as quickly and surprisingly as the bad news had. After only two weeks of treatment, doctors performed a bone marrow biopsy and discovered that the chemotherapy had already forced the cancer into remission. But even after remission more treatment is necessary to achieve a permanent cure. Buchmann spent another two weeks in the hospital as well as another 60 days over the next six months, preventing him from returning to UW-Eau Claire for the fall semester. Looking back now, three years later, Buchmann said he believes that his faith and his involvement in religious organizations on campus helped give him the spiritual strength to “roll with it” when the bad news came. “If you trust in God, you’re more prepared to deal with whatever comes,” Buchmann said. And that was important, because more was coming. After a successful return to school in January 2003, when he became a resident assistant for Murray Hall and president and coach for Club Baseball, Buchmann thought he was past the worst. But that fall he relapsed. And although he had long since decided to place himself in God’s hands, Buchmann said when he first heard the news his initial reaction was, “Oh, come on — again?” Withdrawing from UW-Eau Claire once more, Buchmann underwent a bone marrow transplant. His sister Meg, who was 13 at the time, served as the donor. The difficult, risky procedure was successful, and Buchmann returned to UW-Eau Claire in January 2004. Although he has had to deal with a recurring case of pneumonia and he still tires more easily than he used to, things have been pretty much on the upswing for him since then. As president of the UW-Eau Claire Club Baseball team, Buchmann led his team to the championship of the Western Lakes Conference of the National Club Baseball Association in the spring of 2004 and then on to the regional championship and finally the NCBA World Series in Florida, a feat the team repeated this past spring after a regional finals game Buchmann called the most exciting game he’d ever experienced. The team took fifth place at the World Series last year and improved on that this year, taking third in the nation over 100 teams. But Buchmann’s most lasting influence on UW-Eau Claire’s Club Baseball team probably has more to do with the organization itself. As a management and marketing major hoping for a career as a general manager for a professional baseball team, Buchmann decided he could apply what he’d learned in his business classes to help the team. “As a club team, we only get about $1,600 a year in help from the Student Senate,” Buchmann said. “The cost of our NCBA membership alone is $1,000 a year, and umpire fees are $120 per game, so $1,600 doesn’t go far.” Buchmann suggested the team elect officers with clearly defined roles and responsibilities, solicit corporate sponsorships and set up regular fundraising events, including alumni and parent gatherings and a date auction where each player was auctioned off to the highest bidder. The result was an additional $12,000 for uniforms, travel costs and other needs. “Everyone knows what needs to be done now,” Buchmann said. “I know the group can do the same fundraisers successfully each year so Club Baseball can continue at UW-Eau Claire.” Journalism professor Mike Dorsher, Club Baseball’s faculty adviser since 2001, agreed. “Kyle set up a framework,” Dorsher said. “It remains to be seen whether others will be as diligent and creative as he has been in keeping things going. Basically, he sacrificed some of his own fun as a player in order to do the best job he could as an administrator, both as a head coach for the team and president of the organization.” Dorsher, who helped found an adult baseball league when he was a reporter in Madison, said he encouraged the team’s self-governance. He believes it has allowed all the players, particularly Buchmann and vice president Jordan Krause, to stretch in ways they might not have if they had been on a varsity baseball team led by university staff. Dorsher, like others who know Buchmann, just shakes his head when considering that the 20-something did all this while dealing with life-threatening health problems. “There aren’t a lot of Kyle Buchmanns around,” Dorsher said. That impression seems widespread on campus. “Every now and then someone walks into your office to interview, and you can just tell that person is a unique individual,” said conference and reservations manager Karen Stuber, who has supervised Buchmann since last fall in yet another of his campus jobs as a student building manager for Davies Center. “I was impressed by the level of maturity Kyle displayed.” Last spring Buchmann was one of five students who received Student Leadership Awards, and he also was voted Distinguished Management Student by the management and marketing faculty. Nevertheless, Club Baseball team members like Justin Musil will probably miss Buchmann most after his anticipated graduation in December. About a year after Buchmann had first gone through chemotherapy, Musil was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma, a type of childhood/young adult cancer that starts in the bone or soft tissues. “Kyle was very important to me,” Musil said. “He really made it easier for me, especially at the beginning, because the scariest thing about chemotherapy is not knowing what to expect, and Kyle eliminated that.” Like Buchmann, Musil is now doing well, and he credits his friend for the recent success of Club Baseball at UW-Eau Claire. “If it wasn’t for Kyle, our team wouldn’t have been what it was for the past two years,” Musil said, which may help explain why Buchmann was hired as a marketing intern for the Madison Mallards this past summer. And although he might have wished that his UW-Eau Claire career had gone a bit more smoothly, Buchmann claims “lots of good things” have come out of his experience, including knowing people he might never have met otherwise. “It has made me value and appreciate people more,” said Buchmann, who remembered time he spent talking with a fellow UW-Eau Claire student who died last spring after a 19-month battle with cancer. “It has made me more apt to take time and say yes when someone wants to talk, or just hang out … because you never know what’s coming.”
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