DCAC Official Reaches Retirement

It was a November afternoon in 1925 and Bill Heeremans, then a Dartmouth freshman, sat in the stands at Memorial Field and watched the Green annihilate Cornell, 62-13, in one of the most lopsided upsets in Dartmouth football history.

Heeremans, who retired on June 30 after 15 years as supervisor of athletic maintenance for Dartmouth, has spent countless Saturday afternoon hours and as many (or more) on winter and spring weekends holding the fort at various information and ticket locations around the Dartmouth athletic complex,.

Come this fall, however, Heeremans will be able to relax on Saturday, eat a leisurely breakfast with his wife Dorothy, and then stroll across Hanover to Memorial Field. Then, for the first time in nearly 50 years, he'll sit down and watch Dartmouth play football from start to finish instead of measuring the fate of the Green by the tenor of the crowd that has echoed its sentiments down to his outpost in the shadow of the ivy clad stadium for so many years.

Heeremans returned to Dartmouth in 1957 after 18 years at Princeton where he was first the rigger for crew and then held a position similar to his recent post at Dartmouth.

It was during his final year at Princeton that Ken Fairman (Nassau's athletic director who also retires later this year) asked Heeremans to devise a piece of" equipment that subsequently made Bill's name well known in major league baseball.

Princeton was in need of a portable batting practice cage, one that would be lightweight, mobile and still completely functional.

Using fine copper tubing and cheesecloth, Heeremans produced a model that has grown into the collapsible cage that now is the conspicious canopy for pregame hitting in more than half of the major league ball parks.

He built the first one himself, fashioning the aluminum tubing that is designed to permit the vast expanse of netting to be folded to a size that permits two men to move it with little effort.

"We once demonstrated that we could break down the cage (the major league model measures 16 feet across the mouth and 22 feet from the front to back and is 12 feet high) and have it off the field in less than a minute," said the inventor.

Heeremans didn't take Fairman seriously when the Princeton AD quipped, "When do we go into business?" but he changed his mind in 1959 when a call from the New York Yankees produced the first major league sale.

Now Heeremans has more than 60 cages scattered across the nation in major and minor league ball parks and on many college campuses.

He's had but one problem with his batting cage: no reorders. "They never wear out," said Heeremans. But business is good, especially when you consider the only advertising for the Heeremans cage has been by word of mouth.

Not a bad testimony for the man who has directed the manicuring of athletic fields for so many years and now can sit back and watch them in use for a change.

Bill Heeremans '29