Mount Greylock Baseball Program Honors 'Big Norm'

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. -- “Big Norm” left a big imprint on the Mount Greylock Regional School baseball program.

 

On Tuesday, the program honored that legacy, “in really one of the only ways we know how to do,” Mounties varsity coach Steve Messina said prior to his team’s game against Lee.

 

“Norm, like I said, has been wearing the No. 21 for the 23 years that he has been here,” Messina said, using the present tense to refer to Norman Sweet, who died on Dec. 30, 2016.

 

“So we are pleased today to announce that the No. 21 will be retired and never worn again by anyone here at Mount Greylock baseball.”

 

Norman Sweet Jr., was a Williamstown native who starred in three sports at the old Williamstown High School and was scouted by the Philadelphia Athletics.

 

He chose not to pursue a career in professional baseball but instead built a life farming in his hometown.

 

He stayed connected to sports by coaching his son’s Little League team and, eventually, following his son, Norm III, to the Mount Greylock varsity.

 

“About 1992, when I first started coaching, there was an eager young sophomore who was on the team by the name of Norm Sweet,” Messina recalled. “He was a great player, full of energy and passion and very, very talented.

 

“About a quarter of the way through the season, I realized Norm was a junior, and I realized his dad had equally as much passion for the game of baseball. He would constantly walk behind the bench offering his wisdom to me and the players.

 

“The very next year, Norm started coaching with us here at Mount Greylock.”

 

Where some parents may have lost interest after their own child graduated, Sweet stayed with the Mounties as an assistant coach for more than two decades and kept in touch with the program on a part-time basis until he died at age 85.

 

On Tuesday, Norm III was back on the mound at Mount Greylock, throwing out a ceremonial first pitch along with his daughter Kamryn, a sixth-grader at Lanesborough Elementary School and a player for the Berkshire Force softball program. Kamryn’s sister Addyson, a first-grader, closed the ceremony by yelling, “Play Ball,” over the loudspeaker, cued by 2015 Mount Greylock graduate and former first baseman Jake Benzinger, whose dad is an assistant coach in the program.

 

That pitch and the number retirement were witnessed by the Lee Wildcats, the current crop of Mount Greylock Mounties, decked out in “throwback” pinstriped uniforms with No. 21 patches on the sleeves, and a number of alumni home from college.

 

“Each and every one of the kids who played here, Normy had a special connection, and they would tell you that,” Messina said.