Profile:Duane Erickson

Kids were tackling each other mercilessly, taking each other out and screaming with elation as they had finally done it, they had won. The pile was growing and growing as more kids reached the pitcher’s mound, celebrating with their teammates.

And at the bottom of the pile was a 63 year old man with a prosthetic hip.

As a new youth baseball season is about to begin in Nashua, NH, Duane Erickson is about to begin his 26th season helping out the youth community.

A local business owner, Erickson has been involved in the community for most of his life, though he wasn’t even born in New England. Part of a struggling farming family in Illinois, Erickson worked to make ends meet for his family and maintain his elite grades in high school, all the while becoming a budding local baseball star.

With all of these elements combined, Erickson earned a scholarship to play at Arizona, where he played for 4 years against the likes of Reggie Jackson. What he takes from it though isn’t the plays he made or the line drives that he hit, but rather the meaningful lessons that he learned in such an environment.

“To play on such a high level was one thing,” Erickson said, “but to learn what I did through the process was quite another.”

Erickson has devoted himself to the youth of Nashua not to just teach them how to field a ground ball, but rather to want to field the ground ball, to want to put in the effort required to do it.

“It’s one thing to teach a young player how to hit, but it’s another thing to have the player desire to learn how to hit, to get into the meat and potatoes of it and to put in the time and effort to accomplish it. If you do this, you begin to see them not only change as a ballplayer, but as a person too.”

Erickson recently struggled for his life, spending a significant stay in the hospital after internal hemorrhaging forced him to the emergency room. This, he says, helped him realize that, perhaps, his time may be running short and that it is his responsibility to help kids any way he can.

“Coming out of it, I just realized that maybe God was saying, ‘Don’t let up, you’ve got some time. Use it.’ From then on, I felt it’s been kind of my duty to help out. I feel that’s a responsibility for everyone, to help when there’s an opportunity.”

Erickson works mainly behind the scenes and fails to garner the credit he deserves, all the while refusing to take any sort of monetary profit from it.

“I’ll tell ya why I don’t take the money. What if a kid doesn’t have any money to give? Does it make him any less deserving to play ball? Does it make him any less deserving to learn? No.

“If you’re doing the right thing, I think, then money shouldn’t matter on either end. It’s hard to say something like this while businesses, including mine, are going through the struggles that they are, but the reward for me, knowing that when my time is done I will have helped even just one kid, that’ll be enough.”