Sometimes memories are so clear what occurred could have happened five minutes ago.
Like a line drive to left-centerfield — a low-flying rocket — that kept going until it splashed down in the Hudson River.
An early version of a McCovey Cove shot, except it was in Haverstraw, not San Francisco, and to left-center, not right.
And memories like being 14 and striking out future Major Leaguer Walt Weiss in front of a sea of college and pro scouts there almost exclusively for Weiss, who didn’t get a hit but did steal two bases, score and field like a vacuum.
Or the satisfaction of seeing kids pull together to finally win a state cross-country title after 25 years of coaching and a year after they’d had to settle for second place in the state.
Or the mental-patchwork images of non-stop softball being played behind a bar every weeknight and all day on Sunday. And fast-forwarding decades later to winning a final softball championship at age 60 — catching in a 35-plus fast-pitch softball league.
These things and so very much more will be talked about and laughed about, hashed and rehashed this weekend when sports in Rockland County are celebrated over a two-day span with four large events at the Crowne Plaza on the Suffern/Mahwah, N.J. line.
The brainchild of former Spring Valley High and Rockland Community College baseball star Andre Chiavelli, the weekend will unofficially kick off Friday at 7 p.m. with an all-comers-welcome casual gathering at the Crowne Plaza’s bar.
Already, 150 people from various areas and eras of Rockland sports have said they’ll attend that.
The four official events are slated for Saturday and Sunday afternoon and evening.
And while tickets will be available at the door, nearly 1,000 overall have already been sold.
The celebration will include a relaunch of the dormant Spring Valley High School Sports Hall of Fame with multiple inductions from multiple sports. That event will run 3 p.m.-7 p.m. Saturday
That evening, 8 p.m.-midnight, a celebration of all who’ve ever coached in Rockland County will be held with 50 coaches singled out for special recognition.
As part of the coach celebration, a college scholarship will be awarded to Dimitri Pierre, a 2023 Ramapo High School graduate, who overcame stage 4 cancer to wrestle last winter as a senior on the East Ramapo team.
The following day, the Ramapo High School Sports Hall of Fame will celebrate the induction of new members. That will run 11 a.m.-3 p.m.
Then, 6 p.m.-10 p.m., the Rockland Softball Hall of Fame will induct everyone from coaches to high school and college stars to those who excelled on a recreational level.
The latter includes people like 65-year-old Ed Herdemian, who managed and played for multiple high-level recreation teams in a career that started as a player in 1979, included that final championship five years ago as both a manager and catcher and likely concluded (at least as a player and manager —- he’s now league commissioner) in 2022 — that is barring any Roger Clemens-, Michael Jordan- and Tom Brady-like return.
Herdemian is officially being inducted for his managerial success.
As of Wednesday night, 325 people had bought tickets to the $20-a-head (pizza and beer served and a cash bar open) to the coaches salute, which will feature addresses from two former local high school star athletes, who went on to have professional sports careers.
One will be Suffern High graduate and former Houston Astros manager and Oakland A’s and NY Mets coach Tony DeFrancesco.
The other is Tappan Zee High and Syracuse University graduate Blaise Winter, who played for several NFL teams over 11 years, most notably with the Indianapolis Colts, who drafted him in 1984, and with the Green Bay Packers.
The other events, while not quite as large, are also drawing big numbers despite $110 tickets that include full meals. (There will be a cash bar at both.)
Both the Softball and the Ramapo Hall events were up to 180 registrants and Spring Valley was at 160, Chiavelli reported Wednesday night, noting he expected numbers to grow for all four events.
The jam-packed weekend is an outgrowth of the response Chiavelli got to creating a couple of Facebook pages a few years ago as sites to reminisce about Rockland sports with memory blurbs, videos and photos.
He was expecting a positive response to the pages but not the thousands of postings that followed, most coming on the Facebook page Rockland’s Greatest Group.
That enthusiasm fueled the thinking that led to this weekend.
“We took a long shot with so many events,” said Chiavelli, who runs a consulting and sports memorabilia business.
“It just exploded into this big thing. It’s just massive,” he said of the weekend. “It’s all about reuniting — bringing people back together again.”
Included among the coaches being recognized is Joe Biddy, who concluded 56 years as a track and field and cross-country coach last spring.
Biddy,81, began his coaching career with a year at New Rochelle High and moved on to Suffern High for 50 years before spending the last five at Rockland’s St. Thomas Aquinas College.
Biddy, who noted he had a “special affinity for cross-country” and considers it the “purest sport with the hardets workers,” is the winningest boys high school cross-country coach in New York with 762 victories, including a couple of state championships.
Reflecting on coaching, he said, “It was just fun. I just loved doing it.”
“Kids, they’re like so easy to work with. If they believe in you, they’ll run through walls,” he said.
And most often on successful teams, kids also believe in each other.
David Noriega, who’ll be inducted into Spring Valley’s Sports Hall of Fame along with his teammates from the Tigers’ 1983 squad, which won both the then-Public School Athletic League title, which encompassed all Rockland high schools, and the Section 9 championship, will also give the introductory speech as one of those teammates is also inducted individually.
That will be Pete Capello, the author of that indelible-memory drive into the Hudson, a 3-run shot that secured the Rockland title 10-8 over North Rockland.
Without it, Noriega, who was on second at the time, noted, there would have been no section title and no team induction this weekend.
Noriega, who pitched and played first for Spring Valley’s varsity, starting as a freshman, was a junior in that title year, which was Capello’s last at the school.
Noriega was a very good player, who started and won both championship games that year. He went on to play college ball for Rockland Community College, Wagner College and Dominican College, earning All-American honors one year as a first baseman.
But he wasn’t in the same stratosphere as Capello, who, he maintains, had very much the same cannon arm and near-flawless glove of Weiss and a bigger bat, but just not Weiss’s speed.
Capello went on to play on scholarship for Pace University from which he was drafted in the 14th round in 1986 by the Kansas City Royals; he played four years of minor league ball, reaching Double A, before injuries ended his career.
“He was one of the best shortstops I’d seen — probably the best Spring Valley ever had and probably one of the best in Rockland County history,” said Noriega, who got that close-up look at Weiss, who probably holds that No. 1 spot.
Noriega, of course, was the 14-year-old freshman Noriega, who recorded at least a moral victory of sorts, not allowing Weiss a hit and striking him out once, although Suffern won that game.
Capello, Noriega recalled, had two hits in that game.
While Noriega said in a 14-year-old’s mind, that gave Capello the victory over the future Major League all-star shortstop and future MLB manager, he now gives Weiss his due.
“Walt Weiss was smooth. He was awesome. He was lightening fast,” he noted.
Herdemian also played baseball, graduating from Spring Valley in 1976, before moving on to play softball in 1979.
But it’s his talent managing talent that’s the reason he’ll be honored this weekend.
While some may dismiss recreational softball as beer league fun, played by as many non-athletes as true athletes, the kind of softball Hermedian played and managed for decades was far different.
But, then, softball in Rockland for many years was different.
It was king of the summer.
The Journal News, both he and Chiavelli (himself a Spring Valley baseball player — Class of 1978) recalled, routinely gave more ink to softball than to the New York Yankees.
This not only was the pre-Jeter days of the Yankees but also a time when a field now sadly lost to condominiums hosted hundreds of games and thousands of players each summer.
It was located in West Nyack, behind the now-gone Deer Head Tavern. Not only did high-level fast-pitch games go on every night of the week and all day on Sunday, but every summer a tournament was held that included 80 teams.
Hermedian, who both played and managed teams in the tournament, noted while this wasn’t windmill pitching, hurlers were still fireballers.
While it might not have appeared on their IRS forms, some prized pitchers who played in the league were not exactly amateurs.
“The rumors were there were pitchers that got paid. I’m pretty sure the rumors were true,” he said, noting some of those pitchers ended up on teams he managed and played for in other leagues and confirmed they’d personally been paid.
In his younger days, Hermedian sometimes played for five leagues at once.
Softball was oxygen to many. And there was no shortage of talent.
Hermedian won countless championships but particularly treasures those won in more recent years.
His Pearl River Saloon team won the Rockland Senior League (35-and-up) five straight years, 2009-2013, before two of his pitchers were banned for being too good.
But in 2018, with “really good pitching,” but not the incredible hurlers it once had, his team won again with him behind the plate and, of course, managing.
“That most the most gratifying (of all the championships),” he said.
Hermedian will no doubt talk about that game and about the big hits and big catches made in others, as well as those unhittable fireballers during induction night.
And, like probably many who have registered to attend one or more of the events, he’s most looking forward to reconnecting.
“It’s very special to me,” he said of the event. “I’m looking forward to seeing lots of guys. A lot I haven’t seen in years.”
Rockland Softball Hall of Fame 2023 inductees
Manager Ed Herdemian; Clarkstown North/Seton Hall University pitcher Danielle DeStaso;; North Rockland/St. Thomas Aquinas pitcher Jackie DiNuzzo; catcher Don Fortino; infielder Steve Loscher; Pearl River/SUNY-Oneonta pitcher Katie O’Flynn; the 1983-‘84 North Rockland girls softball team; Riverside Café teams; catcher Bob Ramundo; outfielder Billy Seymour; infielder Don Toto; Pearl River High/St. Thomas Aquinas pitcher Allison Vickers and the late Bob Tortorello, whose family will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award in his honor.
Ramapo Sports Hall of Fame 2023 inductees
The late Chuck Scarpulla (Special Dedication Award ); Eric Bergstol, basketball; coach Fred Bloom and the 1978 baseball team; Juliet Brown, track; Magic Celestin, soccer; Al Cole, pro boxing; Calvin Crosslin, track; Mike Lakes, football; 1984 boys basketball team; Tony Marciano, wrestling; Ray Melendez, baseball; Jeff Nichols, basketball, football and track and field; coach Gary Shoonmaker; Dawn Sugrue, basketball and the late Bob Tortorello, baseball.
Local sports leader dies:Former Sleepy Hollow, Ramapo AD and Pearl River star athlete Chuck Scarpulla remembered
Spring Valley Sports Hall of Fame 2023 inductees
Jim Ashcroft, athlete and coach (Lifetime Achievement Award); 1983 baseball team; Ennedy Basquiat, basketball; Percy Boykin and the 1989 football team; Pete Capello, baseball; Gardy Charles, basketball; Andrew Delva Sr., (Victory Coaching Award); Chris DeMaria, sports medicine; Skip Feinberg, football, basketball, baseball; Bobby Greenberg, soccer; Shilesha Johnson, Vincent Jordan, football; track; coach Mark Katz; Brian Lehrer, soccer; Rick Sarter, football; Timmy Thompson, football and Wendi Williams, basketball.
Nancy Haggerty covers cross-country, track & field, field hockey, skiing, ice hockey, basketball, girls lacrosse and other sporting events for The Journal News/lohud. Follow her on Twitter at @HaggertyNancy.