Note: Hope Athletics will profile student-athletes from all 22 of its varsity sports throughout the 2015-16 school year and highlighting their pursuits and achievements in the classroom.
Story by Eva Dean Folkert and photo by Alan Babbitt
Ask Hope College senior baseball player Mitch Reitsma to name his favorite class during his four-year college career, and be prepared. Some major-league hemming and hawing is about to ensue.
Posed with that question recently, Reitsma, a management major also on a pre-medical-school track, removed his ball cap and massaged his furrowed temple with his fingertips as if to extract the answer from his brain through his skin. He agonized, hesitated, and then finally replied, "Do I have to pick just one? It would be impossible to choose just one favorite class." When the questioner relented on the limitation of the answer, Reitsma's brow eased and he smiled. "Good. Ok, then I can think of seven…maybe more. Can I have more than seven?"
When almost every college class is a student-athlete's favorite, it's a good sign of two things: the quality of the education he is receiving and the quality of the student himself. Reitsma can't choose one class (and perhaps it's an unfair question anyway) because his keen love of learning and his Hope professors' passionate delivery of scientific, managerial, and liberal arts lessons are all equally salient for the young scholar-pitcher who has his heart set on becoming a doctor-businessman.
Don't think those two professions go together? Reitsma can't see how they don't.
"When people say business has no place in medicine, I'd like to clarify and constructively disagree," says the Ada, Michigan, native and Grand Rapids Christian graduate. "Good business practice can provide better health care when applied carefully and judiciously."
To achieve both career goals, Reitsma plans on taking an atypical gap year after graduating from Hope this May, with about a 3.90 GPA, before entering medical school. He won't travel or work in the in-between, though. Instead, he'll enroll in an MBA program in order to equip both of his callings toward gaining better understandings of health insurance, leadership, and business administration.
"As a businessman in a medical practice, system-wide understanding is important on a macro-level, and helping with quality of life, saving lives is what it is all about on a micro-level," says Reitsma, who had worked two summers in the finance and payer relations departments at Spectrum Health in Grand Rapids. "I find that I am passionate about things where a lot of hard work creates success. It's a thrill to put your best out there and earning a master's in business administration, as well as a medical degree, are ways I can do that."
Baseball is another way to give his best, too, of course. A righty hurler, Reitsma "understands the game exceptionally well," says Coach Stu Fritz. "He knows (batting) numbers and the plate location of opponents' preferences inside and out. He's just a great student of the game. "
But sometimes the A student overthinks. In the past, his highly analytical and meticulous mind consumed his approach to pitching, he says. This past fall though, during the team's non-traditional season, Reitsma took a new angle at throwing his curve – and his fastball too, for that matter. With trust in his own ability and a reliance on hundreds of hours of practice, Reitsma discovered a more intuitive method of practicing his 60-foot-6-inch-long craft. In other words, his head got (mostly) out of the way of his arm. And it resulted in his best fall ball season on the mound ever. With spring season competition just 4 weeks away, "he's fired up now and ready and willing to play whatever role he's given – whether that's middle relief or as a weekend starter," affirms Fritz.
Reitsma, a devout Christian, sees the practice of baseball, business, and medicine as a return on God's investment for the intellectual and physical gifts he has been given. He knows more long hours of sacrifice in using those gifts await him for one more baseball season and in a decade of continued education ahead. Yet, sacrifice for a team and toward affecting someone's health and life "is the greatest kind of service I know," he says.
"When I was shadowing in interventional cardiology, I worked with a doctor who showed me powerful service," explains Reitsma, who has spent dozens of hours shadowing physicians in several medical specialties. "Going into surgery one day, an 80-year-old patient was a little scared and said to him, 'Come hug me.' And of course, the doctor did. Now, if I could do that everyday, that would be fantastic."
In fact, it would probably be one of his favorites.
