Tribune Excerpts

The following article appeared in the February 2008 Edition of the Macedonian Tribune

Macedonian Baseball Coach Honored With Stadium Naming

Fort Wayne – Chris Stavreti is a man for all sports, but baseball is his game, and he has a stadium named in his honor to prove it. Stavreti Field proudly serves Fort Wayne’s Northrop High School.

Chris knows how to win championships. He took the experience of winning a state title as a high school athlete to coaching a state championship high school baseball team.

He is a product of the 1940s and 50s growing up in the Macedonian community in Fort Wayne and attending high school where nearly every other Macedonian of that era went – South Side High School. Its teams were feared in every competition whether it was in debate or sports.

There he achieved All-City status in both basketball and football, and he was a star sprinter on the track team. It was in the half-mile relay that his team sprinted to the Indiana State Championship in 1956. He attended Western Michigan at Kalamazoo, but playing guard for the basketball team of the University of Miami at Coral Gables financed his college education. While there, he played in the NCAA tournament in 1960 and the NIT in 1961.

Interest in baseball began when he was nine years old. The Cleveland Indians were playing the Boston Braves in the 1948 World Series. He chose Cleveland and never changed allegiance.

How coincidental is it that the 2007 American League Manager of the Year was Eric Wedge of the Cleveland Indians, who was on Chris’s 1983 Indiana State Championship High School Baseball Team?

Stevan Baloski, Damian and Chris Gosheff are Macedonians who played for Chris, and Andy Lebamoff was one of his assistant coaches in the late 1980s. Chris never played high school baseball because the Fort Wayne schools didn’t offer the sport, but that didn’t stop this talented coach. In addition to the state championship, his coaching career at Northrop includes three semi-states, eight regionals, 13 sectionals and nine conference titles. He also coached at three other high schools in the area. In 1971, Fort Wayne schools decided to re-adopt baseball and the teams played in the city parks. Eventually, the school put in a backstop and the team played on a dirt infield. The team raised money for a fence, and the school installed it.

Chris was pleased to have his family with him when in the late 1990s he received the Fort Wayne Sports Corp Award for contributions to kids through sports. They are (from left) his brother-in-law Steve Bercot, his mother-in-law the late Kalopa Markoff, his daughter Sherri, his brother Carl, his wife Dorothy, his brother-in-law Bob Sordelet, his sisters-in-law Florence Sordelet and Lenka Bercot.

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