Joe Walsh’s first appearance on a Harvard field was not on the fresh spring morning of an Ivy League doubleheader, with lazy blue skies overhead and Crimson faithful dotting the stands.

Nor was it at a crisp New England fall practice as the team kicked off the school year with a few scrimmages before snowfall forced them indoors.

Nothing half so picturesque for the jovial Boston native.

No, Walsh’s inaugural practice on the Harvard turf occurred inauspiciously, more than eight years ago, in a fervent midnight usurpation of the Crimson’s facilities. Suffolk University, his alma mater and coaching home of 14 years, had no home field.

“We had t-shirts that used to say every year, ‘No Field, No Cage, No Problem,’” Walsh recalls fondly.

This predicament left the savvy coach no choice but to pilfer Harvard’s playing fields just to give his pitchers a mound to throw off. Undeterred by the lack of their own facilties, Walsh and his players would hop the fence and borrow the Crimson’s pitching mounds, tuning their change-ups and slinging their fastballs until dawn (or the athletic director) appeared to chase them off the premises.

“We had dubbed ourselves the Mutts; we were homeless,” Walsh says, remembering how a previous Harvard baseball coach, Alex Nahigian, would kick him out after Walsh had snuck in the back door of the field house.

Assistant coach Gary Donovan, who was with Walsh for seven years at Suffolk and followed him to Harvard, recollects how they used to scrounge for available fields.

“We were a group of vagabonds,” says Donovan.

But trespassing laws be damned when there’s baseball to practice. For Walsh, no measure was too extreme when it came to getting his team playing time, even for the low-on-the-radar Division III Rams. After 14 years as head coach at Suffolk, Walsh was used to scrambling for practice space in any way he could. In an effort to play the maximum number of games possible, he once split his squad so that they could play two opponents on separate fields simultaneously. It was challenging, but exhilarating. It made their wins all the more impressive. It was consistent with Walsh’s hard-nosed, scrappy approach to the game. He was homeless, and he was proud of it.

All that changed for Walsh when Harvard grad Joe O’Donnell made a hefty donation to the baseball program, providing for the first time the monetary opportunity for a full-time coach. When then-athletic director Bill Cleary called up Walsh to schedule an interview, the Suffolk coach was both startled and captivated.

“I always had wanted to be a Division I coach and had been labeled a D-III guy,” Walsh says.

The night before his interview, Walsh made a customary illicit visit to the Harvard baseball field—only this time without his players. As he trespassed for potentially the last time on the silent shadowy grounds, the vision of the future tantalized him.

“I just sat on the stands and walked the field, just preparing for my interview,” Walsh says. “I just wanted to get a feel for it, and I realized how much I loved baseball and wanted an opportunity.”

He got that opportunity. Cleary called after the interview to offer him the position of Harvard’s first full-time baseball coach. Walsh accepted wholeheartedly.