Xavier Mann is getting his first taste of college baseball. He is waking up at 5 a.m. for autumn workouts at Lenoir-Rhyne University in North Carolina, about 650 miles from Shoshone Park in Buffalo, where he began playing the game not long after kindergarten.
Much has changed in the few months since last spring, when he batted a celestial .689 and was named All-Western New York for City Honors School. The oldest of two kids, he said his goodbyes two weeks ago to his proud and emotional mother and father, and then stepped into those first, unforgettable weeks of college:
New school. New teammates. Even a new climate.
What does not change is who he is, or what shapes his life.
Xavier, 17, makes that reflection while thinking with gratitude about the committee that made him one of the first 10 recipients of a scholarship created to honor the late Lt. Aaron Salter Jr., a panel that searched for students projecting similar commitment.
“I’ve got a few scholarships, but this one really stood out for me in the gravity of what it means,” Xavier said. “I couldn’t believe I was receiving it. When everything happened, I couldn’t imagine so many people like me just being gone. I thought: We’ve got to do something. We’ve got to come together.”
For Lum Smith, a historian with deep knowledge of the African-American experience in Buffalo, the meaning of those feats of hitting the ball over the scoreboard will always…
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