OHS alum Dylan Judd named captain at UMass

It’s awesome knowing that your teammates and coaches have that mutual respect and trust to look up to you in moments where things get tough.”

Dylan Judd

Dylan Judd is an athlete who likes to have the whole field in front of him. At Oceanside High School, Judd played catcher on the baseball team and safety in football, graduating in 2018. Both positions give him a chance to see plays develop before he made his move.

Though the status of Major League baseball this spring remains in doubt, college baseball is just starting up. The University of Massachusetts Minutemen began their season last weekend, with Judd, a 21-year-old senior, as one of their new captains, having been voted into the leadership role by his teammates back in December. Judd played all three games behind the plate against Georgetown in UMass’s opening series last weekend.

“I am very pleased with the team’s selection of Dylan and Kevin [Dow] as captains for the 2022 season,” head coach Matt Reynolds stated in a press release. “They both exemplify the character, work ethic, and performance standards on and off the field that we would expect from our student-athletes.”

Last season, Judd started all 42 games behind the plate and batted .312, with 7 home runs and 50 runs batted in, while also leading the team in slugging percentage, .493, and fielding percentage, .968. Fittingly, he models his game after some of his favorite catchers of the past and present — Jorge Posada, Gary Sanchez and J.T. Realmuto. “Nowadays, you don’t see a lot of good-hitting catchers,” Judd told the Herald. “They’re kind of few and far between.”

Judd has wanted to play ball since he was 3, and practicing with his older brother in their backyard in Island Park. Tyler Judd was a pitcher, so someone needed to catch for him. “It’s a position where you needed a tough kid to get back there,” Dylan said. “You put the gear on, and you feel like you’re gearing up for war.”

He fell in love with the game when he was playing in the Island Park Little League against his friends from Oceanside. As an 11-year-old, Dylan played on Tyler’s older team, and helped it win the league championship. “From that moment on, I knew this is where I belonged,” Dylan said.

He credited his brother, and his coaches at Oceanside High, for challenging him to be a better player. Judd played for the Sailors from 2015 to 2018, and was ranked the 10th-best catcher in New York state as a senior, according to Rawlings’ High School Rankings.

At OHS, he refined the communication skills a catcher needs to have with his pitcher, and did something similar as a football safety. In both positions, Judd called plays and served as the last line of defense.

Though he is a senior at UMass, he has one more year of college eligibility because of the pandemic, which led to the cancellation of his sophomore season in 2020. “Not being able to compete is the weirdest feeling in the world when you do it every single day in your entire life,” he said.

Covid made last year difficult as well, but Judd said he was thankful that he had the chance to bond with his teammates in a modified season, when they were grateful just to get back out on the diamond again. When they weren’t playing, they could do little more than hang out with one another, which brought them closer together.

Now the Minutemen are finally getting back to the rhythms of a normal season, with Judd as one of the captains. “It’s awesome knowing that your teammates and coaches have that mutual respect and trust to look up to you in moments where things get tough,” he said. “It’s definitely an honor.”