For the Carbone family, baseball is not a profession but a lifestyle. Retiring Ohio coach Joe Carbone is the same man at home as he is in the dugout, meaning that his daughters have no offseason from America’s pastime.
At home, he is still full of quotes and never lacks advice. His demands are stringent and the bar is set high, but those who know him would not expect anything else.
For Cristy and Sarah Carbone, Joe’s daughters, everything can be reduced to an analogy to the sport that dominated their childhoods.
“You’re not going to get better at something if you don’t practice.”
“School first, fundamentals second.”
Growing up in the Carbone household was comparable to any suburban childhood, except that every conversation, demonstration and vacation somehow related back to four bases spaced 90 feet apart, surrounded by a fence with a hill in the middle.
“You can’t turn that coaching gene off,” Cristy said. “When I was trying out for volleyball in middle school, I liked it so much because my dad didn’t know anything about volleyball. But he told me in order to serve the ball overhand, you had to pitch it like a baseball.”
If a volleyball had four seams, that might have helped. But looking back, their father’s advice bounced them in the right direction in life, regardless of the platform.
“My daughters were raised at a ball field,” said Pat, Joe’s wife. “We sat under the stands and they played in the gravel. … When we got the job at OU, it was just a part of them.”
And they didn’t leave that part behind when they had to make a decision about where to pursue a college education. The natural fit was Ohio University.
“I wouldn’t choose not to go to OU because of my dad (coaching there),” Sarah said.
Both Carbone daughters said attending OU was awkward at times but fulfilling as a whole. They were granted the freedom of “normal” college students, though their West Green homes were only a block from Bob Wren Stadium and The Convo, where their father went to work every day.
The Carbone sisters had established OU as their home years before they moved into the residence halls.
Growing up, they accompanied their dad on bus trips and were a constant presence behind the backstop at home games.
“Sarah and I felt like we had 30 older brothers,” Cristy said. “When we were on the bus, we always had to watch Disney movies, nothing PG-13, and when someone yelled a cuss word, everyone would yell, ‘Shhh!’ ”
But once Happy Meals turned into dining-hall cuisine, the mantra changed. Both daughters admitted to feeling out of place at times, being that they were at least partially in the public eye.
“The first time I went to Boyd Dining Hall, I had this table of guys looking at me and talking,” Sarah said. “As I was sitting there, I realized it was a baseball table. It was kind of awkward at first, but I didn’t really mix with them too much.”
The Carbones sold their house in Athens this spring and will move to Columbus to be closer to family friends and a major airport so they can visit their daughters, who now live in Chicago, more frequently.
“I’ve always felt bad that I didn’t spend enough time with my daughters as they were growing up,” Joe Carbone said. “So now I want to be able to spend some more time with them, as they’re adults now.”
jr992810@ohiou.edu
