NEWS

NORTH ADAMS, Mass. – Frank Holbrook, manager of the Newport Gulls, has been selected as the New England Collegiate Baseball League (NECBL) Joel Cooney Manager of the Year, while Joe Gravina of United Collegiate Umpires was voted Umpire of the Year for the 2023 season.

 

Holbrook’s Gulls won the Coastal Division for a second straight season with a 31-11-1 regular season record, just one win shy of the league record set by the 2006 Gulls and matched by the 2022 Vermont Mountaineers and Bristol Blues. Holbrook was also voted as the East Division manager in the 2023 All-Star Game.

 

Newport entered the 2023 postseason as the No. 1 overall seed, earning home field advantage throughout the playoffs. After losing their playoff opener at Cardines Field, the top-seeded Gulls won consecutive games against the Ocean State Waves while facing elimination, and then won six straight games including a championship series sweep against the Bristol Blues to clinch their league-leading seventh NECBL Championship. 

 

Holbrook, who was with the Gulls organization in his college days, is now a two-time NECBL champion. While pitching for them in 2012, he finished 3-0 with 23 strikeouts in 21.2 innings of work and the Gulls won their fifth NECBL title. He then returned in 2013 as an assistant manager, and the Gulls reached the NECBL finals again, but fell short of back-to-back titles. 

 

From 2014-18, Holbrook served as an assistant coach at his alma mater, Wheaton College, before leaving to accept a head coach position at Rhode Island College for the 2019 season. In the first year at RIC, his team broke the program record for wins, going 26-16, following that in 2021 with a 23-11 record.

 

Holbrook returned to the Gulls in 2022 as a manager and helped the team win the Coastal Division and clinch a playoff berth as the No. 3 seed with a 30-14 regular season record, but Newport was eliminated in the Wild Card round by the No. 6 seed Sanford Mainers.

 

Across his four years as a player, assistant and manager, Holbrook has a 122-49-1 career record with the Gulls organization. 

 

Gravina is a six-year veteran with the United Collegiate Umpires Association and has experience umpiring for 50+ Division Ⅰ programs within several conferences including the ACC, Big Ten, Big East and Ivy League among others. He has umpired four Division I conference tournaments and two NCAA Division 1 Regionals. Gravina, who helps train fellow United umpires, has umpired four NECBL All-Star games (2017, 2018, 2021, 2022) serving as crew chief in one of them.

 

Before his time as a collegiate umpire, the Rhode Island native served as a mathematics teacher at La Salle Academy from 2008-2010 and a substitute teacher at Cumberland Public Schools from 2010-2011. Gravina also has experience as a referee for the Rhode Island Wrestling Officials Association.

 

“I would like to congratulate Joe Gravina on being selected the New England Collegiate Baseball League (NECBL) Umpire of the Year,” said United Collegiate Umpires president Chris Marshall. “Joe has exhibited a very high level of performance and professionalism both on and off of the field and embodies all that United Umpires and the NECBL stand for.”

 

About the Joel Cooney Award

 

The NECBL Manager of the Year award is named after Joel Cooney, an aerospace engineer by trade who was instrumental in the founding of the New England Collegiate Baseball League.

 

Joel and a group of visionaries, including founder Joseph Consentino, met at ESPN in 1993 with the notion that college ballplayers needed a place to polish their skills in a competitive environment with qualified coaches during the summer. Joel was elected NECBL president in 1995 and was instrumental in the circuit gaining NCAA sanctioning that led to funding from Major League Baseball. He was bumped to the commissioner’s chair in 1997 to make way for former MLB Commissioner Fay Vincent to become president.