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Adam Rittenberg
EVANSTON, Ill. – Northwestern’s Jack Lausch prefers a planner.
He has a smartphone, but he doesn’t use a calendar app to map out his days.
He likes handwriting tasks in black ink, crossing out each one after completion. This spring, his planner is filled with scribbles.
Lausch, who started at quarterback for Northwestern in 2024, is participating in spring practice, but he’s also starting in center field for the school’s baseball squad. His days often begin around 5 a.m. at Northwestern’s football headquarters, and they end about a mile and a half away at Rocky and Berenice Miller Park, where the baseball team trains and plays.
The schedule typically allows time for both sports, and of course classes and meals, but there are a few “conflict days,” Lausch calls them. For instance, Lausch participated in a football practice last Saturday before flying that night to Michigan State to rejoin his baseball teammates for a series finale Sunday.
“Those are the tough ones,” he said.
Lausch’s days might seem like a logistical nightmare, but he’s living the dream. A decorated high school baseball prospect, he could be playing pro ball already if he had bypassed college. Yet, football brought him to campus, where he became QB1 for the Wildcats last fall.
Then, when the opportunity came to add baseball, he dove in, glove first.
“My mindset was always like, ‘If baseball is meant for me, it’ll come back to me,’ and it has,” Lausch said.
Lausch is reacclimating to baseball, where he has started 26 of 27 games that he has played, hitting .229 with two home runs and 12 RBIs. Despite a challenging season in football last fall, he’s still competing for snaps, and his coaches have seen improvement this spring.
But how much longer can he keep all this up and fill those notebook pages?
ATTEMPTING TO PLAY multiple sports in the Big Ten requires a mix of talent, ambition, confidence and organizational skills. Lausch checks all the boxes.
He grew up in Chicago’s Beverly neighborhood, on the city’s far South Side, playing baseball, football and basketball. In 2016, he began travel baseball with the Cangelosi Sparks organization at Bo Jackson’s Elite Sports. Lausch played baseball throughout spring and early summer, before pivoting to football around Aug. 1. But when football was canceled in 2020 amid the COVID pandemic, Lausch remained on the diamond all fall.
“That’s when he separated himself from the pack,” said Tyler Thompson, director of baseball operations for Cangelosi Sparks. “He started to get [MLB] interest.”
A rangy 6-foot-2 outfielder who hit left-handed and had the ability to steal bases and drive in runs, Lausch was rated the No. 23 outfielder in the 2022 class by Perfect Game and the No. 212 overall prospect by Baseball America. Lausch said he could have been drafted in the second or third round out of high school.
Every MLB draft pick in the first 10 rounds has slotted signing bonuses, and second- and third-round picks can sign for seven figures or high six figures. Lausch talked things over with his parents, John and Mary, who both were college athletes (John captained Harvard’s football team; Mary played volleyball at Wright State and Loyola-Chicago).
“A lot of parents would be like, ‘You’re going pro, you’re taking that money now,'” Lausch said. “But they were like, ‘Dude, if you want to go play college football, scholarship or no scholarship, we’re fully behind you doing that.'”
Lausch is diplomatic about his sporting preferences, saying his favorite varies by what is in season. But according to Thompson, “He loved football more than anything. It was his No. 1.” Why else would he pass up a hefty signing bonus to play in college?
After receiving interest from several top baseball programs, Lausch settled on a plan. He would go to Notre Dame, which wanted him for baseball and could also offer a preferred walk-on spot in football. Notre Dame has been especially welcoming to multisport athletes, including Jordan Faison, a starting midfielder in lacrosse and a starting wide receiver in football.
“I was excited, from a baseball standpoint, to play on a really good team,” he said. “And then, to be honest, from a football standpoint, I was ready to go in and be Notre Dame’s starting quarterback, walk-on or not.”
But Northwestern also had an opening for a scholarship quarterback and recruited Lausch, who accounted for 41 touchdowns (20 passing, 21 rushing) as a high school senior. As signing day neared, then-coach Pat Fitzgerald called to offer Lausch, who signed barely a week later.
“To be a scholarship Big Ten quarterback was a big deal, something I’d always wanted to do,” he said. “That was a big reason why I didn’t go somewhere else to play baseball.”
But a full pursuit of football caused Lausch to pause his baseball ambitions.
WEEKS AFTER BEING named Northwestern’s baseball coach in 2023, Ben Greenspan was hosting a recruit in his office when he received an urgent message: His truck was about to be towed.
Greenspan had parked on the street next to Northwestern’s football stadium, which hours later would host the home opener.
“I sprint out of the office, the guy’s putting my truck on the tow truck and I’m like, ‘Please, please, please, I’m the new baseball coach. I didn’t know I couldn’t park here. I’m begging you,'” Greenspan said.
Thankfully, a group of football parents had lined up outside the main tailgating lot, including John Lausch. The parents vouched for Greenspan, whose truck was spared.
“How perfect of an introduction,” said Greenspan, who had briefly scouted Jack Lausch as an Arizona State assistant. “We end up speaking that day, and I said, ‘Hey, I don’t want to muddy the water with football, but if there’s ever an interest, we need to sit down and talk.'”
Lausch, who scored his first college touchdown that day, had come to Northwestern with the understanding that he would focus solely on football in his first academic year.
“I would ask him sometimes if he regretted not playing baseball,” said running back Joseph Himon II, who lived with Lausch in the dorms. “He would say, ‘No.’ He loved football.”
But the first spring was tough, seeing friends playing major college baseball or starting their minor league careers.
Lausch briefly considered adding baseball as a sophomore and occasionally joined his friends on the team for batting practice. But Northwestern made an offensive coordinator change, and Lausch knew his chances of starting in 2024 hinged on absorbing the scheme. Baseball would have to wait.
After a strong spring, he took over as the starting quarterback after two games. He passed for 227 yards and two touchdowns, while adding 62 rushing yards, in his first start. The rest of Lausch’s season was uneven. He had five other 200-yard passing performances, but three of 108 yards or fewer.
He finished with more interceptions (8) than touchdown passes (7), and Northwestern ranked 111th in passing offense and 128th in scoring.
After finishing 4-8, Northwestern added transfer quarterback Preston Stone, who started at SMU in 2023 when the team won the conference title. Despite Stone’s arrival, Lausch kept pushing for snaps.
He also eyed a return to baseball, the sport he knew would always be there for him.
Former Northwestern quarterback Ben Bryant connected Lausch with Seattle Seahawks wide receiver John Rhys Plumlee, who started games at quarterback for both Ole Miss and UCF, while also playing center field. Plumlee told Lausch the key was going through the calendar with his coaches to see what was possible.
Lausch first contacted Greenspan, who was thrilled with the idea, before approaching football coach David Braun, who had taken over before the 2023 season. Strength coaches Alex Spanos (football) and John Ghibellini (baseball) also were consulted.
“I told Jack, ‘If there’s 100 guys who had that conversation with me, I’d tell 99 of them that this is a bad idea,'” Braun said. “With Jack, I was like, ‘If anyone can handle it, it’s you.'”
Everyone signed off on the plan, which brought excitement but also a sobering reality. Since fully committing to football in 2022, Lausch had swung a bat only about a dozen times.
“You need to see a million pitches,'” Greenspan told Lausch. “You need to lock yourself in a cage.”
THE DRIVE FROM Northwestern’s football building to the baseball complex takes about five minutes, but Lausch cherishes that time.
“To have a moment to myself in the car is really cool,” Lausch said. “Mentally, it helps a lot.”
Lausch’s daily transitions are swift and smooth. The stretch between the end of the football season to the start of the baseball season, meanwhile, helped give him a chance for success on the diamond.
Rather than straining in the football winter lifting program, Lausch retrained his body on how to hit and even how to throw a baseball. He was initially throwing all cutters, which mimicked the football motion, before making an adjustment.
Hitting was the bigger challenge, from timing to the mental approach toward at-bats. He had been prepared for the possibility, even playing right-handed in golf when he took up the sport recently to not “mess up” his baseball swing.
Lausch always had a bit too much swing-and-miss at the plate, which wasn’t helped by playing other sports. Greenspan anticipated some struggles as Lausch acclimated, but he didn’t pull back. Lausch started the first 26 games he played. He leads the team in strikeouts (44) and has only five walks, while hitting .118 against lefties.
“I knew that there would be some challenges offensively early on, just because of the layoff,” Greenpsan said. “What you’re going to see in February and March is going to be a very different player than April and May.”
He showed initial tentativeness on defense, letting a ball bounce over the wall that he could have attempted to catch. When Greenspan asked if the wall had made him hesitate, Lausch admitted it had.
“You’ve got to play like you’ve got nothing to lose,” Greenspan told Lausch.
“Yeah, I’ve been hit harder than that wall, I promise you,” Lausch replied.
‘Well, there you go. Let’s go make a play.”
Other football references have helped Lausch. When he was missing the cutoff man from the outfield, Greenspan told him to visualize throwing a pass over a linebacker, but in front of a safety, and Lausch quickly became an electric defender.
His offense has also picked up. He belted his first two home runs and had a career-high three hits on March 30 at Maryland, and now has six doubles. Lausch is also 3-for-3 on stolen bases.
“His mindset at Maryland really shifted from trying to prove that he belongs to like, ‘No, I know I’m good,'” Greenspan said. “I felt the way he walked to the batting box was like, ‘I’m going to get you.’ Early on, it was a little bit more timid on the bases. Now, he’s got the attitude of, like, ‘Turn me loose.'”
The diamond isn’t the only place Lausch is making progress.
“He’s playing his best football,” Braun said. “He still does all the work, he’s engaged in meetings, but I don’t think there’s this level of do-or-die on every play. Like, ‘I’m just going to show up and do my best. If it goes well, it goes well, and if it doesn’t, I’m going to try and win a baseball game.'”
Lausch’s football experience, even the difficult moments, is helping him in his baseball return. A ninth-inning at-bat, down a run, isn’t that different from running the two-minute drill.
“Playing in the Big House, playing at Wrigley [Field], playing at Washington, at Iowa, in front of 100,000 people, is the best experience you can get as a competitor,” he said. “You go into a baseball field, it doesn’t matter who’s pitching.”
WHEN NORTHWESTERN PLAYED its first home baseball game in March, about 30 of Lausch’s football teammates were there to cheer him on.
“We were all going crazy,” said safety Rob Fitzgerald, who lives with Lausch and two other football players. “Couldn’t be more proud of him. To play two college sports, that’s obviously super impressive and we all wish we were able to do that. Damn, that’s pretty badass.”
Braun has been supportive, making adjustments so he can be with the baseball team as much as possible. But he admits he would be “bummed” if Lausch doesn’t keep playing football. Lausch is eligible for the MLB draft and is set to graduate in June.
“He has the potential to be an every-day big league center fielder,” Greenspan said. “He runs, he throws, he defends, there’s power potential. His makeup is elite.”
Greenspan added that he’s not obligated to tell Lausch how to proceed.
“The local scouting community is so in love with Jack Lausch,” Thompson said. “Regardless of his numbers this year, I could see them drafting him. He’s got a higher ceiling in baseball — it’s as simple as that.”
Lausch is aware of his baseball outlook, and said his performance over the next six weeks could impact what he does next — go pro or return for another football and baseball season at Northwestern.
But he hasn’t reached that page in the planner yet. There are still plenty tasks to cross out.
“Going back to high school, I would always get stressed out about: Am I going to play college baseball, college football, pro ball?” he said. “I’ve really learned how to relax, just live in the moment and it’ll take care of itself.”
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