CUMBERLAND — If you sat down a dozen of Bobby Cavanaugh’s former baseball players, you’d hear a dozen of the same stories.

To his high school players, he was a strict but fair disciplinarian who won nearly 400 games with bunting and fundamentals.

When it came to his pee-wee and farm system players, he believed that every kid plays. He put an emphasis on having fun learning those fundamentals and to play the game the correct way.

He never cussed, he always looked like a coach adorned with a pair of khakis, a T-shirt and a whistle around his neck, and he always treated others with respect.

Coach Cavanaugh died in 1984 before I was born, but the words of his ex-players, a dozen of whom returned as guest coaches at Coach Cavanaugh’s Baseball Farm System camp last weekend, made you feel like you knew him.

Former Fort Hill baseball head coach Jeff Brode, 57, did not play for Cavanaugh, but he participated in the pee-wee baseball infrastructure Cavanaugh helped build at local playgrounds around the area.

Now his son, current Fort Hill coach Tanner Brode, and the rest of the Sentinels’ staff are trying to keep Cavanaugh’s legacy alive with a camp bearing his name.

“It’s great that they’ve decided to do something like this,” Jeff Brode said. “There are usually not many baseball camps. ... We always have football this, football that, and it’s good to try to build up a different sport.”

Cumberland sports aficionados know the name Bobby Cavanaugh well, and they probably know it from his basketball rivalry with Allegany’s Bill Bowers.

Bowers got the better of him on the hardwood compiling a 567-164 record with 11 state championships from 1927-55, but Cavanaugh wasn’t far off with a 525-216 mark and seven state titles in 30 years at Penn Avenue and Fort Hill (1929-58).

Cavanaugh’s main passion was on the ballfield, where his Fort Hill teams went 387-164-3 — a remarkable feat with an average of 16 games a season in those days.

Fort Hill won five pre-Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association baseball state championships in 1938, ‘39, ‘48, ‘49 and ‘58, as well as 10 Allegany County titles in a time when there were eight county schools.

Cavanaugh was a member of the inaugural Maryland State Association of Baseball Coaches Hall of Fame class in 1992.

As an athlete, Cavanaugh, a native of Waterbury, Connecticut, was a four-sport star at Washington College in Chestertown. He quarterbacked the football team and made a 55-yard drop kick in a 3-0 win over St. John’s College in 1923.

Cavanaugh was inducted into the Washington College Hall of Fame in 1981, was the first football, basketball and baseball coach at Fort Hill and refereed the first football game played between Allegany and LaSalle high schools.

What isn’t gleaned from a record book, however, was Cavanaugh’s profound impact on youth baseball in Cumberland and the surrounding area.

In the 1940s and ‘50s in Cumberland, Dapper Dan Little League sponsored 16 teams, and there were more kids who signed up and went undrafted because there weren’t enough spots.

Those youths, therefore, had no place to play organized baseball in the summer.

Cavanaugh, Cumberland’s first full-time playground director, began what he called his “farm system” in 1950, a camp for those undrafted players to hone their skills and for younger kids not old enough for Dapper Dan to learn the game and get drafted the following year.

Each “farm team” was affiliated with a Dapper Dan team, and players who didn’t play much in Dapper Dan were eligible to play on the farm team.

Youths aged 8-12 learned how to bunt — a trademark of all Cavanaugh teams — swing the bat properly, run the bases, apply a tag, catch with two hands and field a ground ball.

At the conclusion of the camp portion, a pee-wee season began. Cavanaugh even went as far as to score the games and report standouts to the newspaper, so those “B league” players felt as important as the Dapper Dan ones.

Cavanaugh had his Fort Hill players act as student helpers, and local youths umpired the games, with Cavanaugh overseeing with a watchful eye to make sure the rules were being properly applied.

It was a feeder system for umpires as much as it was for players.

He ran the camp for 26 years, and former Cumberland Times Sports Editor Suter Kegg put the scope of his impact in perspective in a 1984 column following Cavanaugh’s death:

“Consider that an average of 350 youngsters, boys and girls, have played baseball in the farm system. Multiply that by 26, then add the thousands he tutored as a scholastic coach in all sports, plus those who came under his influence as the city’s first full-time playground director, and you’ll come up with a total to stagger the imagination.”

While the primary goal of Fort Hill’s camp last weekend was to introduce baseball to those in grades second through sixth, honoring the legacy of the program’s most legendary coach was a close second.

“When first taking over, we wanted to tie it back to some of our roots with Fort Hill and Fort Hill baseball,” head coach Tanner Brode said. “He was the best to ever do it, in my opinion.

“Just hearing how those guys, our guest coaches, revered him, and how much they respected him and the stories they could tell and that they’re still carrying on that legacy. They’re trying to live life the way that he did.”

One of those guest coaches was Olin Perkins, 79, who played for coach Cavanaugh from 1962-64 at Fort Hill.

Perkins went on to play four years of baseball at Frostburg State before earning his master’s degree at Towson and returning to Allegany County as an elementary physical education teacher.

While he didn’t play in Cavanaugh’s farm system, Perkins saw it first-hand as a helper and umpire, which he did for four years.

“It was actually coach Cavanaugh that really got me interested in teaching kids and coaching,” he said. “That’s why I went into the profession that I did.

“Coach Cavanaugh was really a great coach. He knew fundamentals and we practiced game situations and that led me into playing for coach (Bob) Wells at Frostburg State.”

Gus Caporale, 78, the owner of Caporale’s Bakery in Cumberland, a business that’s in its fourth generation of family ownership spanning more than 120 years, played for Cavanaugh.

Cavanaugh’s insistence on a “right way” to do things left an impact on Caporale too.

“Coach Cavanaugh ran such a class-act program and was a class-act guy,” he said. “Such a role model for all of us. I remember coming up, you couldn’t wait to play for coach and for Fort Hill. Then when you got the opportunity to take the field in that uniform, you thought you had made it.

“Coach taught us all to do our best and do things the right way, which we have all tried to carry with us throughout our lives.”

Cavanaugh was known for his squeeze play. If you faced one of his teams with a runner at third and less than two outs, you knew a bunt was forthcoming.

According to Fred Bartik, 73, who played for him from 1967-69 at Fort Hill and took part in his farm system as an eight-year-old, other teams could easily steal his signs if they wanted to.

“I always like to tell everybody that the signs he had for bunts and steals and all were the same every year, and he started coaching in 1937 when the school opened up,” Bartik said. “No indicator.”

It didn’t seem to help.

“Anybody that coached against him will tell you that he was notorious for a squeeze play,” said Wes Powell, 72, who played for Cavanaugh at Fort Hill and attended his camps as a player and as a helper.

“Everyone knew it was coming and tried to stop it. And it was just repetition at practice every day, every day. That’s what made him so good.”

Cavanaugh had pound-for-pound the best coaching staff around; his former players can’t recall him ever having an assistant.

Bill Dean, 80, shared memories of his 1963 Fort Hill team that won the City title over Allegany and imposing 6-foot-7 pitcher Steve Vandenberg — who went on to play at Duke on a basketball scholarship — and the county crown over Mount Savage and Bobby Robertson, a 1971 World Series champion with the Pittsburgh Pirates.

“Coach Cavanaugh is a person you will never ever forget,” Dean said. “He was a wonderful man. He treated everybody with compassion and dignity. If you got down on yourself or something like that, he was always encouraging.

“We won games with the bunt when everybody knew it was coming, but they couldn’t stop it. Fundamentals were key to his game — back up every throw, catcher at first, middle infield to pitcher back from the catcher, outfield to every base. He made sure we did the little things the right way. Simple stuff, and it became automatic.”

Homer Hardinger, 81, played for Cavanaugh from 1959-62 and shared his memory of a freshman-year Robertson, years before he clubbed four homers in the 1971 NLCS and three in Game 2 alone.

“(Coach) went out to John Price and he says, ‘don’t you throw it in there (belt) high,” Hardinger said. “Well, John did, and Bobby hit it out over the trees. And I’ll never forget it because I was playing left field when the ball hit the bat. I said, ‘Oh my, good night.’ And the ball went forever.”

Tom Mullaney, 66, a Bishop Walsh graduate who now lives near Dean in Dover, Delaware, played in Cavanaugh’s league.

He stopped playing baseball after his freshman year at Bishop Walsh, but he rekindled his love for the game by helping his former coach the following year.

Cavanaugh didn’t drive, and Mullaney and a friend who owned a car would collect Cavanaugh in the morning to go to their pee-wee league event. They’d stop at a local establishment at lunchtime for a refreshment and then take the coach home.

At around 1-2 p.m., they’d come get him for his next session and then take him home again afterwards.

“The other part of being a rec coach at that point, we umpired all the little league games,” Mullaney said. “We had to know the rules inside and out to be able to do that. Coach would come and he would do sessions with us. It was like classroom-type sessions, and we’d do scenarios, and we’d have to figure out what was the right call and how to go about those things.”

Mullaney went on to play for the undefeated 1978 Bishop Walsh baseball team for Ted Femi, a legendary coach in his own right whose son, Brian Femi, is the head coach of the St. Michaels team Allegany defeated in the Class 1A state championship game last season.

Near the end of Cavanaugh’s life, Mullaney was stationed in Las Vegas, and he’d call his former coach and report how Keyser’s John Kruk, a member of the AAA Las Vegas Stars, was doing.

Kruk was a career .300 hitter in the MLB and made three All-Star appearances in 10 seasons with the Padres, Phillies and White Sox.

Mullaney remembers playing youth ball with Paul Ackerman, who first suited up for Cavanaugh in the first grade in 1963.

Ackerman, 68, a 1975 Fort Hill graduate, signed with the Pittsburgh Pirates in the summer of 1979 and played in the organization for five years.

“The man was one of the most wonderful people that I’d ever met in my lifetime,” he said. “Gave me my chance as a first-grader competing against third- and fourth-graders, and I had a 60-year career in baseball.

“Almost like a second father to a lot of us way back in the day. Much more than just a coach.”