But now the hunted is the hunter, a recruiter rather than a recruit.

“There’s no place like Ross-Ade Stadium,” he tells a group of 15- and 16-year-old baseball players who have descended on the community to participate in the annual Colt World Series baseball tournament.

Each year, he takes the Colt World Series players on a tour of the Purdue campus. “It’s kind of like Gilligan’s Island,” Clark jokes, “a three-hour tour.”

Clearly, this is his favorite part of the tour, leading the baseball players down the ramp and onto the field.

“They can have the Horseshoe at Ohio State, or the Big House at Michigan, but to me, there is no place like Ross-Ade,” he tells them.

The tour, particularly the portion that includes the athletic facilities, is always a highlight for the players.

“I don’t have exact figures, but I’ll bet there have been at least 20 kids who have played in the World Series and have gone to Purdue,” Clark says. “They’ve enjoyed their stay in our community, liked what they saw in the university and decided to come here to get their degrees.”

Clark is vice president of Lafayette Colt Tournaments Inc., the organization that has hosted the Colt World Series baseball tournament every year since 1973. The responsibility of seeing that the tournament runs smoothly fills most of his waking moments for the four weeks before and the two weeks after the eight-day event held in early August at Lafayette’s Loeb Stadium.

“Yeah, I have to admit I don’t get a whole lot of work done during that time,” says Clark, who operates his own company, INTAC Management Group, LLC.

The company helps clients such as Caterpillar, Alcoa, Wabash National and the city of West Lafayette become more energy efficient.

“The nice thing about owning my own business is that I can take time off when I need to,” Clark says. And during the CWS, he needs to plenty.

His involvement with the tournament started in 1992, as a host family. Tim’s son, Timmy, had played youth baseball. Becoming a host family was a way to give back to the sport and to the community.

Since then, the Clarks have hosted 64 players from around the world, providing accommodations, food and transportation to games, practice sessions and CWS events. This year, Clark hosted six players — two from Mexico and four from the Bahamas.

“It’s great fun,” Clark says. “It’s a lot of running around, but I have a ball. Who wouldn’t? These are the best baseball players in the world. Not just in the U.S., but in the world!”

As vice president and board member of the local tourney organization for the past seven years, Clark’s responsibilities have grown as his involvement has increased. He is responsible for finding host families for 144 World Series players, organizing 36 local activities for the players and overseeing the stadium food tent during all the games.

He also is in charge of the purposefully vague duty of “game management.”

“I tell people that game management means everything that occurs between the two dugouts,” Clark says. “But sometimes I think it means ‘everything that didn’t get done when it was supposed to.’”

While Clark is amazed each year at how much committee workers accomplish to pull off the tournament, he has several ideas he would like to implement to enhance the CWS experience for participants and spectators alike.

Some are small and fairly easy to implement, such as adding a home run derby. Others fall into the “pie-in-the-sky” category.

“We do a great job of putting on the tournament, but there so many ways we can make it better. We need to increase revenue and profitability,” he says. Clark would like to secure major sponsorship for the tournament, in the same way Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes took over sponsorship of the Little League World Series this year.

Oddly enough, Clark sees the Little Leaguers as an inspiration for the Colt League. The 11- and 12-year-olds have games televised on ESPN, with the finals broadcast on ABC. Only two CWS games are televised (on tape delay) by a cable television crew out of Noblesville, Ind.

“I know we will have arrived when we can get a television deal,” Clark says. “I’d also like to get more local people involved in the tournament as volunteers. We’ve got a core group of about 20 volunteers right now, but I’d like to see that number double.”

That just might be enough people to allow Clark to get some work done next August.

Contact Clark at tclark@intacllc.com

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Editor’s Note: Randy Hart took a coaching job at Ohio State University in 1982, before Tim Clark’s junior season at Purdue, and Hart never paid off the wager to Tom Clark. In 1996, the elder Clark received a package from Purdue University. It was that long-promised game ball, clearing the books on Hart and eliciting a good laugh from both Clarks.