It had been a remarkable day of Denison baseball — a remarkable season, really — and truth be told, Denison shortstop Brian Regan ’04 was a trifle worried that the Big Red’s performance on the diamond might be upstaged by the diamond hidden away in his equipment bag.
It was April 24, 2004, Senior Day on the Denison ballfield. The Big Red had just swept Case Western Reserve University in a double-header, and Denison pitcher Cam Cowden ’04 had just thrown his first career no-hitter in the second game.
The celebration already underway was about to grow even more joyous.
Cowden was Regan’s roommate and one of his best friends.
“He didn’t know what I was planning,” Regan said. “I kept it very close to the chest, so when I went after the game to get the ring out of my baseball equipment bag, I looked at Cam and said, ‘Cam, I am so sorry. I do not want to steal any of the thunder that you just had from throwing a no-hitter.’
“We were best buddies, so he was all good with it,” Regan said.
Moments later, having summoned his college sweetheart Haley Holmberg ’04 to home plate with a ruse about honoring the team’s loyal fans on Senior Day, Regan produced the ring, got down on knee, and made his case for marriage.
“I had a really eloquent speech planned, some really romantic things,” he said. “She remembers none of it.”
Seated beside her husband, Haley Regan confirmed, “Not a thing.”
Spoiler alert: She said yes.
Brian Regan is one of 10 Big Red athletes set to be inducted Oct. 3 into Denison University’s Varsity D Association Athletic Hall of Fame, during Big Red Weekend.
Regan describes his four years as an athlete at Denison as a remarkable time in his life, when his athletic achievements and personal aspirations became so perfectly intertwined that a marriage proposal following his final home game made all the sense in the world to him.
“The baseball program was a really special thing for the four years that I was there,” Regan said. “As I started thinking about proposing to Haley, I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to do this in front of all of our friends and all of our family at Denison?’”
He wasn’t always so confident, romantically speaking. The Cincinnati native had noticed Haley their first year.
“I was like, ‘That girl’s cute, I want to talk to her,’” he said. “And it took me until junior year to actually work up the courage to talk to her.”
By then they were both living in Shaw Hall. This being Denison, they had mutual friends. Haley had noticed Brian, too, but because everyone called him “Regan,” she was surprised to learn his first name was Brian.
“I knew a couple months after dating her that I wanted to marry her,” Brian Regan said.
They dated through their senior year and had talked about their future after graduation. He initially figured he would propose after college, and she expected the same. They seemed in agreement: first things first.
To understand his change of plans, you have to understand what it was like to be playing baseball for Denison back then.
When Regan came to Denison, baseball coach Barry Craddock was undertaking the rebuild of a team that included 28 first-year players. Of the 11 who would stay on to play all four years, Regan said, “We were best friends.
“We lived together, we played together, we were all in each other’s weddings,” he said. “It was just a super-tight-knit community. All the parents traveled and came to every game. We just developed a really special bond over those four years.”
And once he and Haley became a couple, “She was always around, too.”
Craddock’s rebuild had worked. By Senior Day, Denison baseball was fifth in the nation heading into the North Coast Athletic Conference tournament . Plotting his proposal, Regan knew his and her parents would be there for Senior Day. He let very few people in on the plan — Craddock was among them — just the few needed to pull off the ploy to coax Haley from the stands. She was handed a bouquet by Cowden and teammate Adam Mandel ’04, but both players quickly departed.
Puzzled, she found herself the sole fan honored during this purported fan appreciation. “I asked Brian, ‘Am I supposed to stand here?’ Even when I was standing on home plate, I was still clueless.”
Word of the proposal raced across campus. Newspapers, including The Columbus Dispatch and The Cincinnati Enquirer, ran stories about it.
“For a couple days, there was just this energy around the baseball team, the campus, us,” Brian Regan said.
After graduation, Brian Regan took a job in Cincinnati with Procter & Gamble, and the economics major still works there. Haley, who majored in psychology, found a job at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.
They were married Oct. 15, 2005. A few weeks after he is inducted into the Hall of Fame this fall, he and Haley will celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary.
The Regan family.
They have three boys and a girl — Gunnar, 16; Scout, 14; Zeke, 12; and Knox, 10. This summer, Brian coached all three of the boys’ baseball teams, for a total of 141 games.
“It was a heavy schedule this year,” he said, laughing.
Their life, Brian Regan said, “couldn’t have panned out better than it has.”
Looking back, he marvels at “just how special the baseball program at Denison was.” The Big Red finished the 2003 and 2004 seasons with 31 wins, which at the time tied for most in program history.
“The turnaround of that baseball program, and the hard work, the effort it took by all of us — to culminate it with a celebration of baseball and just my life and my future wife all in that same day, for me was one of the most memorable days of my life.”
Speaking to a news reporter back in 2004, 22-year-old Brian Regan recognized that, even then.
“This,” he said, “will be a great story the rest of our lives.”
