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To stay competitive, H.B.C.U.s have had to cast a wider net. Lynn Thompson, the athletic director at Bethune-Cookman since 1990, said he saw the start of the decline of baseball growing up in Daytona Beach in the late 1960s; in neighborhoods where his friends once rode their bikes to play sandlot ball, redevelopment paved over ball fields in favor of basketball courts and parking lots.

Bethune-Cookman began recruiting out of Florida’s deep pool of Latino players early on, and Thompson said that he has given the same marching orders each time he hires a baseball coach, something he did for the sixth time last August.

“We just happen to be historically black; we’re not exclusively black,” Thompson said. “Our job is to tell the great story of Bethune-Cookman through the lives of these great kids who wear our uniforms, wherever they come from and whatever they look like.”

This is a complicated stance, and it has drawn criticism. It is not unusual for H.B.C.U. football teams to recruit white kickers or punters, or to look farther afield to fill out their tennis and golf teams. But baseball can strike a different chord, particularly because of the legacy of the Negro Leagues and Robinson’s stature as a civil rights icon.

“We’ve taken some heat from some people,” Thompson said. “But look, we’re Division I, and if you’re a high school kid and you’re playing right field and batting .198 and you think just because we’re an H.B.C.U., you think you ought to be able to get a scholarship, you’re wrong.”