Former UCF pitcher Jaime Douglas was maybe an unlikely professional baseball player.
Born in Huntington, West Virginia, and raised across the Ohio River in South Point, Ohio, Douglas never pitched until his senior year in high school. He began his collegiate baseball career at Ohio Dominican, a Catholic NAIA school in Columbus, Ohio.
"I played summer ball with a guy named Rich Wallace, who played and then coached at UCF (and now is a Notre Dame assistant baseball coach), and he talked me into coming to Florida and to UCF," says Douglas.
He transferred to UCF and spent two seasons with the Knights before leaving after his junior season in 2004 after the MLB Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim made him their 26th-round draft pick.
With UCF in 2003-04 Douglas made 27 combined appearances on the mound. He started six times in a 2004 campaign in which the Knights finished 47-18, went 24-6 in Atlantic Sun league play and advanced to the title game of the NCAA Championship Tallahassee Regional.
Next he spent six years playing minor league baseball—2004-05 with the Angels' Rookie League and Midwest League (Class A) affiliates, then four more years with independent teams in Calgary (Canada), Orange County (California), St. George (Utah), Sussex County (New Jersey) and Florence (Kentucky). He appeared in as many as 25 games in 2008 with Sussex County, ending with a 2.66 ERA and finishing 13 games.
"It was an interesting part of my life," says Douglas. "It developed me as a person. I endured a lot of failure. I was a hard-throwing lefty, but I never really produced that well as far as pitching.
"Over those six years I felt like I hit rock bottom several times. But it taught me resilience and determination. It made what I do now easier because back then I was broke most of the time. I played baseball six or seven months out of the year and created debt playing--and then I worked construction in the offseason to pay off those debts and save some money for the next season."
Douglas' very first professional outing couldn't have gone much better—two innings pitched and four strikeouts.
The next day he learned his girlfriend had passed away in a plane crash. That was more personal adversity than anything on a baseball diamond ever produced.
"That changed my whole demeanor," he says. "But I enjoyed the baseball, I really did. I was blindly optimistic all the time. Every single year and every single day I was sure I was going to the big leagues. It didn't matter how I actually was doing. Every year I went in thinking, 'This is the year.'
"My very last outing wasn't great. I went home and it was black and white. I was done, and I felt very comfortable with that. It was time to try something new. I played baseball until I was okay with not playing baseball anymore."
In those baseball offseasons, Douglas came back to the Orlando area, finished his UCF degree in interdisciplinary studies—and worked on construction projects to build a foundation for life after baseball. When he hung up his baseball cleats, he was well versed in construction management and ready to hit the ground running.
Douglas received some help from a former UCF baseball teammate, Matt Rhodes, who also had entered the construction business in Orlando.
"I would call Matt in the offseason and he would hook me up with various jobs in the concrete business or laying floors," says Douglas. "That got me interested in the industry, and it just went from there."
Douglas' time as a field-crew associate in his those offseasons gave him hands-on experience and unique insights on a multitude of construction trades, including HVAC installation, electrical work, flooring and multiple concrete scopes.
"Once I got out of baseball, I got into the management side and realized it was something I could do. I did not really start out in the industry with the goal of starting my own firm—that came later," Douglas says.
He earned his certified building contractor's license and eventually decided to venture out on his own. After five years in Ovideo, Florida, with Wilson & Company general contractors, he headed to Palm Beach Gardens and was project manager for Fisher Contracting Corporation. In 2017 he founded Montierre Development in Jupiter, Florida.
Douglas and his family (wife Anne-Marie—a UCF graduate—and children Hudson, Beckett and Palmer) lived in the Lake Mary area of Orlando until 2014.
They come back to campus on most UCF home football weekends. "And I love coming up for baseball games as often as we can," he says.
"I learned a lot at UCF, and UCF was very good to me. It structured my life. It was the first time I experienced a required approach to discipline and hard work—and UCF was always behind me and always supported me."
This is a recurring series of feature pieces on former UCF student-athletes.