Bio

Regarded as one of the top pitchers to ever come through the Cowley College baseball program, Wes Detwiler was inducted to the Tiger Athletic Hall of Fame.

Detwiler attended Wentzville Holt High School (at the time Wentzville High School) in Wentzville, MO, roughly 40 miles west of St. Louis. As a senior at Wentzville, he earned first team All-Gateway Athletic Conference honors, as well as being an honorable mention all-region baseball selection. He was an honorable mention all-conference performer as a junior and an academic all-conference selection from 1996-99.

He also played basketball and football in high school. He had offers from a few small four-year colleges, but had dreams of playing NCAA Division I and professional baseball and saw Cowley as the best way to accomplish those goals. He played at Cowley during the 2000 and 2001 baseball seasons in which the Tigers went a combined 91-16 and captured back-to-back Jayhawk East titles. Detwiler said those teams took on the personality of its coaches.

“Both those teams I would describe as blue-collar; very few stars if any,” Detwiler said. “We prided ourselves on out-working our opponents. And at the risk of sounding cliché, I think we had more desire to win than our opponents.”

Detwiler had a solid freshman season for the Tigers, going 7-2 on the mound and winning his final seven decisions. He followed that up with a dominating sophomore season in which he went 13-3 with six saves. He posted a 1.89 ERA in 103 1/3 innings pitched, and struck out 123 batters versus only 23 walks. Along with being an All-American, he was named a first-team all-region and all-Kansas Jayhawk Conference Eastern Division selection as a sophomore.

During the 2001 season, Detwiler was the ABCA/Rawlings NJCAA Player of the Year and helped lead the Tigers to a Region VI Championship and a third place finish at the JUCO World Series. Cowley head coach Dave Burroughs enjoyed the opportunity to coach Detwiler and remembers him as a great competitor.

“He could beat you with his stuff or his brain,” Burroughs said. “We may have had guys through the years that could throw harder or had better stuff than him, but when it came to watching him pitch he didn’t have any peers. He is very deserving of this honor.”

Detwiler has fond memories of his two years at Cowley. “My experience at Cowley was my first time living away from home for extended periods of time,” Detwiler said. “I was truly embraced by not only my teammates, but the college and its professors as well as the Ark City residents that supported Cowley athletics. It was a fun time. I focused on school until noon and then the rest of the day was baseball. In my two years in Ark City I made many lifelong friendships, received a great education and began to build both the social and professional foundation that I utilize to this day.”

After Cowley, he played baseball at the University of Texas at Arlington. He earned degrees in Information Systems and Operations Management from the University of Texas at Arlington in 2003, and later earned a Master of Business Administration with an emphasis in Finance and Real Estate from the University of Missouri in 2005.

After graduating from the University of Missouri, Detwiler worked for two years at Key Bank in Kansas City analyzing and underwriting potential lending opportunities.

He married his wife, Emily in 2007 and the couple moved to Des Moines, Iowa, where they lived for four and a half years. During this time, Detwiler worked for Aviva Investors, where his responsibilities included portfolio management and fixed income analysis on bonds that were collateralized by commercial real estate.

Over the past two years, the couple lived in Stamford, CT and Detwiler worked at Wells Fargo in New York City. While at Wells Fargo, he worked on the production team specializing in loans in excess of $100 million. Just recently, Detwiler and his family moved back to Kansas City and he began employment at Block Real Estate Services as a Senior Financial Analyst where he is responsible for the financial analysis of developments, acquisitions, dispositions and company-owned and managed properties.

Detwiler and his wife, Emily, have a son, Emery 3, and are expecting their second child at the end of January. Detwiler’s brother, Ross, is a Major League Baseball pitcher, who has pitched six seasons for the Washington Nationals.

Detwiler has been unable to make it back to Cowley since attending a baseball reunion in 2006. Coming back to Cowley to be inducted into the Tiger Athletic Hall of Fame will be a humbling experience according to Detwiler.

“This is very much a team award that all of those guys in 2000 and 2001 had a hand in,” Detwiler said. “Many of my fondest memories playing baseball come from those two years and the success that the team had was a reflection of the hard work every coach and every player on that team put in.”