Spring Hill pitcher overcomes loss, finds Division I path at Bethune-Cookman

Anthony Anselmo’s route to Division I baseball began with loss, not leverage. On Aug. 25, 2022, just as he arrived at Fort Lauderdale University for his second year of college baseball, he got the call that his father, Paul, had died suddenly of a heart attack at 48.

For Spring Hill, the loss reached well beyond one family. Paul John Anselmo II was a longtime resident, a flooring mechanic and a Catholic, and he spent years coaching Spring Hill Dixie Baseball, the Spring Hill Dixie Girls Softball League and travel teams. That made Anthony’s rise part of a larger Hernando County baseball story, one shaped by a coach’s influence and a son’s refusal to stop after grief and setbacks collided.

Anselmo had not entered college as a marquee recruit out of Nature Coast Technical High School. He was a skinny right-hander with a mid-80s fastball, solid enough to draw interest but not enough to generate scholarship offers from several junior colleges that looked his way. His first collegiate stop came at the University of Fort Lauderdale, an NCCAA program in Lauderhill at 4131 NW 16th St., where the 2022 roster listed him as a freshman from Spring Hill and Nature Coast Tech.

That middle stretch mattered as much as the destination. The move from a modest recruiting profile to a place at Bethune-Cookman showed how much Anselmo had to adapt, not only through arm slot and pitch mix but through the pressure of carrying loss. His sidearm delivery became part of the formula, helping him carve out a role against higher-level hitters and turn persistence into a roster spot at the Division I level.

Bethune-Cookman’s 2025 roster shows how far that path carried him. Anselmo appeared in 15 games, made three starts, went 3-3 with a 3.63 ERA, and logged 44.2 innings. He also recorded one save, one complete game, 34 strikeouts and eight walks, while holding opponents to a .287 average. The Wildcats finished 37-23 overall and 24-5 in the Southwestern Athletic Conference, won their first SWAC regular-season baseball title in program history and later repeated as champions in 2026 with a program-record 37 wins.

The postseason run ended in the NCAA Tallahassee Regional opener against Florida State, but Anselmo’s story was already bigger than one game. He had been part of Nature Coast Technical’s 2021 run to the FHSAA Class 4A state tournament Final Four, yet even then he was not the staff’s headliner. For Hernando County families, that is the lesson in his career: a player can start as an overlooked arm, endure a devastating family loss and still keep earning the next chance until the Division I door finally opens.