The road to Dallas and Sylvia Green's farm rises and falls and rises again like an old-fashioned rollercoaster. It is a narrow, two-lane strip lined with corn and occasional stands of hickory and beech.

Spring in this corner of Chester County has "planting time'' written all over it – except at the Greens' place.

Dallas BE '81 and Sylvia CHEP '60, '72M, do their share of digging because Sylvia runs a commercial nursery that rings their West Grove yard with orchids, peonies and katsura trees that smell like cotton candy. But, here, spring has always meant baseball.

From the mid '50s when Dallas' pitching arm first caught the attention of the Philadelphia Phillies, you could lay odds that he Greens and their four children would have only one answer in a word-association game when the first word was "spring'': "training.''

They've been following some teams since the minors when he pitched in Buffalo. Baseball took them to Cuba when the Batista regime was tottering and fans showed up for a three-game series toting guns and machetes. And it took them to the top when Dallas led Philadelphia to the World Championship in 1980, entering the record books as the fourth rookie manager ever to win the series.

A small version of the world championship trophy is displayed in their den alongside his UD Medal of Distinction and two plaques recognizing him as a member of the Delaware Sports Hall of Fame and UD's Wall of Fame.

UD is a common thread in the couple's life. Sylvia still plays bridge with the group she began with as an undergraduate. Dallas is still close to his old basketball buddy Clyde Louth CHEP '57. Bobby Trivits AG '55 still hunts duck with him. He rattles off a litany of lifetime friends they first met at the University.

When Sylvia and Dallas married when she was 18 and he was 23, her mother fretted that she wouldn't finish college. She finished in three years, earned a master's plus 30 credits while teaching full-time and then studied horticulture at Longwood Gardens.

Dallas left college shy of graduation to play professional baseball. For years, Sylvia prodded him to finish, but the course he needed always seemed to be offered in the spring. He finally earned his degree in 1981 when the business department allowed him to substitute an original research paper for the course. It was a classic. The topic -- how to turn a disparate group of baseball superstars into a championship team.

He discusses some of the key points:

One was managing a group of players loyal to his predecessor: "When I took over, there were a lot of cliques. Most of the Phillies I took over had played together for years–Maddox, Schmidt, Luzinski, Bowa, Boone, Carlton. This nucleus happened to love Danny Ozark because he let them do whatever they wanted to do, in my opinion. We had great individual performances, but we had failed as a team. I tried to eliminate all the excuses they had before. Then, I brought in the line: "We, not I."

He explained how small changes made a big difference: "I changed the locker system so the kids I brought in from the farm system were mingling with the veterans, whereas before, the veterans were off by themselves.''

He discussed how he got the team in shape. Hall-of-Famer Steve Carlton had his own physical training program that worked. The other players hadn't been required to follow a program. Dallas gave them a choice – his own running program or the program developed by Gus Hoeffling and followed by Carlton. "I took his course. He got me into great shape, but I kept saying, 'Gus, I'm 46. Relax. He was killing me. I had some thought that Carlton
could do that, but normal baseball guys weren't going to be able to handle that.''

Dallas' first-person management account earned him a business degree in 1981, and his work as an ambassador for the University led to a UD Medal of Distinction in1998.

He was a member of the steering committee that raised the money to build the Bob Carpenter Sports/Convocation Center in honor of his benefactor-turned-friend R.R.M. Carpenter Jr. It was Carpenter's Friends Foundation that offered Dallas a basketball scholarship a half century ago.

Dallas and Sylvia continue to help with alumni fundraising, and they have established the Dallas and Sylvia Green Baseball Scholarship at UD.

"I just enjoy doing it for the University,'' Dallas says. "There are two reasons why I do it. One is my love for Mr. Carpenter and my respect for him. The main thing is the fact that I was poor and I wouldn't have gone to school without Mr. Carpenter.''

"It's kind of my way of paying back,'' he says. "I preach this to my baseball guys – you've got to pay back somewhere along the way. I try to remember where I came from and that I didn't have any money and my family didn't have any money,'' he says.

" A lot of people go to school on athletic scholarships,'' he says. "When they get out and start doing their own business or doing their own thing in the workplace, they should remember how they got there.''