Bill Reynolds: Mike Stud — A transformation few would have figured

His professional name is Mike Stud, and Wikipedia calls him "an American hip hop recording artist."

And he is that, no question about it.

And he will be at Lupo's, the downtown Providence music club on Thursday night.

And it will be a homecoming for Mike Stud,' who grew up in western Cranston.

But that is only part of the story, and in no way the most important part.

For this is about dreams, more specifically about how one dream can die and another can take its place.

Maybe more important, it's about reinventing yourself.

Or how does a former All-State athlete surface almost a decade later with a new name and a new dream?

That's the real question, and in many ways it goes back to the western Cranston of his childhood, back when he was Mike Seander and Mike Stud was way off in the distance somewhere. He was a star athlete at St. Raphael Academy in Pawtucket back then, playing both basketball and baseball, one of those gifted high school athletes whose promise had the ability to open doors.

He had ability. He was 6-foot-2, and he excelled in both sports. In 2006 he was the state's Gatorade Player of the Year in baseball and the Louisville Slugger Player of the Year, the season that he got on Duke's radar screen. In his senior year he averaged 21 points a game in basketball and was on a two-time All-Stater.

Duke came calling and in the fall of 2007 he went there, where he quickly established himself as a quality college pitcher, a kid who had big baseball dreams. He played in 2007 in the New England Collegiate Baseball League for the Newport Gulls. The following year, he played for Wareham in the Cape Cod Baseball League. He thought he was on the fast track to his baseball dream, the one that kept getting closer.

Then he got hurt.

And everything changed.

"My whole life had revolved around sports,'' he says. "My whole family was invested.''

So now what?

"I felt I had let everyone down,'' he says. "I was lonely, and I was depressed.''

So there he was at Duke with a dream that seemed like broken pieces on the ground all around him. He was living in a house with a lot of baseball players. but there's a funny thing about teams: you're either on the team, or you're not. And Seander was not. And it seemed as if life was going on by, because that's what seasons do, and he was on the sidelines watching it.

Now what?

One day he did a little tape of a rap song comprised of little things running around in his head. Just fooling around. Hoping maybe his teammates would think it was funny. He had done a few rap songs when he had been just a kid, just fooling around back then, too, so in his own way he felt comfortable doing them.

He called himself "Mike Stud,'' as a kind of goof, but guess what? His teammates liked it, and somehow it found its way to something called "College Humor,'' where it went viral.

It wasn't long before he had five or six more songs, and that was the start.

And why the name "Mike Stud?'"

"We all had goofy nicknames,'' he says. "I had been 'Mike Stud' to my teammates three of four years earlier."

So "Mike Stud'' it was.

Not that he ever thought it was like ... going to go anywhere.

"I was a white kid from Duke,'' he says. "Who was going to take that seriously?''

After shoulder surgery, he came back to play baseball again — he had one year of college eligibility left — this time at Georgetown.

Since then he's been "Mike Stud,'' five years of touring in a van, here, there and everywhere, eight guys on the road. Five years of chasing the dream, the way he once chased his baseball dream. For there are similarities, no question about that.

"They are all my lifelong friends,'' he says of the guys who tour with him. "Three of them go back to junior high. One guy was my next-door neighbor. The deejay goes back to junior high. We built it from the grass roots. And we've been hustling for five years now.''

That's one of the lessons he learned from sports, of course. The sense of hard work. The sense of staying the course during all those times where you're in some van in the middle of the night and the glamour is all somewhere else. The sense of paying you dues.

And there's also the sense that this is his time. Call him Mike Seander. Call him "Mike Stud." Call him anything you want. But "College Humor'' reportedly has gotten more than 60 million views on YouTube. He's had three No. 1 songs on iTunes, and "This is Mike Stud" is going to be on the Esquire Network this summer.

Thursday night he will downtown at Lupo's, the hometown kid back home.

The hometown kid who lost one dream and found another.