WIAA state baseball: Teams gear up for final run at a summer championship
Mark Stewart
Jacob Paige came up in the game.
Before spending the past eight seasons as Muskego’s head coach, he was an assistant for five years at Oak Creek. And before that, he spent one season assisting at both West Allis schools, Central and Hale. Ask him about his high school days and he’ll tell you he played at West Allis Central.
Summer baseball is all he knows.
“There is something about it,” he said. “The weather is part of it, but there is just something about that meat of the summer and being able to show up at the baseball park. Kids are out of school, so it gives us a lot more time with them and it’s just seems to be all about baseball at that time.”
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A lot of coaches feel that way about summer baseball.
They’ve enjoyed teaching the game in the heat of the summer. They know nothing about massive rescheduling or hardly ever bundle up for a game. The idea of a team not playing a full schedule, something many spring teams experienced this past season, was unheard of.
Reaching the state tournament was always a big deal, but especially this year. The final four that will play for the title at Concordia University’s Kapco Park on Friday are really the final four. Menomonee Falls, Muskego, Pius XI and Plymouth are the last four teams standing in summer ball, period.
With the tournament’s conclusion, the WIAA will shut down the summer version of the sport after 54 years.
“It is special. I’ve always been a proponent of summer baseball and I’m sorry to see it go,” Menomonee Falls coach Pat Hansen said. “To be able to be a part of the final one is special.”
Hansen’s squad will face Pius XI at 11:35 a.m. That game will be followed by the Muskego-Plymouth semifinal. The winners will play at 6 p.m.
Fifteen minutes before the start of the final, representatives from each of the previous 53 state championship teams will be recognized as part of a final send-off for the tournament.
The 54th team to join that exclusive club will either win its third title in four years (Falls), cap a season filled with high expectations on a high note (Pius), become the first out-of-area school to be champion (Plymouth) since 1982 or simply win its first title (Muskego).
The truth is that at this point in the season each team heads to Kapco with a certain level of confidence.
» Pius XI: The Popes have been the Journal Sentinel’s top-ranked team in the area for most of the season, and for good reason. They’re blessed with a deep pitching staff of seniors Sam Treffert, TJ Driver and Kayde Thiele as well as one of the area’s most dangerous hitters in senior catcher Gino D’Alessio.
“We talked about that from Day 1,” Pius coach Kevin Kehoss said of reaching state. “That was on my mind right off the bat. I knew the talent we had coming back, so it was a motivating factor for me to use. (I’d say) ‘Let’s do this together as a family and figure it out and win a state championship.' ”
» Menomonee Falls: Falls fell one game short of winning the Greater Metro title and has won 18 of its last 20 games. Take away two losses to Sussex Hamilton – the Chargers beat Falls three times in all this year – and the team would be unbeaten during its late-season run.
“First and foremost our kids are just good teammates to each other,” Hanson said. “They’re always pulling for one another. I don’t see any selfishness among them. They’re good teammates and I think that trait shows in their ability to not hang their heads when things are looking bad. We had a number of games this year where we fell behind early and were able to come back and win.”
» Muskego: The Warriors finished fourth in the Classic 8 but were in second-place before a late-season sweep by Mukwonago helped dropped them in the standings. Their strength this year has been their development as a whole.
“This has been one of the most team-oriented teams that I’ve had,” Paige said. “There is not that one individual that gets all the attention and focus. It has really been a full team effort.”
» Plymouth: As a member of the Eastern Wisconsin Conference, the Panthers are a bit of an unknown given that teams often save their best pitchers for conference games. It is 4-5 against area teams in non-conference play. Plymouth, however, is the last out-of-area team to seriously threaten for the title. The Panthers’ 2014 team lost 2-1 in a state semifinal game to eventual champion Brookfield Central.
“Our consistency throughout the lineup has been a strength,” Plymouth coach Butch Cain told the Sheboygan Press. “Every night some spot in the lineup has had to step up and they have.”
Those are four of the 50 teams that were left standing this season in summer baseball. Next spring those teams will be rolled into spring ball.
Only one of them will forever carry the title of the final summer baseball state champion.
"No one is going to remember (who won in this year or that year), but they’re going to remember the last year that we play in this summer baseball tournament," Kehoss said. "To say we won the last one would be really something special.”