SOUTH BEND — Back before a certain select group didn’t know what it didn’t know about high school baseball school and everything playing on varsity entailed, their future coach knew.
Goshen High School baseball coach J.J. DuBois remembered coaching those then-eighth graders, a talented, together collection of kids, in one summer tournament that they won and told them that they had the chance to do something special. They had a chance to eventually take a Goshen High School baseball program places it rarely goes.
If they would stay together, stay connected, stay committed to the cause, DuBois remembers saying about a group he had first worked with when they were in sixth grade, they had a chance to do all that stuff that middle-school kids dream of doing when they’re in high school.
Just before 5 p.m. on Saturday June 6, DuBois huddled with that core group of seniors one final time following an 11-1, this-one-got-away-from-them, run-rule loss to Lake Central (25-8) in a Class 4A regional championship at Four Winds Field.
“They met every expectation,” DuBois said. “This group has changed the culture of Goshen baseball forever.”
This day, this game, felt so familiar to the RedHawks, who won a semi-state semifinal and came within one win of getting to Victory Field on the same Four Winds Field last June. Playing at a place that has seen future Major Leaguers step between the white lines, the RedHawks knew the drill.
They got loose in the same indoor batting cages down the right field line. They unloaded their gear in the same first-base dugout that was home last year. It felt like Deja vu again. Somehow, someway, Goshen would do something this postseason as it did last postseason.
It would find a way to believe and to win and to play another day.
Instead, DuBois and that core of 10 seniors stood in shallow right field and watched another team dump a Gatorade bucket’s contents on their head coach. They watched another team hoist a regional championship trophy, something Goshen made possible last season after beating perennial power Penn.
They watched another team extend their season for another week. They also watched their magical two-year run of Goshen baseball come to an end. The last team meeting, at least on a field and in uniform, was a quick one for DuBois.
What do you say other than thank you to a group that has given everything of themselves, and to one another, for two straight seasons? Be it the cold of an early spring, or even late spring around these parts, to the days like Saturday when the heat index jumped over 90 degrees, Goshen baseball played and thought and believed the game like one.
That game, and that belief, just happened to run its course. No fault of the RedHawks that the other team was better.
Lake Central got the timely hits. Lake Central manufactured runs when runs needed to be manufactured. Lake Central had the kind of day at Four Winds that Goshen enjoyed last season.
That’s baseball. And that’s the end of this run for that Goshen roster.
It happens.
On this regional championship day, it happened to Goshen, which finishes the season at 22-7.
“It sucks,” said senior shortstop Braxton Cline. “Playing with these guys my whole life and just knowing it’s my last game with them, it’s terrible. We knew we were a great team when we were younger.”
When the wheels came off in this one, they did so quickly and, honestly, painfully. One minute, it was a 3-1 game with Goshen on the wrong end of the scoreboard. A big rally, maybe some luck, a miscue or two, and the RedHawks might be back in it. Lake Central, though, scored twice in the bottom of the fifth and then went wild with six more in the sixth to turn what had been a crisp, clean game into a laugher.
“When you get behind …” DuBois said. “We like to be aggressive. We like to play small ball and put pressure on teams, but when you’re down, you can’t do that because you can’t waste outs.”
Give Lake Central credit. It’s not easy to do what the Indians did to win this one. A 90-minute bus ride from the Region, which left at 9:15 a.m. local time. An extended wait to play the day’s second game at Four Winds. Deal with heat. And humidity. Anxiousness.
“It’s not easy; this is always a tough time of year,” said Lake Central coach Mike Swartzentruber. “School is out and you’re out of a routine and it’s hot. This group is the loosest group I’ve had. They probably don’t understand they’re not supposed to be here. We’re hot at the right time.”
Lake Central simply shrugged off any possible distraction and played baseball. It played winning baseball.
“They,” Cline said, “kept putting it on us.”
Follow South Bend Tribune and NDInsider columnist Tom Noie on X (formerly Twitter): @tnoieNDI. Contact Noie at tnoie@sbtinfo.com
This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: All runs end, and the magic did for Goshen in a Class 4A regional
Reporting by Tom Noie, South Bend Tribune / South Bend Tribune
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By Tom Noie, South Bend Tribune | USA TODAY Network
