Darlington junior legion baseball gets ready for season with new coach
By Drake Horton
Contributing Writer
While the high school baseball season might officially be over, the summer months are just now approaching and this is the time where all high school baseball players work on perfecting their craft.
Starting May 28, the Darlington junior legion baseball team will begin another season of play, but unlike the past few years, there is one change worth noting — the man leading the program.
Taking over for Dennis Gearhart, who decided to step down, is JV head coach Joe Kolodziej, and outside of winning, which everyone wants to do, he has three major goals that he wants his team to accomplish by the end of the season.
The first one is getting all of his players used to playing a second position out on the field.
“One thing that I have always done in JV, in the two years that I have them is get them to be able to know two positions cold, so when they do get up to varsity, they not only have a better chance of playing more, but a better chance of contributing to the team more once Gearhart got them,” Kolodziej said.
The second and probably most obvious one that any coach wants to see out of his team is improvement by the end of the season.
“The other thing that I always look for is improvement,” Kolodziej said. “Did you improve the numbers from the year before, not only as a team, but as an individual?”
The third and final, which is overlooked by a lot and can completely make or break a team in sports, business or life application in general, is team chemistry.
“Look for these guys to improve overall as teammates and build that chemistry,” Kolodziej said. “That just isn’t something that a team is born with; it has to be worked on and for guys to rely on one another.”
And while team chemistry might be third listed, it is going to be one that this team will have plenty of opportunity to work on.
“This year’s team, we can only retain three guys from off the varsity after graduating 10,” Kolodziej said.
“On varsity there are only seven guys left and out of those seven only three of them were age-eligible to play and some pretty good guys with Rance Hatchel at first base, Jacob Adams at catcher and Jake Blackmon also at catcher and utility, but other than that it is mostly going to be a new team this year.
“We are going to mostly have my JV that will be moving on up, mostly all of the sophomores and right now we are carrying 17.”
Another way this team will get to work on its chemistry is the fact that this team, outside of the four who are too old to play, will all be next year’s high school varsity squad since all of the players are from Darlington.
In previous years, players from Lamar and Hartsville have participated, but Hartsville now has its own team and none of the Lamar players were able to try out for the team as the Silver Foxes were still playing in the playoffs and Darlington assumed that Lamar was going to have its own junior legion team like it did last year.
This, however, gives Kolodziej a great chance to develop some of his upcoming players from JV and get them better groomed for the varsity level.
“We got some guys coming up, first being our shortstop Carson Norris, batted close to .500 during the season, led in just about every offensive category,” Kolodziej said.
“We also have two pitchers that are coming up, Tyler Berry and Brian Dickerson, both of them bring it pretty well and fill up the strike zone pretty well, especially when you are on JV you have a limited pitch count, our focus is to pound that zone as much as we can and try not to waste too many pitches.
“We also have a couple of good guys coming out of the pen there in second baseman/relief pitcher Thomas Standish and we actually have two coming out there, both are also third basemen, Lex Blackmon and John Dennis.”
It is this group of kids and these three key goals that have Kolodziej excited for the upcoming season and excited for the future of Darlington baseball.
