After back-to-back regional championships the last two seasons, the goal for the Normal Community High School baseball team was obvious to Kyle Beaty and his teammates from the first day of practice.
“The last couple of years we weren’t able to get past the first game at sectionals on really good seasons. This year, the first practice indoors in our little gym we looked at the [championship] banners and realized we didn’t have a baseball one up there yet,” the senior two-sport standout recalled.
“It was the goal to hang one and we did that.”
The Ironmen baseball team earned that right by capturing a third-place finish in the Illinois High School Association Class 4A state tournament Saturday in Joliet.
NCHS defeated Brother Rice of Chicago, 7-2, in the third-place game after falling in extra innings on Friday to eventual state champion Libertyville.
Ironmen players, coaches and support staff were greeted to a boisterous reception on Sunday as they returned home for a celebration inside that same gym where the new banner will hang.
The Ironmen finished with a program record 37 wins with just five defeats and the program's first third-place finish at state.
The 37th win of the season went to senior pitcher Jonah Roper, who masterfully limited the top-ranked Crusaders to three hits and two tuns in 5 2/3 innings.
Roper was challenged with leading a regroup after the team’s crushing loss less than 24 hours earlier.
“I’m proud of the guys and how we battled back and put yesterday behind us and came and won a game,” Roper said moments after the team received its third-place medals near home plate at Duly Health and Care Field.
It may seem an unlikely finish to the season for a pitcher who wasn’t sure his season would start.
Roper, a 6-foot-4 righthander, missed eight months with a torn UCL [ulnar collateral ligament] that required Tommy John surgery that he said saved his pitching career.
“100 percent,” declared Roper, who plans to pitch at Rock Valley College in Rockford next spring.
Milestone year for coach
The state finals appearance culminates an eventful year for head coach Ryan Short, who reached 400 career wins in March. With a career winning percentage at 67%, he hasn’t come close to a losing season in 20 years in the dugout.
Short asked the team at the beginning of the season to think about who they were playing for this season. For Short, it was his former coach at Lewiston High School, Ned Graham, who died in November. Short played on Graham's state championship team in 1993.
“I wanted them to have the feeling of that, later on in life. They can look back on this run with the other 23 guys and go out there and love their lives, but always know they have this to remember,” Short said.
He added it’s because of the team’s “in the moment” focus — led by his 10 seniors — that he fully expected them to end the season with a win after they were edged in the semifinals.
“We’ve been talking about being 1-0 [each game] for a long, long time now and we’ve done it pretty well throughout the season,” Short said. “That was the message, and we didn’t need to say much more."
Short told the gathering at Sunday's celebration that such a successful season may suggest the team faced little adversity. He noted the players held a team-only meeting after a disappointing 2-3 start in late March. While he doesn't know what was said in that meeting, he saw the results.
The Ironmen won 34 of their next 35 games and went on to earn the program's first trip to the state finals since 2004.
Beaty explained that meeting was to strategize how the team was going to handle adversity throughout the season.
"After that meeting, I would say we handled adversity in the best way possible," Beaty told to the crowd in the NCHS gym.
The baseball team’s finish also became a capstone for its multi-sport standouts. Normal Community’s football, boys’ basketball and baseball teams each won Big 12 championships this season while posting a combined conference record of 35-1.
Beaty, the team’s starting quarterback who led the Ironmen to the state quarterfinals and plans to play football at North Central College in Naperville this fall, said he could not have asked for a better high school career.
“It’s sad [it’s over] but you gotta smile because of everything that happened. It was a pretty awesome time to experience.”
