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| Teams lean on seniors such as Tommy Lopez, who was the player of the year in our conference, once the high school postseason begins in May. |
That can only mean one thing, it's May: otherwise known as 'Winning Time'.
Every year, teams wrap their offseason preparation in late January or early February, begin practices around President's Day, battle through late winter weather conditions that often extend into the spring, head south for Spring Break tournaments, then come back and battle for seeding in their league tournament.
A 20-game regular season, really a snapshot of a season when considering players are often playing 75-100 game a year between their high school and travel ball schedules, and it all comes down to single-elimination tournaments in public school baseball. Seven innings, 21 outs, sometimes getting your top hitters to the plate just three times with your season on the line, all for the opportunity to survive and advance to play another day.
For a lot of players - correction, for the majority of the players - they'll never play the game again, at least competitively. Making a run to a championship - the majority of our players at Oakton High School listed winning last year's Concorde District title as their favorite high school memory in our media guide this year - is paramount in the athletic careers of the vast majority of prep athletes that pull on a uniform.
A perfect example? My alma mater, Herndon High School, and a school I used to coach at, Centreville High School, battled into extra innings before Herndon walked away with an upset victory, 1-0, last night. It was a conference quarterfinal game (with the winner clinching a regional berth), but it felt like it could have been a state championship with the amount of emotion, nerves and sweaty palms among the players, coaches and fans in attendance. I loved every minute of it.
We play tomorrow in the semifinals of our conference tournament. We've locked up a regional berth by virtue of winning the regular season title, but there's an absolute sense of unfinished business among our group of guys. They know they're the defending league champions and have won it two of the past three years, so there's a bit of a target on their backs. And they're OK with that. They also know of the great tradition we have at Oakton, and they want to have their names mentioned 5, 10, 20 years down the road like the alumni who played a role in building that tradition. They want that banner of their own.
And it will be our seniors who will have to carry them to that championship. Four-year guys who don't want their high school careers to end. You don't get that in some levels of sports, such as college basketball, where the top guys are done playing after a year or two. In high school athletics, guys come in as 14- or 15-year-old boys and walk away as 18-year-old men, having grown up before our eyes. That is just another example of why high school athletics are great.
All our guys know it. Our coaches know it. Girlfriends, wives, etc., will put up with us being on edge for a few more weeks. Some of us may sleep in our uniforms. Deal with it.
It's winning time, the best time of the year.