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Jun. 19—When the 2020 baseball season was canceled a year ago due to the pandemic caused by COVID-19, Pymatuning Valley baseball coach Justin Smith said his team made the decision to treat the non-season as an opportunity to better themselves for whenever the game would return.
The work they put in last year paid dividends this spring.
The Lakers went 16-6 this season, finishing second in the Northeast Athletic Conference. Smith earned Ashtabula County Baseball Coach of the Year honors for the 2021 season.
“Last year when a lot of kids maybe lost a year, our young kids really played throughout the summer and played a lot of innings and that really helped” Smith said. “We had some really good kids coming through, some really good athletes, and with their hard work and continued focus on playing baseball, it paid off for them.”
The 2020-21 school year was strong for several PV athletic programs. The football team went 8-1 and advanced to the third round of the Division VI, Region 21 playoffs. The basketball squad reached a Division III district final and two wrestlers qualified for the state tournament.
Smith said getting the players out on the diamond a year ago to work on their game was not anything he had to push them to do.
“They definitely wanted to get out there and keep playing,” Smith said. “[Jefferson coach] Scott Barber does a great job of organizing the [NEOBL summer] league. We’ve wanted to play before, but we never had enough interest. This was the first year we had a group of kids that had the opportunity to continue playing and we were able to get a good number of them out there and that benefitted us a great deal.”
Offensively, the Lakers were sparked by a trio of juniors — Robert Verba, Nate Henry, and James Bohinic. Verba hit 476 including six doubles, five triples and three home runs, and 16 RBI.
Bohinic and Henry each hit 388 and combined for 11 extra-base hits and 36 runs batted in.
Henry also dominated on the mound, going 6-2 with a microscopic 1.59 earned run average. He struck out 73 batters while walking only seven in 57 innings of work.
Sophomore Tyler Briton was also strong on the mound, sporting a 2.52 ERA in 33 plus innings.
Aside from its
record and individual player stats, Smith said what really made the team special was its attitude to keep fighting regardless of the circumstances.
“They were not ones that would give up,” he said. “They fought hard throughout the season every game. Even if things were down, if things were breaking against us, they just kept fighting.”
The success the program enjoyed this year, along with the number of players committed to continuing to play, is something Smith believes can springboard the program to future seasons of winning baseball.
“This will be a building moment for them,” the coach said. “They are going to be very good for the foreseeable future. They’ve got a great couple of classes coming up behind them.
“With a lot of players being juniors and sophomores, there should be natural progression and growth that goes with that and I just think they’re going to be great next year.’
Smith also credited his assistant coach Jerry King for building up the JV program, as well as the parents for being ‘super supportive.’
“There’s going to be some great things coming up,” Smith said.