Rochester 8U baseball handles adversity, wins Town & Country state title

BY VAL TSOUTSOURIS

Sports Editor, RTC

The Rochester Town & Country 8-and-under baseball team won the state title at Nick Patterson Field Monday. They defeated Russiaville, Frankton and Lapel twice to complete a 30-5-1 season. Front, from left – Rhett Calvert, Liam Day, Grayson Jones, Abel Bowers, Grayson Burrus. Middle – Jackson Burrus, Waylon Nelson-Bauer, Tanner Jones, Harrison Brown, Carter Meadows. Back – head assistant coach William Day, coach Joel Burrus, assistant coach Andrew Brown, assistant coach Colt Meadows. (photo provided)

Showing what coach Joel Burrus said was an unusual “maturity,” the Rochester 8-and-under baseball All-Stars won the Town & Country state title at their home ballpark Monday.

The state title capped a season in which the team went 30-5-1. Add in rec league games, and the players played more than 50 games this summer.

And now they head back to school within the next week after a busy summer of baseball.

“I said it after the game the other night,” Burrus said. “I said part of that commitment takes some maturity from a kid that age to be able to say, ‘I’m going to prioritize baseball.’ … The experience of this is unreal, but it’s one of those things where you’re like these kids, they’re having to show major maturity by committing to this.”

Burrus’s head assistant was Will Day, and Colt Meadows, Andrew Brown and Chad Calvert joined them on the coaching staff. This team featured many returning members of last year’s 8-and-under “black” team, and six kids are expected back next year.

The season started with a doubleheader against Peru the weekend before Memorial Day, and the first tournament was the Mentone Egg Festival tournament Memorial Day weekend. They also played in a tournament at Plymouth in June in which they faced travel teams from as far away as Detroit. 

Burrus praised not only the players but their parents also. He said they let the coaches do their job without interfering.

“If you’ve got parents this day and age that will leave you alone and let you coach, you’re going to be able to do your job, and you’re going to be able to do it well,” Burrus said. “And these parents were very supportive, and I think that rubbed off on the kids. We had everybody bought in. We had 10 kids on this team. Nobody missed. The parents were there.

“I said it when we won state, and I had the microphone afterwards, and I said the buy-in from not only just the kids but the families in general, that was a big part of the reason, I think, we had everybody bought in.”

Part of a winning team’s journey involves handling adversity, and Burrus said this team showed that ability at the Oak Hill Tournament in late June. After losing their first game to the Swing Kings, a team based out of Benton County, they had to win six games in one day just to get to the championship game. They won the tournament with an 8-1 record.

The day started with their first game at 10 a.m., and the kids did not get home until about 1 a.m., according to Burrus.

That is when they showed how special they could be.

“Our big thing that we talked about with them when we would face adversity – I think that’s the big thing with 7 and 8-year-old kids: how do they handle adversity when the boat starts rocking?” Burrus said. “We talked a lot about that. Practice time or after the games, you know, hey, we faced adversity. How are you guys going to handle this? Are you going to pout? Because at the end of the day, we’re molding these buys to grow up to be good quality young men too. They’re 6, 7, 8 years old, but they’re not too far away from the next step –middle school. It goes so quick.”

Burrus was asked if kids so young can be fierce competitors.

“Yes, these kids hate to lose,” Burrus said. “And I don’t think you can ever put that in a kid young enough really. And here’s the thing: You have to learn how to lose. But when you lose, my big thing with these kids is the adversity of that, do you use that to fire yourself to work harder? The earlier that you can get that burning desire to say, ‘I hate losing,’ am I going to go pout in a corner, or am I going to fight my way out? Well, we’re trying to teach these kids how to fight their way out.” 

Burrus said the kids shared in their own success and cheered each other on rather than dwelling on their own personal success.

“They were very collective,” Burrus said. “Sometimes you hear these kids because their parents are worried about stats. That wasn’t a thing with this group. You hear that with some of these kids. ‘Well, I hit this, this and this tonight, and I’m the best,’ or whatever. We didn't have that on this team. It was a lot of collective, a lot of guys being good teammates.”

Baseball at the 8-and-under level involves pitching machines. Pitches come out of an opening between two tires on the machine. Burrus said coaches can ask umpires to adjust the pitching machines, but Burrus preferred to tell his players to make the adjustments themselves. If they could make the adjustments themselves, it could give them a competitive advantage over their opponents.

The machines are set at 37 miles an hour, though Burrus said he noticed differences in pitching machines. 

“Some of these machines vary,” Burrus said. “It’s a JUGS (brand) machine, so it’s on the tire. Is the tire wore down? Is it a newer tire? Does it have grooves in it? Some of them, you’re like, ‘Man, this machine’s moving slower.’ Or our machine, we always feel like it moves quicker. When it’s set on 37, it seems like it’s a little more dialed in what maybe a machine at Denver or something like that might be. It might seem a little slower.”

The team won the District title at Akron, winning games 16-0, 17-3, 15-5, 13-4 and 11-1.

They then came out of the Denver semistate. On Sunday night of the tournament, the team was supposed to play, but they had a game rained out and were told they would not make up the game on Monday and that the third-place game against Plymouth would be decided by run differential, not on the field.

Since Plymouth had the better run differential, Rochester had to settle for a No. 4 seed for state even though they had only lost once in a double-elimination tournament.

That made their road even tougher.

Despite the tough draw, they beat top-seeded Russiaville 9-4 and Frankton 11-3 before finishing with back-to-back 11-10 wins over rival Lapel to close out an undefeated run at the double-elimination state tournament at Nick Patterson Field.

Rochester went 4-0 against Lapel this summer. They beat them twice at the Oak Hill Tournament. If they had lost either game, they would have lost the tournament. Then came the two state wins.

“We both said we’ll meet again,” Burrus said when recalling the meetings with Lapel at Oak Hill. “And sure enough, they were the team standing in front of us to win the state. So it was kind of crazy. … That was where the rivalry with Lapel started. We played them four times this summer. And they’ve got a great group, a great group of kids. We love their coaches. We got along with them really well, but it was a dogfight every time we played them. So it wasn’t a surprise when we faced them in the championship.”

Burrus also runs a drivers education business. He also supervises summer weights in the weight room three days a week and will begin his fourth season as the Rochester girls basketball coach this fall. (Meadows will also be one of his girls basketball assistants.)

He said that many of the lessons that he tries to teach transcend age and gender.

“We talk a lot about communication,” Burrus said. “A lot of the things I talk about at the high school level, you’re still talking about down here because you’re always trying to develop those things – being a better communicator, being a better teammate, working as hard as you can, giving 110% effort. 

“That kind of stuff, there’s really no difference.”