By Garth Shanklin
Sports Editor
While the professional leagues begin ramping up preseason work and high schools await guidance from the state and the OHSAA, one Clermont County team has already brought home some hardware.
The Tealtown Cougars, a Class D Sr. squad led by head coach Michael Myers, defeated the Milford Hurricane to win the city knothole tournament title on July 18, 2020.
“It was just amazing,” Myers said. “The boys were thrilled…I’m so proud of them. They worked really hard this year, and they made it. That was really the goal.”
The team’s run through the tournament began with a doubleheader on Saturday, July 11 against the NKY Sharks.
“That was a game where we were able to run on them,” Myers said. “They weren’t really prepared for how to hold players on. We ran on them pretty good.”
One run-rule victory later, Tealtown faced off against the PYO-Ammon, a team from the West Chester area.
“They had some very skillful hitters,” Myers said. “They had some good pitchers, and that really helps us. We train to hit fast [pitches], and we did a nice job hitting. We picked them up on defense and we won that game.”
That set up a Clermont County showdown with the Hurricane. A victory in that contest kept the Cougars undefeated on the season, a streak they continued with a win over the Bad News Bears, a team from Northern Kentucky.
“Those guys could hit the ball well,” Myers said. “They fielded pretty well. The pitched OK, we were just way faster and hit the ball well.”
The Hurricane fought through the consolation bracket, setting up a rematch. Milford won that game 18-14, setting up a winner-take-all contest in the final.
One slim victory later, and the Cougars could add yet another trophy to their collection, building on a county tournament title from last season.
“As you go in baseball year to year, you have to get better each year,” Myers said. “For us, that required us to get some different kinds of equipment, training technologies and get into some different routines to amp up the skills to work our way through not only the beginning of the season but also the tournament.”
Early on, before the coronavirus pandemic shut down the state, the team practiced with a pair of new machines to help hone their skills.
“We held a big raffle and we bought something called a MaxBP,” Myers said. “That’s a little whiffle ball machine that’s used by lots of colleges, even. It allowed us to train at different speeds. It throws the little whiffle balls that curve, sliders. At nine, it really taught them hand-eye coordination.”
In addition to the MaxBP, the Cougars utilized a Zooka, which the company describes as a cordless pitching machine. Myers had another description.
“It’s a baseball cannon, frankly,” Myers said. “We could shoot balls out into the outfield in a consistent manner and train to catch outfield balls…even as a coach as long as I’ve been doing this, you can’t consistently hit the ball in the same spot.”
In lockdown, the team couldn’t meet to train the way they had previously. That prompted Myers to make a training guide, which he disseminated to the team.
“I made a training tool with my grandson and we sent it out, things to be training on,” Myers said. “The parents really took that to heart. They went out in the back yard, got a tee and got their feet right, their stance right, that kind of stuff.”
That kind of parental involvement and dedication was not lost on Myers.
“The boys that progressed the farthest are the ones that had the parents involved. Half my team, probably, has parents that come up to me during practice or games and say, ‘Hey, we worked on this or this.’ I’m thankful for the group of parents that I had.”
It’s not just the parents that had to buy in. The players had to put in the work too, as the team would usually practice two days a week. There were two games per week, and the days without practices or games usually contained smaller, more individualistic practice sessions.
“You have to break it down to smaller groups when you’re trying to lead 13 guys into something,” Myers said. “I find it really interesting, you say something over and over 100 times and on the 100th time the kid says, ‘You mean, you do it like this?’ With baseball, as a grown-up you think about baseball as a grownup. The challenge, and I say this to all the guys who coach with me, you have to think about it like you’re nine. You have to talk about it like you’re nine. You have to see it like you’re nine.”
Or eight, in the case of the Cougars. According to Myers, roughly 75 percent of the players on his team were playing up a year.
“They’re eight,” Myers said. “We played against nine-year-olds across the city and we won. That’s fantastic, and a testament to their hard work and their training.”
2020 Tealtown Cougars Roster
#1 Carter Ostwinch
#4 Mason Scherer
#5 Sutton Beabout
#8 Ryker Fitzgerald
#10 Chase Renner
#11 Levi Case
#13 Jace Kaylor
#15 Chandler Myers
#27 Hayden Davis
#32 Nolan Mahar
#35 Zane Conner
#37 Cameron Carson
#46 Knox Caldwell