The Florida Experience

Four area high school baseball and softball teams traveled to the Sunshine State last week for a bit of spring training. The teams got in a total of 15 games, something they would not have done if they had stayed at home and tried to play because of the weather.

Are these trips about winning or losing? The four coaches, Corbin’s Jeff Garmon and Chris Hart along with Whitley County’s Rob Ledington and David Halcomb talked about the trips down south.

Corbin baseball

Garmon said, “We got to play games and that was the most important.”

“I felt like the most important thing out of the trip was that we got to play. Taking everything into account with the situation were we were at and how we started, it is what it is and we want to continue to get better from there,” said Garmon.

“This was a different year than we have ever had before,” said Garmon. “We had five kids that were starting and getting to play a lot that were tied up into basketball. “They never got that first day of practice because of the state basketball tournament. It got over on a Saturday and we started on Monday.”

“Our timing was off a little bit,” said Garmon. “The thing that hurt us was not having at least a week or two of preparation before the season.”

“A lot of these kids have been on the defensive side of the baseball,” said Garmon. “We struggled in this area and it was just like our timing on our pickoff plays. The timing is just not right there, right now. We have five basketballers out there and it’s taken a little bit of time to be where we want to be…a trip like this really helps.”

“A lot of these teams have been out since February 15^th,” said Garmon.

“We just need to get out there and play,” Garmon added. “I think we will be all right, we have a good team. It’s just a matter of getting some games under our belt. The more they play the more situations they are going to get put in. Going to Florida allows us to get in those games and gives us the opportunity to put the kids in those situations.”

“We played four games down there, the first day I think we got off to a bad start with a bad first inning, it kind of washed that game out,” said Garmon. “After that we won 16-4 (Allen County), we swung the bats pretty good and played pretty good defense that day.”

“The next day we played Campbellsville and I thought we played pretty good,” said Garmon. “We beat them 4-2, we gave up two runs, but we played pretty decent on both sides of the ball.”

“We had one bad inning against Madisonville-North Hopkins,” Garmon said. “In that last game we got beat 5-3, but was ahead 3-2 going into the sixth.”

“We’ve had some inopportune errors at times that have hurt us, but I would rather see us make those mistakes now than later. The games there give you time to see your kids improve on those mistakes,” added Garmon.

“The trip was good, every team we played the team’s were good,” he added. “They were as good as us or better.

Whitley Co. baseball

First year coach Rob Ledington takes a completely different approach about his trip. “Technically, its spring training,” he said.

“Basically, what we got out of it was good competition,” he said. I knew we would before we got down there. I told people that we would lose four ballgames. Well we won two, and went two and two.”

“We actually competed very well,” Ledington said. “The first game that we played, if we played them a hundred times, we wouldn’t beat them, they were just that good. They beat us 13-0. The second game we lost 5-4 to Cape Coral. We had opportunities to win that game. The fourth game against North Fort Meyers, a pretty good club. We played pretty good against them and beat them 15-2 in six innings.”

“Friday we played Dunbar to be quite honest was a very good team,” said Ledington. “We beat them 8-2.”

Our goal down there is to win games,” he said. “Our goal everyday is to win that’s why you play is to win. The main goal for the players is to win and my main goal as a coach is to develop talent and to teach them how to play.”

“It’s a combination of a lot of things,” Ledington said. “Obviously, it’s a bonding thing because you go that far away from home and you are with each other day in, day out.”

“I do things differently when I go to Florida,” Ledington said. “We will have an early morning workout from 9-11 a.m. then go back to the hotel to have lunch, two hours later we will go and play. It’s more like Spring Training for us, it’s not much of a vacation, maybe it is for parents but the kids and the coaching staff are completely worn out.”

“It’s an opportunity for us to work on a lot of things and guarantee us good weather,” said Ledington. “Back home it snowed a day or two, brutally cold, it rained. We had a record low in Fort Meyers Tuesday and that record low was 72, so we were still in pretty good shape.”

“It gave us opportunities to work on our game and it is a bonding thing,” said Ledington. “You hope your team comes together when you are on these trips, but the main thing is the weather. This time of the year in Kentucky, you don’t know what you are going to get. We got to play for a week and the teams back home didn’t.”

Whitley Co. softball

For Whitley County Coach David Halcomb it is not about wins and losses. “If you are going down there worried about wins and losses then you are really going for the wrong reasons because the competition down there is so good that you really want to improve on different aspects of the game,” he said.

“The biggest thing for us is that we try to do a lot of things as a team and create unity within our team. This year I think we were successful in doing that,” said Halcomb. “We have a pretty tight group of girls this year and I think they get along really well.”

“You get to play some competition you would not normally see and it helps improve your game,” he added. “There might be something you are struggling against early in the week, you may have improved by the end of the week.”

“You are dealing with a lot better weather than we had here that week,” he added. “Those three things, team building things, daily improvement and having an opportunity to play teams in good weather is the reason we like to go,” Halcomb said.

He felt this trip had a lot of positive impacts on this team. “We began hitting the ball a lot better while we were down there and we saw a lot of good pitching every game. I think that our kids did hit the ball better from top to bottom.”

“We saw a lot of teams that did a lot of things to us that we won’t see on a daily basis up here like base-running, teams that would suicide squeeze and slap bunting, stuff like that,” said Halcomb. “It really helps you realize the things that you need to work on and it really tries to speed you up defensively. I think those things will help us.”

Corbin softball

“I don’t think Florida is ever about wins and losses,” said Corbin Coach Chris Hart. “Florida is about trying to get away to a little warmer climate where you can play some games and go down an improve on some aspects of your game.”

“You can down, move some players around try them in different positions,” said Hart. “You go down there and you are not playing district and region opponents so you get a chance to play people you would never see unless you get to the state tournament or play them in a weekend tournament somewhere.”

“It gives you a chance to try and see some things you probably wouldn’t do at home,” said Hart. “Hopefully when you come back from Florida, you come back a better team.”

“It was kind of a mixed bag for us this year,” said Hart. “I was a little disappointed we didn’t reduce some of the errors we have been making but I was pleased with the way we hit down in Florida.”

“I was pleased with the way some of the people responded with some of the changes we made to our lineup, so I did think we came back a better team,” said Hart. “All together we didn’t improve on a couple of aspects that I would have liked to but over the next couple of weeks we will fix those.”

“I thought we hit the ball extremely well and I thought our base running improved,” said Hart. “We came together as a team a little bit and that is always helpful.”

“I think some of our inexperience and youthfulness came together a little in Florida,” he added. “We saw some players that could play some different positions and that will help us down the road.”

“I think going to Florida is always a positive thing,” Hart said. “We did some things that will help us in the long run.”