Sunday Morning Chat: Atlantic Manager Steve Wilson

Today, one of our senior writers, Rick Duteau, sits down with Atlantic Manager Steve Wilson, who talks about last year’s state tournament experience, the Dave Smith Memorial Game and the one thing that keeps him coming back every year. Enjoy!

Rick: Well, coach, last season Atlantic had one of the best seasons ever, making the state semifinals in 7A. At what point in the season did you start to think, “Maybe this team could win it all?”

Coach Wilson: I never thought that we could get to the point where we could win it all, only because so many things can happen on the baseball field. I knew we would not only have to be good, but we’d have to be lucky. When we won the district championship, I thought ‘Well, we’ll now go to the next step. We’ll take one game at a time.’ And that’s exactly the way I looked at it. In reality, I had people coming up to me and telling me, “Now if you win this, you’re going to play this…” I never even looked to see what the next step was after the district. I never looked from game to game until I won that game. I had no idea and it was a great run but I never really expected it. I knew my players had it in them but so many things can go wrong on a baseball field that can turn good things to a bad thing.

Rick: Explain the feeling of going to state for someone who’s never had the privilege to experience that feeling.

Coach Wilson: It is the most unbelievable thing ever. I mean, for my players it was like magic. When you walk into that stadium and you look around and notice that they had worked so hard to be there and it meant so much to them, it was just magical. That’s what we talked about last year that their run was magical. And it was like the crowning magic on top of it all.

Rick: You guys played a hard-fought game against Venice in the state finals but come up on the losing end, 4-3. When you replay that game, which I’m sure you’ve done hundreds of time since May, is there any second-guessing that goes on?

Coach Wilson: No, I don’t second guess what goes on during a game because I can’t take it back. So there really is no reason to do so. We played as hard as we could. We did the very best that we could do. I wish maybe that on a line drive that Joey Ohannesian had hit, it was maybe one inch higher in the first inning and we would have got two more runs, and we would have got over our goal of scoring four runs.

Rick: The fielder grabbed that one, if I remember correctly.

Coach Wilson: He reached up there.

Rick: Yeah, he made himself about as tall as he could get, if I recall.

Coach Wilson: It was a really good play. And I joke with Joey, I say “Joey, if you could have got just a little bit higher.”

Rick: [laughing]

Coach Wilson: That’s the only thing that we did. You know, I would have loved to have gone into it. I’m not making excuses, but I would have loved to go into it a lot more healthy because we weren’t healthy. But once we got them at the field we gave them all we had and we came up short. You have to give Venice a lot of credit. They are a very good baseball team. They brought in the lefty submariner, it was all she wrote. We were shut down.

Rick: And I remember this year, you guys you faced a submariner in the preseason.

Coach Wilson: Yeah we did, it was preseason and we did OK against him. We’re actually turning one of our junior varsity pitchers into a submarine pitcher.

Rick: Are you going to put him out there on the mound as a lamb for you guys to get ready for these teams? [laughing]

Coach Wilson: Well I don’t really know how we’re going to do it, but the bottom line is, he is doing better as a submarine pitcher than he was over-handed. My young junior varsity coach said, “Lets give him a shot at being a submarine pitcher.”

Rick: You guys would be the one with a submariner out there.

Coach Wilson: Well maybe, [laughing] but the bottom line is Venice did a very good job. They beat us straight up and we’re happy with as far as we went. It would have been nice to keep going, but we didn’t

Rick: Last year your team started 0-3 before you had gone off and had 12 wins in a row. This season the team starts 0-5, but you’ve won your last four including two big district wins.

Coach Wilson: Right.

Rick: Why do you think your teams these past few years have started so slow and then turn things around?

Coach Wilson: I don’t know exactly why, but I go into the Slam a little bit differently. We are a program that does not have an abundance of pitchers, we never have. So I have to pick and choose what location I want one of my pitchers to pitch in and where at. And where at during that whole week. Sometimes it doesn’t work out. I was not worried at all when we lost the Slam games last year. We lost four of them. I actually, at our banquet at the end of the year, I commented that we had played those four games and we were about exactly where we need to be. Because there were things we needed to work on and we came out of the Slam and did that. Same thing has happened this year. Unfortunately we lost a rainout. So we didn’t get the extra game, and it kinda carried over a couple games. And once the district started, we started to play well and another thing that’s happened, we got our captain back, Brad Myott. Brad is the team leader and the kids follow him.

Rick: And I noticed he came back, and you won four games.

Coach Wilson: We won four in a row! You know what it is, if one person can change anything, it’s a lot like a teacher when you have a classroom, when you have the one student doing well, he can pull everybody else up. And they start to all get involved. Well the same thing with Brad on the baseball field. He’s a leader and he gets the kids more psyched up about the game and ready to go. He is that person for us. He is The Man.

Rick: There’s obviously a lot of history at Atlantic. You played the Fourth Annual Dave Smith Memorial Game with Treasure Coast. Smith was Atlantic Baseball for almost two decades. How special is that game for you personally?

Coach Wilson: It’s very special. I was lucky enough when I came to Atlantic to know Dave. Dave was a very funny man who was basically was always looking on the bright side of everything. At that time he was no longer coaching baseball. He was coaching golf which was his other passion. But he was having anecdotes here and there and talk about the baseball field and what were the good things and the bad things. And he had some pretty good stories about what went on and the good and the bad.

Rick: Baseball enthusiasts will always contend that the love of baseball is bigger than any love for another sport. How does this Dave Smith Memorial game exemplify how baseball brings people together?

Coach Wilson: Well, with Dave, he’s touched so many players and he touched so many individuals in the community that through baseball that everybody remembers him and loves him. Whether you agreed with the way Dave coached or not, he was there to give 100 percent and his team gave 100 percent all the time and that’s all you can ask as a coach. He was a great guy, and it was such a shock when I had found out that he had passed away. I had talked to him the day before and he was telling me that he was going to New York and they were going to see some plays with his wife and he walked out of a restaurant and he was dead. I feel really bad for Kyle, his son who’s the baseball coach now at Treasure Coast. And I’m glad that we’re able to do this game in memory of him. It means an awful lot to me, and I know it means a lot to Kyle as well.

Rick: What is the thing you like most about coaching high school baseball? The one thing that keeps you coming back here every year?

Coach Wilson: The players. I mean…

Rick: And I know with your team especially, there’s a lot of characters but there’s a lot of character in this team.

Coach Wilson: My players. I try to point out to them that this is high school baseball. This isn’t professional baseball. You’re not in a position yet to walk out and sign a contract. You’re here to enjoy your high school career. And one of the things I did in high school, I enjoyed my high school career. My son enjoyed his high school career. And the bottom line is, you need to enjoy it. Look at the good, look at the bad. I try to talk about how are you going to take what you learned on the field into your life as you move forward because we’re not all play baseball forever. I tell them always, “You never know when it’s going to be over.” And everything you do on the baseball field you give 100 percent, and when you look in the mirror you’ve done the very best that you can do. And that’s how life is all the time. If you give it the very best you can do then you have no reason to have any doubts or regrets for what goes on. Its for the kids, it’s always for the kids.

Rick: If your coaching career ended tomorrow what would you point to as the single greatest memory that you’ve had on the baseball field as a coach?

Coach Wilson: Coaching my son is the number one thing. It’s the best thing that I did.

Rick: For how long did you coach him?

Coach Wilson: I coached him in American Legion Baseball for five years. He played baseball for me.

Rick: What position was he?

Coach Wilson: He started out as the second basemen, and then I needed a catcher and he became a catcher.

Rick: [laughing] Did he volunteer or did you volunteer him?

Coach Wilson: It was both and then he was a first basemen. I coached my son especially the last couple of years because we knew it was coming to an end, and it was the best thing that I’ve ever done.

Rick: How old is he? Where is he now?

Coach Wilson: He currently lives in California and he’s 35 years old. I’ve got a couple of grandkids.

Rick: How much thinking back, does it take to bring those memories up? It sounds like they’re still right there for you.

Coach Wilson: It doesn’t take long at all because when I’m on the baseball field, with my players now I think about things that went on with my son. Well not just him, but his teammates and I’m still very close to him. Some of his best friends were on the baseball field. Especially one of them, they’re like best friends, like bosom buddies. I think of them all them all the time and the funny things they would say and how they would react. So he was a catcher and his friend was the pitcher. They were the staff in the area.

Rick: Do you see any guys on the current team that kinda remind you of him?

Coach Wilson: I don’t like to do that because my son is above everybody else…

Rick: [laughing]

Coach Wilson: Because I have them enter my heart a different way. But my son always gave it everything he had whether he was able to come through or not. He always did 100 percent. My players do the same thing. I demand it of them. And when I demand something, it carries over. Baseball is a game of failure and we have to always find a way to get ahead of it and my players try to do that.

Rick: Going back, if your coaching career ended tomorrow what would be your biggest disappointment?

Coach Wilson: …that it wasn’t longer. I don’t want it to stop, but I know there’s going to be a time when it needs to, And I’ll be able to tell when that is. When your heart wants to do it, but your body says that you can’t do it anymore. But that would be the toughest.

Rick: Getting your team back to state this season, what has to happen for the rest of the season for a return trip?

Coach Wilson: Well it’s the same thing I talked about last year. We have to be baseball lucky. We have to do the best that we can and we’re going to need a little luck involved as well. My younger players are going to have to come through and if they come through and be my replacement for my seniors who left. My seniors were very strong this year.

Rick: I was just going to say, you lost two left-handed pitchers who were not only very successful in what they did, but they were probably the nucleus of the character of the team, and they were two different characters.

Coach Wilson: Yeah, two different characters. I don’t think Rigo Beltran would like to be in the same class as Sam Bergida, but they both are left-handers, so they are both characters in their own way. To replace players like that where you would know when they walk down to the mound that you would have better than a 60 or 70 percent chance of winning the game, that’s difficult. But we have young kids that are coming through and we’re climbing up the latter one rung at a time hopefully we’ll make it to the top this year.

Rick: If I wasn’t coaching baseball, I would be… doing what?

Coach Wilson: What I’m doing today, teaching. I never thought I would be a teacher. I was in the business world for a long time and then I got out of it. My wife one day said, “You’re missing coaching. Why don’t you go into teaching and maybe get back into coaching.” So I decided to become a substitute teacher to see what it was. I’ve been teaching now for eight years and I’ve loved every moment of it. But there are frustrations involved.

Rick: Have you been at Atlantic for the whole time?

Coach Wilson: The whole eight years. Dr. Kathy Weigel hired me, and I’ll always thank her for that. But I would continue to be doing what I’m doing today.

Rick: Something people outside of my baseball program would be surprised to know Steve Wilson is…

Coach Wilson: I can’t answer…I don’t even know what to say! I can’t even answer that question. [laughing]

Rick: That’s a tough one. See, you’re such an open book! [laughing]

Coach Wilson: I try to be, but I don’t know…if they don’t know, I don’t want them to know. How’s that? They just don’t know. They now know more private things than they need to know about me.

Rick: I’m going to get you out of here with the last one here. The biggest life lesson that I hope players can learn from me during their time here at Atlantic is…

Coach Wilson: Always give it 100 percent no matter what you’re doing. Don’t be afraid to fail because failure is how you learn to grow. That’s it.

Rick: I like it, coach. It’s always fun to talk to you.

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