Baseball: Koerner, Newman have ‘special season’

After being oh so close to advancing to the state finals each of the last two seasons, the Newman coaching staff knew there were two approaches they could take to start this season.

One would be to ignore those heartbreaking supersectional losses, wipe the slate clean and start over.

The other was to remind the players of the tough endings to the previous two seasons and use it as a motivating factor to try and get over the hump this season.

“We embraced it. Early in the season when we talked, we said our goal was to go to state. We made that our goal,” Newman coach Kenny Koerner said. “Right or wrong, our conference is a hard conference, we never set a goal to win our conference. We set a goal to be playing as well as we can at the end of the season so we can win a regional, then win a sectional, then a supersectional.

“We set the goal to go to state early on, and used the last two seasons as motivation.”

It worked. The Comets broke through with a supersectional victory, earning a trip to the state finals for the first time in program history. They finished third in Class 1A, exorcising their demons along the way.

For Koerner and his coaching staff’s approach to the physical and mental aspects of the game in an historic season at Newman, he is the 2023 Sauk Valley Media Coach of the Year.

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Koerner is quick to deflect credit to his players for their accomplishments, but he also talked at length about his assistant coaches – all nine of them.

“We added some coaching this year that really made a big difference for us throughout the whole season. We had nine guys this year coaching for us. It gave us a lot more time to spend individual time with kids during practice, and to get different viewpoints,” Koerner said. “I thought we did a lot better job this year of reaching the kids individually with what they needed. We coached the kids hard, and I really think the coaching side of it for us was key. You’ve got to have really good kids and really good players, but I thought we did a better job individualizing our coaching this year throughout the season.”

It wasn’t just the number of coaches that helped things flow, but the different personalities and specialties each coach brought to the table.

John Kutz was the guy who let his hair down – and had it shaved off during the postseason run – that allowed the players to stay loose. Nate Olson was closer in age to the players, giving them more of a peer to talk to. Larry Ybarra served as the wise “grandfatherly” mentor to focus on the mental side of the game.

Gehrig Koerner, Kenny’s son, came back from Judson College armed with drills and lessons he had learned from playing college ball. Ryan Decker provided on-point scouting reports, which came in especially handy during the postseason. Nate Mason, Zach Rice and Larry Van Landuit were extra sets of eyes and lent a lot of help during practices. Manager Jace Murphy was made an honorary coach, and Skip Wolfe volunteered his time to help with the pitching staff.

“It just felt like we were better to holistically coach the kids this year,” Kenny Koerner said. “I’m much more of the head coach and the disciplinarian and the guy that yells at everybody. Then the players could go and talk to the other coaches after they get scolded by me. Our coaching staff, I feel, is as good as anybody’s – I just feel like we have a nice mix of people for the kids.”

It wasn’t lost on the players how much more work they could get done in practice with more coaches helping out. Different drills and different stations going on all at the same time helped the players focus in much more closely on improving their skills.

“It felt like we had multiple position coaches at every position group, and it allowed them to hone in on certain guys and certain skills, and coach us better,” senior catcher Jaesen Johns said. “Everybody got more reps because we could work through more drills at once.”

“That was huge,” senior infielder/pitcher Nolan Britt added. “This year, there were two or three coaches watching every swing in the batting cage, and giving feedback on every swing, every ground ball and pop fly during practice. It helps when you have teammates there to see it, but it’s just different when the coaches see it.”

It wasn’t just the coaching itself, either. The different personalities on the staff allowed for more of the players to feel comfortable expressing their own character around the team, and that helped the team grow closer.

“Their different personalities helped us relate to them 100%, but it also helped us to be different characters at practice,” senior pitcher/infielder Kyle Wolfe said. “Sometimes you need to be lighthearted and goofy, especially when you’re practicing for two hours day in and day out; you’ve got to be able to flip the switch sometimes at practice and be a goofball, as long as we were getting our work in. We were training and working really hard during some drills, and then in others we’d still work hard, but take a little time to be able to be high school kids playing the game we love.

“It gave us a chance as teammates to embrace each other’s character and bond, and that helps us play for more than just ourselves. We went out there to play for each other.”

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Team leadership was also a key for the Comets. Not only were there more coaches to focus more closely on the players, but the three seniors and junior Brendan Tunink, who had all been there through the previous two seasons, stepped up from the start this season to set an example.

Britt, Johns, Tunink and Wolfe provided a strong, steady core that the younger, less-experienced players were able to easily rally around and feel comfortable with. The fact that they were all in the middle of the field – Johns at catcher, Wolfe and Britt in the middle infield, and Tunink in center field – proved the old adage that the strength of a team starts up the middle.

“From a players standpoint, early in the season when we started practice, Brendan, Nolan, Kyle and Jaesen, when we were talking, they said to me, ‘Coach, we’re not losing this year.’ They said that, and as a coach, you think, ‘Yeah, we’re not losing this year, but there’s a lot of things that have to go right, too,’” Koerner said. “And it was a team that was really loose; the dugout this year, the bench was really a big factor for us. But when we got on that field, you had Nolan, Jaesen, Kyle and Brendan as those guys who had been there before, right in the middle of the field, and they’re tough kids and they don’t want to lose.

“I could tell when we came to the playoffs, we got behind early in those games, and the way we were talking in the dugout, it wasn’t like we were losing; those kids just believed that we were going to find a way to win this year.”

Rallies became the … well, rallying cry for the Comets in the postseason. They trailed in each of their final five games, but came back to win four of them.

First came a 3-0 deficit to host Pearl City in the sectional semifinals; Newman roared back to win 8-3. The sectional final saw Newman trail 3-0 early against Dakota, then 7-6 later on, only to have Tunink hit home runs to tie the game 3-3, give the Comets a 6-3 lead, then tie the game 7-7 on the way to a 10-7 win.

The supersectional saw Newman trailing 1-0 going into the fourth inning before a 3-2 victory over Chicago Hope Academy to punch its ticket to Peoria.

At state, the Comets fell behind 1-0 to Henry-Senachwine in the semifinal before they tied it 1-1; Henry went on to win on a walk-off hit in the bottom of the seventh. But Newman bounced back the next day, trailing Goreville 2-0 going into the bottom of the fifth before scoring six unanswered runs to take third place in Class 1A with a 6-2 victory.

With three seniors leading the way, the Comets combined a sense of urgency with a calm confidence that they could come through, no matter the situation.

“I think it was all of it together, the coaching and the urgency and just having a lot of guys who didn’t want to lose, me being one of them,” Johns said. “We wanted to go out with a bang, capitalize on what we could in the postseason and not go home early, I guess you’d say. We wanted to play as many games as we could.”

Wolfe credited the past losses as the key when it came to crunch time in the postseason. With the ability to focus on one team without worrying about who would come next if they won, and the time to prepare for that next opponent between games, the laser-sharp focus and advanced scouting reports blended perfectly with what the older players already knew about the big stage.

“I think it was experience. Going through the postseason and being there before as huge, and with us being seniors, we had nothing to lose,” Wolfe said. “In earlier years, it was more of a point just to get to the supersectional; this year, we felt it was our time to do something to finally take the next step. I think it pushed us further, after seeing how tough it was for the classes before us to come up just short.

“In years past, it was frustrating not to get there, but we knew we were really close the past two years, and we just wanted another shot. We got it, and we took advantage. We just really wanted to make it to state. It was just a different mindset, and to finally get there was incredible.”

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This year’s Newman team grew organically. Unlike the last couple of seasons, where there was pretty much a locked-in lineup from Day 1, this year’s squad had some question marks early on.

“We played with a lot of lineups early in the season. We had three positions that were wide open. It was different this year than it has been the last two years, when we’ve been pretty set,” Koerner said. “We moved a lot of guys in and out, we moved a lot of guys up and down from JV to varsity, so early in the season, we were playing with some lineups.”

But a sophomore and two freshmen – Joe Oswalt, Garret Matznick and Garet Wolfe – stepped up fairly quickly to fill those open positions, and when sophomore Daniel Kelly came back to the lineup after recovering from surgery at the end of wrestling season, things started to solidify.

“It just felt like after we got Daniel back, we settled into a lineup; the last month, I don’t think we changed our batting order at all,” Koerner said. “We really settled in, and I just started to get a sense – and the other coaches did, too – that we were on track.”

The players also felt it. Not only did the early struggles help strengthen the team’s resolve – Newman had an 11-8 record after a loss to Princeton on May 1 – but the way the younger players stepped up showed the veterans that they could count on them when they needed to come through.

“I think it was really huge for us that the team grew the way it did. We started the season not knowing that those people could step up and play at that level, so when they earned those spots, it made us even better because they were more confident, and we knew that we could trust everybody and be confident in everybody because they earned their spot,” Johns said.

Coincidentally, it was a comeback that started the stretch run that saw the Comets win 12 of their final 13 games. Leading Mercer County 4-2 through five innings on May 2, Newman had to rally in the bottom of the seventh after the Golden Eagles took a 5-4 lead in the sixth.

Tunink led off the seventh with a walk, then stole second and third before Britt drove him in with a one-out RBI single to tie the game. Britt then stole second and third before scoring the winning run on Garet Wolfe’s sacrifice fly.

The next day, the offense was clicking on all cylinders in a 24-3 win over Sterling, as Newman scored seven runs in the second inning, six in the third and 10 in the fourth, and Kyle Wolfe gave up just three runs and three hits in a complete game. Eight different Comets had RBIs, and all nine spots in the order scored at least two runs in that game.

“I think the big win over Sterling really sparked us to go on that winning streak,” Britt said. “Honestly, starting slow at the beginning of the year was big for us at the end. We didn’t truly have all the positions figured out, who was going to play where, and I think in struggling to get to that lineup, we were finding out players’ weaknesses, and then especially their strengths as we started to win.”

Koerner commended his three seniors for their role in helping the team come together. He pointed out the clutch hitting of Johns and Britt in the second half of the season, as well as Kyle Wolfe’s strong stretch of games on the mound. Britt also became a more consistent pitcher down the stretch, and Koerner couldn’t say enough good things about how that trio continuously came through in crunch times.

But it was also their leadership skills that shined throughout the season.

“Kyle is just so steady at everything he does, and he’s always so calm,” Koerner said. “Jaesen got a lot more vocal as the season went on, especially in the dugout with a lot of the younger kids. And Nolan, he’s just a big-game player and leader; when you get to the postseason, he always plays his best.

“Those guys just battled and battled all season, they were all just tough competitors, and they came through time after time in the big moments.”

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Now, Koerner and the coaches will turn their attention to next season, and what the Comets can do for an encore.

Losing the three seniors will leave big shoes to fill both on and off the field, but the return of Tunink for his senior season, as well as the emergence of the freshmen and sophomores this season – and a group of their classmates “that probably could’ve come up and played a little bit of varsity if we wouldn’t have had such a great core at that junior-senior level,” Koerner said – has the coach thinking big.

“It’s exciting to me. We had our banquet last week, and that’s where I made the statement just like we did in the playoffs: ‘OK, we’re celebrating, this is it, now we’re moving forward,’ and we started talking to the young guys about it,” Koerner said. “It’s exciting. I look forward to the new challenge. Every season’s a new group, and it’ll be fun to see Brendan in that senior leadership role now, and to see where he goes and if anybody will pitch to him next year at all after this year’s season [when he hit .488 with 18 home runs, 52 runs and 50 RBIs]. It’s just exciting to me to see where the young kids go and what they can do.

“To me, those first couple of years, you have some insecurities as a coach even, just wondering, ‘Is this a fluke? Are we really doing the right thing?’ Another season like this kind of makes me feel like we’re on the right track. It just feels like it validates what you’ve done, and I really am excited to see how we continue to grow it. I think we’ve done a good job the last three years of making it a place you want to play, and it’s fun because it makes you feel like you’ve got something now with the momentum.”

But even with the focus forward, Koerner knows he’ll still reminisce about this past season from time to time, and feels like there might be just one little regret when he looks back.

“Sometimes we talk as coaches, you want to sit back and just enjoy it,” Koerner said. “I made a comment to Coach Kutz one day, ‘You know, we really should just sit back and enjoy this a little bit more than we have,’ but you’re so into every game, and you’re so stressed about where the season’s going, what every kid is doing, about every kid improving. This is one of those seasons that when you look back in 10 years, we’ll say, ‘Why didn’t we sit and enjoy it a little bit more?’ Because it’s a special season.”