Published: June 11, 2008 11:26 pm      

High school, legion make it happen

SOMERSET — Coach Steve Costea didn’t need to put his baseball team through a strenuous practice on Wednesday afternoon.

After all, they had a game to play in a few hours.

Not the state championship game with Berwick – that isn’t until Friday night at Blair County Ballpark.

Instead, Costea’s players went through a light workout before driving north to play St. Michael in a Cambria County American Legion game.

That’s the way it is in Somerset: All baseball all the time.

“The way Somerset baseball has survived here is the high school team and Legion team working hand in hand,” Costea said as his team took a round of batting practice on a sunny afternoon. “It’s a lot of the same ballplayers – it is the same ballplayers, basically, except for a couple here or there. We work well together.”

Costea doesn’t manage the Legion team – he leaves that up to Bob Hay – but he certainly keeps in step with what is happening in that league and with his counterpart.

“Coach Hay and I talk to each other daily,” Costea said. “We know what’s going on. He knows what’s going on. When he has a problem, he comes to me. When I have a problem, I go to him. It’s a nice liaison to have. It’s nice for the left hand to know when the right hand is trying to do something. That’s only helped the program become stronger at the top.”

Costea wasn’t worried about his players taking part in an early season Legion game nearly 48 hours before the biggest game of their young lives. Sure, some of the top players might get the night off, but the fact that Somerset can even field a Legion team in the midst of its run to the PIAA championship game is impressive, especially given the way that some other local teams have struggled to field a Legion team.

And Somerset wasn’t about to try to push back the Legion game, even if it was against a St. Michael team that is one of the league’s other powerhouses.

“We may not put the best lineup out there tonight, but we’re going to put a competitive team out there,” Costea said a few hours before the Legion game. “Some of the young guys are going to play, and they’re eager to play. They don’t get to play a whole lot this time of year. They want to get out there and prove what they can do and build for the future. I trust my young guys, too. They’re good.”

That’s a large part of the reason that the Golden Eagles have been consistently good in baseball: Year after year, Somerset churns out good players.

The only way to do that is to have a strong feeder program in place so that Costea and Hay aren’t trying to teach the basics of the game to high-school age players.

“The Little League has been great. The senior league … that whole system just keeps bringing up ballplayer after ballplayer,” Costea said. “We take it, we fine tune it, we change some things, but we get good, quality baseball players coming into the program that know baseball.”

That also requires a strong commitment from the players themselves, and it’s one they don’t take lightly. They know that Somerset baseball has a proven track record of success, with a number of Golden Eagles going on to play at the college, minor-league and even major-league levels, and it’s a tradition they plan on upholding.

“It’s real important here,” said Tyler Uphouse, the team’s cleanup hitter. “The program has been good here over and over again. We have a tradition of success here in Somerset.”

That kind of tradition is built during cold, rainy spring days as well as long, hot summer evenings and, sometimes, during fall baseball sessions in far-flung locales. It requires plenty of sacrifice, a fact that Costea said has scared off more than a few Somerset student-athletes.

“We get a lot of kids that don’t come out for baseball because they know what work ethic there is and what tradition there is,” he said. “We take serious baseball players. It’s not something to do after basketball or after football. It’s baseball season around here.”

Costea knows all about the school’s baseball history because he’s lived it. He’s the fourth baseball coach in the school’s history and he’s tried to keep the school’s tradition alive.

“Things haven’t changed a whole lot,” he said. “That’s the key. We have continuity here. I played for Joe Maslak. I coached under Bob Mayer. I coached under Randy Close. Those guys handed me a program that was off and running. I’ve learned from those guys and what they do and how they do it.”

So, the Golden Eagles – two days shy of the state championship game – were out on the field Wednesday, practicing bunts. Costea wasn’t overhauling anything, instead making some minor adjustments.

“Take care of the little things,” Costea said. “Put the small pieces of the puzzle together and the big picture comes all of a sudden. It’s here and it’s there. Hopefully we’ll put the final piece in on Friday night.”