Glenvar baseball team follows an unlikely leader to state tournament

Tyler Crockett didn’t really know what high school baseball meant to him. He does now.

Glenvar’s senior shortstop and pitcher reevaluat ed after a midseason team meeting to air out theories on why the Highlanders had lost seven of their first nine games and what could be done to arrest the slide .

“I don’t want the season to end,” he said. “I want to keep playing.”

One of three seniors on the team, Crockett has done what he could to assure that outcome.

“For the last five weeks, he’s put us on his back and carried us,” Glenvar coach Billy Wells said.

The Highlanders are one of the last Group A Division 2 teams still playing, and the Region C champs entertain Gate City 7 p.m. tonight at Kiwanis Field in a state quarterfinal.

The winner plays Friday in a semifinal against the William Monroe-Nandua survivor in an attempt to make the title game on Saturday.

Glenvar has a young team that perhaps wasn’t expected to make it this far. Three sophomores and two freshmen start, which is why Crockett’s role has been critical. That’s also why he came to find out that baseball was so important to him.

“When we started out, there was a bunch of cliques on the team,” he said. “But the way this team has come together has made this by far the most fun team I’ve ever been a part of.”

Crockett’s leadership has been a factor as much as his play, but he’s caught fire on the field as well.

After a particularly slow start, he has rebounded to lead the team in batting average (.375), hits (24), walks (18) and runs scored (27). He has stolen 14 bases. At short, he has but four errors. On the mound, Crockett has made 11 appearances, including five as a starter , totaling three wins, two saves, and a 2.46 earned run average to go with 53 strikeouts in 37 innings.

“He finds ways to get it done,” Wells said.

A key to his success was moving back into the offensive role he was most accustomed to, that of a leadoff man. Experiments were made moving him around to third and ninth in the order, but he never seemed comfortable. When Wells moved him back to the top of the lineup, Crockett began to play with impact.

He also had an impact on Glenvar basketball .

Crockett is the leading scorer in Glenvar basketball history with over 1,200 career points and he set the single game mark this year with 45 points. He had a terrific career made all the more enjoyable because his father, Brian, was an assistant coach, and Tyler Crockett will play basketball at Randolph College next year.

Golf may be Crockett’s favorite sport to play — even if it isn’t the one in which he had the most talent.

“Baseball was No. 3,” he said.

Being the busy athlete he is, he avoided out of season baseball altogether since he’s been in high school. He’d just show up for the first day of baseball practice and start playing.

He didn’t even play baseball as a sophomore after lettering as a freshman in a limited role. His plan was to concentrate on basketball, the sport he assumed he had the best chance to play in college.

Crockett visited Wells before the season to tell him what he’d decided. His coach respected the decision and wished him luck.

The following year Crockett had second thoughts. Wells urged him to come out to practice , stick with it a week or so, see what he thought, then make his decision. No hard feelings, Wells said.

Crockett came out the first day and never left.

There was never a question whether he would play as a senior.

With the inexperience of many players, the struggles on the field, and the lack of success in the first part of the campaign, things were tough for the Highlanders.

The meeting to discuss the issues and make some plans on where they’d go from there helped.

Glenvar won 11 of its last 13, including the Three Rivers District tournament and Region C. Then the Highlanders upset 22-win Chilhowie in the regional semifinals to qualify for the state tournament.

“I just think we were playing scared,” Crockett said. “People were playing like they were afraid to mess up.”

Having played as a freshman himself, he could relate. That made it easier to talk to younger team members.

His advice:

“Don’t worry about physical mistakes. Nobody is going to get mad at you about that.”

Mental mistakes are another matter. Crockett avoided a serious one of those when he opted for one more season of baseball.

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