Road trip break up the spring

The IHSA designated March 11 as baseball's opening day, the first official day that high school teams in Illinois were allowed to play a game.

Yet as of Tuesday, 23 days later, some baseball teams in Lake County had yet to play a game. In fact, some teams had yet to even practice on their fields.

Yep, even by northern Illinois standards, the weather this spring has been a real stinker.

The snow and rain storms of recent weeks, coupled with the cold, have kept baseball teams inside and made their fields soggy, muddy, unplayable messes.

Enter the Spring Break trip.

The fashionable thing to do these days is to escape the harsh, unproductive conditions.

Much like many students all over the country do over Spring Break, baseball players are heading south for their weeklong recess from school. Their hope is to finally get some baseball in -- sans indoor batting cages or parking lot blacktop (the most common option for practicing outdoors when a field is too wet).

Six teams in the Daily Herald's Lake County coverage area -- Grayslake Central, Lake Zurich, Libertyville, Mundelein, Vernon Hills and Warren -- made a beeline for warmer weather last week and it paid off.

They were all able to practice outside on grass, play games and, well, feel like an actual baseball team.

"It was so nice to finally get outside," Warren coach Clint Smothers said. "What a difference."

Grayslake Central and Vernon Hills played in a tournament in Louisville, Ky., Lake Zurich got six games in while in Missouri, Libertyville went to Arizona for the fifth year in a row and Mundelein and Warren trekked down to southern Illinois.

"It was so nice," Lake Zurich baseball coach Gary Simon said. "It was like being in another world. It was 60 or 70 degrees, our kids wore short sleeves. It was a bummer coming back here."

For Vernon Hills, returning home meant a return to a field that is in even more dire shape that most fields. A design flaw makes the Cougars' field prone to frequent flooding and drainage problems.

Last spring, the Cougars didn't even get to practice on their own field until May 1. This year, they have yet to get on it and are relegated to the parking lot even on dry, sunny days.

"It was a quick dose of reality coming back here," Vernon Hills coach Jay Czarnecki said. "Games are getting cancelled, you're back in the gym or in the parking lot. When you're coming back from a place where you got to play and you're back inside or on the blacktop, it's hard to keep the guys focused and keep their spirits up."

Imagine what the coaches at the schools that didn't go away are facing.

How demoralized must their players have been over Spring Break?

"I can't even imagine," Grayslake Central coach Troy Whalen said. "We got in three games and we feel very fortunate to have gotten that. I can't imagine still being 0-0 right now. But that's what we would have been if we would have stayed."

Whalen said that as it is, his team is still down six games.

"We could've been down nine games right now had we not gone on our trip," Whalen said. "That's almost a third of your season right there and I'm sure some teams around here are in that very situation. This has been a really tough start to the season."

Where to go: Different coaches have different reasons for the destinations they pick for their Spring Break trips.

Some coaches like to keep their trips as local as possible so that they're far enough away to benefit from better weather, but close enough to be within easy driving distance of home.

Meanwhile, Libertyville coach Jim Schurr is a big fan of the cross-country flight his team takes each year. He likes the fact that warm, sunny weather is almost a guarantee in Arizona.

"All kinds of things go into (the planning) of a trip like this," Libertyville coach Jim Schurr said. "All I know is that what we've been doing has been working great for us these past five years. It's been so advantageous to our program to go to a place where we know we can practice and where we know we can play games. I had to rub in the sunscreen. (Laughs) It was 85 to 90 degrees every day there and it was just beautiful. That's a guarantee that you could never get here."

Grayslake Central coach Troy Whalen also wants to guarantee some fun when he travels.

That's why his team played at Disney World's Wide World of Sports last year and will likely do so every other year so that each class will have the opportunity to experience it. In off years like this year, they'll stick with the trip to Kentucky.

"It's a pretty big undertaking to plan a trip like (Disney World)," Whalen said. "But it's so great to do. It's a great experience. Really, any trip with your team is a great experience. You're creating such a memorable experience for the kids. It's nice to see them bond."

Wood working: It was opposite week for Libertyville during its trip to Arizona.

Not only was the warm, inviting weather there completely different from what the weather was like here, so were the bats that the Wildcats used in one of their games.

Libertyville took on a team from the Bronx in New York. High schools in the state of New York recently switched from using aluminum bats -- the National High School Federation standard -- to wood bats.

Libertyville coach Jim Schurr says he doesn't know of any other state in the country in which the high school teams use wood bats.

He likes the trail that New York is blazing.

"I don't see Illinois doing something like that (switching over to wood bats) until teams at the college level embrace it. "Schurr said. "There's a lot of money in the aluminum game. And the aluminum bats are supposed to make the high school and college game more fast-paced and higher scoring.

"But using wood is the purest way to play the game. I'd like to see the high school game played with wood."

Schurr's players probably wouldn't put up much of a fuss. He said they all seemed to enjoy playing a real game with a wood bat.

"A lot of the guys train with wood bats because they're harder to hit with, the sweet spot is a lot smaller," Schurr said. "If you can hit with a wood bat, you should be able to hit really well with an aluminum bat. I think the guys liked seeing what they could do with a wood bat in a game."

Spring break stars: Despite a lack of field time for teams in this area during the preseason, there were some standout performances over Spring Break.

And some of them were kind of unexpected.

"One of the nice surprises of our tournament was the play of some of our juniors," said Vernon Hills coach Jay Czarnecki, whose team returned home from Kentucky with a 2-0 record. "We got a lot of solid at-bats from our juniors. And we faced some real quality pitching, so that was nice to see."

Czarnecki said that junior Nate Moraton played particularly well, going 3-for-3 in one game with a double and a triple.

Meanwhile, Warren went 4-0 over Spring Break thanks in large part to junior Chad Johnson, who made a strong varsity debut by drilling 2 home runs and driving in 9 runs while in southern Illinois. He carried a .575 batting average for the trip.

Classmate Pat Walters, the designated hitter for the Blue Devils, also came up big. He smacked a homer and drove in 5 runs.

Lake Zurich went 4-2 in Missouri, riding the strong arms of Joey DeBernardis, Tanner Witt, Ricky Erickson and Steve Cleary _ all of whom got wins. DeBernardis also put up some big numbers at the plate. He had 2 doubles and 2 home runs.

The big hitters for Grayslake Central, which went 2-1 at the same Louisville-area tournament that Vernon Hills played in, were Shawn Tobie, Matt Schmidt and Mike Gentile. The Rams also got solid pitching performances out of Kevin O'Rourke and Aaron Snyder.