Grapevine baseball’s new coach gets ready for first playoffs
Grapevine baseball coach Steve Hutcherson made it very clear to the community when he accepted the job this past June that he wanted to be at Grapevine as long as possible. He is this high school’s fourth head baseball coach in the past four seasons.
Based on how the regular season went, Hutcherson could have signed a lifetime contract. The Mustangs (23-3, 12-0 District 6-5A) easily won their district championship and carried a 19-game winning streak into the postseason.
Because this is a standardized testing week, the Mustangs could not begin their Class 5A Region I bi-district series against Denton until Friday. The entire series will be played at Saginaw Chisholm Trail High School.
The opener is set for 7:30 p.m. Friday. The second game is scheduled for noon on Saturday. A potential deciding third game would follow 30 minutes after the conclusion of the second. The winner advances to the area round against the winner of Granbury-Fort Worth Western Hills.
“When I found out [former coach Lee Yeager] wasn’t coming back,” Hutcherson said, “I wanted to call Grapevine home if I got the job.
“We have good players. Really the athletic and baseball side are things that I wasn’t worried about. My focus was to get them to be more team oriented. We were pretty good at that anyway. But the better you are at that, the better your team is.”
Baseball is such a repetitious sport that the game can sometimes become stale and a grind. Hutcherson and his staff worked to avoid the grind. After all, this is high school. He wanted to make this experience memorable.
Hutcherson drew his experience through his tutelage under Yeager and what he learned as a head coach at Lampasas. It seemed to resonate because the Mustangs haven’t lost in nearly two months.
Some of the 6-5A competition was solid between Lake Dallas and Birdville. The rest of it between the Fort Worth ISD schools wasn’t. Grapevine outscored its opposition, 174-9. But the winning streak also faced its challenges with Saturday non-district games against Colleyville Heritage and Frisco Liberty.
“These guys embraced the challenges and wanted to prove to teams in Region II that Region I could play some good baseball,” Hutcherson said. “We got everybody’s best shot. We knew we had a bulls-eye on us.”
To do that, Hutcherson made sure both of his top pitchers in left-hander Kyle Flamm and right-hander Connor Neuman would face Lake Dallas and Birdville. In some cases, neither pitched in several of the district games so they would face better lineups against Colleyville Heritage and Liberty.
The offense has been led by senior shortstop Ty Jones, who is closing on the single-season school record for hits. Senior catcher Tanner Gibson has been a stabilizing presence for a pretty deep pitching staff. Neuman, who played center field when he doesn’t pitch, is hitting around .400.
Colleyville Heritage update
The Panthers (19-12, 7-5 District 7-6A) wrapped up third place and will face South Grand Prairie, the No. 2 seed in District 8-6A, in the Region I bi-district playoff round in a series that will start on Friday.
While the Panthers finished the regular season dropping five of their last six, head coach Alan McDougal isn’t concerned about the lack of momentum.
“We’ve been battled tested and faced some really good arms in Carroll and Coppell,” McDougal said. “We have a really young roster of guys who have not experienced the postseason. It’s going to be a case of how they respond to it.”
This story was originally published May 3, 2016 at 1:53 PM with the headline "Grapevine baseball’s new coach gets ready for first playoffs."