Tribe baseball has come a long way

Two wins.
Do you remember when that was a season for the Indians?
It wasn’t that long ago.
In 2011, the Fort Recovery High School baseball team managed just two wins — 2-17. It had won only three games a year earlier, two of which came following sectional elimination.
Both of those teams lost their opening tournament game.
Now, just four years later, the Indians find themselves two wins away from a state championship.
“It’s incredible,” said FRHS senior Mitch Stammen.
He’s right. And it’s almost impossible to overstate how incredible it really is.
After a run of three straight sectional titles from 2006 to 2008, Fort Recovery’s baseball program had fallen apart. It was on the verge of extinction.
There was no junior varsity team. There were barely enough players to fill a varsity roster.
The idea of not fielding a team in 2011 was a real possibility. But Jerry Kaup, who had been an assistant coach with the baseball and softball teams for more than a decade, didn’t want to see that happen.
So he accepted the job, becoming the team’s fourth coach in five seasons.
In taking the reins, he talked not about strikeout totals, batting averages or stolen bases. And he certainly didn’t mention wins.
His philosophy was about building something stronger — trust.
“Baseball’s a team game,” said Kaup. “And so you have to depend on your teammates. You have to trust your teammates. You have to trust the coach. You can’t be selfish.
“You can’t be selfish,” he added, repeating the phrase for emphasis. “You have to trust the fabric of the team and hope that everybody can become successful.”
But success didn’t come easily.
Take a look back at the 2011 team photo. There are 11 players, about half of whom were freshmen, and two coaches — assistant Harold Fiely and Kaup.
“That first year was just awful,” said Fiely, whose son, Cody endured the three-win season as a senior a year earlier. “It was so hard, because we were begging kids to play.
“By the time we got to our third year, we … started getting better. And our fourth year, last year, was tremendous. … It’s just hard to understand. It’s incredible how we went from the bottom to this.”
As a freshman and sophomore, Shane Pottkotter endured both the 2010 and ’11 seasons, years in which the team went a combined 5-35. That’s a lot of losing for a young player, or any player, to endure.
The thought of state championships, or anything close, was unimaginable.
“When I was in school, I was dreaming about winning sectionals,” said Pottkotter, who is now a volunteer assistant with the team. “This journey has just been kind of amazing really.”
The progress started in Kaup’s second season, when the Indians won nine games.
It wasn’t anything to get excited about outside of Fort Recovery, but it was nearly twice as many victories as the team had earned in the previous two years combined. It was a big first step.
Fort Recovery got back above .500 a year later, finishing 14-13. And then last season the program took off, winning 20 games.
Derek Backs and his fellow seniors — Nate Lochtefeld, Ben Will, Cole Wendel and Stammen — saw the entire climb, having entered the program in 2012 after the struggles of the previous two seasons.
“The whole mentality of this program has changed,” Backs said. “There wasn’t really any hype about baseball. Yeah, I love the game, so I knew I was going to play it, but … nobody really came to the games besides parents. And now we have ‘pack the park’ nights … People just love the game now and they love supporting our team … And that’s fun.”
A season like the Indians have put together this year will do that.
They won their first 17 games. They were ranked No. 1 in Division IV for most of the season. And their run through the tournament has pushed them to a school-record win total — 25.
Now, as the Tribe prepares to take the field Thursday at Huntington Park in Columbus against Newark Catholic, it all comes back to that little number.
Two wins.
Not so long ago, they meant little. They were brief respites from the norm, aberrations that meant little as losses piled up around them.
Now they could mean everything. They would complete a storybook season for a state championship, earn a place in Fort Recovery lore and make memories to last a lifetime.
It’s been an incredible journey for the Indians, from the doldrums in 2011 to the brink of being crowned the best small-school baseball team in Ohio. It’s been built on hard work, teamwork, and, yes, trust.
All of those things and so much more — pitching, hitting, defense — must come together this week for Fort Recovery to complete its climb to the top. It now comes down to that simple goal, that humble place this program came from just four short years ago.
Two wins.