2018 Midwest Region Preview | 2018 Perfect Game High School Preview Index
It seems as if the good folks in Kokomo, Ind. – or at least those who double as fans of the Kokomo High School Wildkats baseball program – have been waiting for the start of the 2018 baseball season for right about three years now.
It was back in 2015 that Sean Swan took over the head coaching duties at Kokomo HS after serving as an assistant coach at the school the previous four years. He decided to start a rebuild of a proud program that hadn’t won a sectional championship in years and hadn’t played in an Indiana High School Athletic Association (IHSAA) state championship game since 2007 (the ‘Kats finished as runner-up that year).
Swan studied his roster that season, took a look at a promising group of newcomers to the program, and made the thinking-outside-the-box decision to start a core group of five freshmen on the varsity: right-hander/infielder Jack Perkins, third baseman/right-hander Bayden Root, right-hander/infielder Kyle Wade, right-hander/outfielder Nate Hemmerich and infielder Noah Hurlock.
Fast-forward through that 2015 season, along with the springs of 2016 and 2017 and then wander over the Wildkats’ home field in a couple of weeks and take a look at those “Fab 5 Freshman”. They’re seniors now – three of them have signed with NCAA Division-I schools – and they’re determined to make people take notice of this year’s Kokomo ‘Kats.
“They’re a pretty special group,” Swan told Perfect Game this week. “They had some success at a very young age before they even got to high school, so there was a little bit of expectation coming with this senior group. Each year, they’ve continued to grow and continued to develop.”
And they have not done it in anonymity. Kokomo debuted in the No. 31 spot in the PG High School Preseason Top 50 national rankings and is No. 2 in the PG HS Midwest Region (Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin) behind only Pleasure Ridge Park HS in Louisville (No. 29 nationally).
It’s a team that finished 21-4 last season following a loss to Zionsville in the first-round of the IHSAA Class 4A playoffs, a squad that had also beaten Kokomo during the regular season; the Eagles went on to win the Class 4A state championship.
According to records posted on the MaxPreps website, the Wildkats finished 12-14-1 in 2015 and 14-14 in 2016 before busting out a year ago. They won 18 of their first 19 last spring, which had many people thinking a state championship would arrive a year before the five frosh were seniors, but Zionsville dashed that dream.
“Kind of our motto right now is that we just have a lot of unfinished business, really,” Root told PG this week. “We came in with a lot of hype our freshman year, and we haven’t been able to do anything with the expectations we have of ourselves and from the community, too. … There are just a lot of expectations that we haven’t lived up to yet, and that definitely fueled the work we did in the offseason.”
Root is an Ohio State signee that PG ranks as the No. 200 overall prospect in the national class of 2018. The 6-foot-2, 210-pound, hard-throwing PG All-American Perkins is ranked No. 56 nationally and has signed with Louisville; Wade is a top-500 who has signed-on with Purdue.
Additionally, sophomore right-hander Charez Butcher is the No. 40-ranked national prospect in the class of 2020 and has committed to Mississippi State.
“We’re all really, really good friends,” Root said of the senior group. “We spend a lot of time together, obviously, at practice, but we also spend a lot of time together off the field, too. That also kind of fuels the relationships that we have, and there’s no bad chemistry on our team; there’s not a lot of drama with this team. …
“The biggest thing with our team is we have a lot of good guys and a lot of close friends, but we just have to bring it all together in the biggest moments.” That loss to Zionsville still eats at these guys.
… … …
KOKOMO IS A CITY OF NEARLY 60,000 CITIZENS IN HOWARD COUNTY, and it sits a little over 60 miles north of Indianapolis. Kokomo High School is the only secondary school in the city and boasts an enrollment of more than 1,800 students in grades 9-12.
Indiana is renown nationally for its high school basketball, perhaps a little too romantically at times thanks to the movie “Hoosiers.” The Kokomo HS basketball program has won one state championship (in 1961) and recorded five state runner-up finishes, most recently in 2011.
By contrast, the Wildkats’ baseball program won the one-class IHSAA state championship in 1985 and was the runner-up at the one-class event in 1988 and in class 4A in 2007. Swan feels like it holds its own within the building.
“It’s Indiana, so it’s always going to be a basketball school, but I’d say baseball is right up there with it in terms of the success they’ve had here,” Swan said. “We’ve had multiple kids that have gone on to play collegiately and professionally, so there is a very strong history in regard to the program, long before this group got here, and I got here.”
And there’s more than just baseball and basketball in Wildkat Nation. Perkins and Wade were key performers for the football team in the fall, which finished as the Class 5A state runner-up after dropping a 42-28 decision to Columbus East in the championship game. It was the first time a KHS team had reached a football title game and it brought a lot of excitement to the neighborhood.
“What the football team did this fall was really special for our school,” Root said. “It instilled a lot of school pride, and that was something that hadn’t been taken as seriously as it was this fall. It was really special what they did in that respect.
“It made people at our high school (realize) that special things are going on here, and let’s not look over them and let’s really, really take advantage of the time that we have here.”
Swan likes the fact that quite a few his guys play multiple sports, which, of course, is not to say he won’t welcome the baseball-only guys like Root. He just likes the idea of his players getting direction from coaches other than himself; he likes them hearing different voices.
“In some cases, they may not be the star or the best player on the team like they’d be in baseball, so they have to accept a different role,” he said. “I think that teaches them a lot of things.”
Root is in a unique situation because he can also listen to a different voice: that of his dad. The Houston Astros made Derek Root a fifth-round pick right out of an Ohio high school in the 1993 June Amateur Draft and the left-handed pitcher and first baseman ended up playing parts of seven professional seasons in the minors and independent leagues.
“He’s a really big motivation for me; I credit everything that I have to him,” Root said. “He’s taught me the game front and back. … I feel like I’ve really been groomed to be a baseball player and my dad has been a big part of that. The mental side of baseball is just as big if not bigger than the physical side, and if I didn’t have him I don’t know where I’d even search for that kind of preparation or instruction.”
Scouts will be the first to say that it is the athletic Perkins who shows the most present upside on the team. The Louisville signee carries with him some impressive numbers, like his 4.39 grade-point average, the 95-mph fastball he unleashed at the PG All-American Classic at Petco Park in San Diego last August and the two all-tournament teams and one Top Prospect List citations he’s earned at PG events.
“Jack is a very intense kid,” Swan said. “He’s pretty quiet and low-key if you don’t know him, but he’s got a fire that burns inside of him. He’s very competitive – he holds himself to a very high standard – and I think that sometimes drives him to be as successful as he is …
“He does a lot of the little things behind the scene that doesn’t always show up on people’s radars. He’s just a good, solid kid.”
… … …
WITH THE START OF INDIANA’S HIGH SCHOOL SEASON STILL WEEKS AWAY, Swan will use the time spent during late winter indoor workouts to talk about the expectations that await his players. Those conversations won’t always dwell on what is expected of them on the baseball field, either, but rather what is expected of them away from it.
Once they leave high school and the KHS baseball program, some of them will move on to become ballplayers at the collegiate or professional level; PG ranks Perkins the No. 99 overall (college, juco, high school) prospect in June’s MLB Amateur Draft.
Here in the right now, however, Swan will tell them the importance of keeping their grades up, so they can get into a good college and continue to better themselves academically and socially. From there, they can hope to pursue a satisfying career while also becoming loving husbands and fathers.
“We try to look at the big picture,” he said. “We try to talk to them about being accountable to one another – being a good teammate – and hopefully leaving a little bit of legacy behind for the next group. It’s not just about them, it’s about the program and what they want to leave behind.
“I think if we do the little things … the wins and losses usually take care of themselves. We don’t really try to set too many goals in regard to (the number of wins), we try to be more big-picture.”
Kokomo plays its regular-season games in the competitive 10-team North Central Conference and winning a conference championship – like the Wildkats did last year – is a priority. While the coaches may not talk to the players about winning a certain number of games, scoreboards are still used at all the fields and it is winners that reap the rewards.
It’s going to take a lot of work to get there, to continue the winning ways of a year ago. Despite the sound leadership the seniors are poised to provide, other players will be looking to define their roles early in the season. That process involves the uneasy trick of allowing teenagers to mature into those roles and then get them to understand that there will be some necessary give-and-take along the way.
There is no denying that this is a group of Wildkats that won’t be satisfied with anything less than winning a state championship. It is for that reason the players and coaching staff are embracing the national attention the program is receiving from outlets like Perfect Game.
“I look at it as a reward for the hard work that they’ve put in up to this point,” Swan said. “It’s recognition that people think they see potential in us being one of the better teams in the nation (and) I don’t try to shy away from it. But I also don’t let them rest on that.”
Everyone appears to be ready to take it to the limit this season, to close-out that “unfinished business” to which Root referred. There is a lot of motivation.
“I think about that loss to Zionsville,” Perkins told Dean Hockney from the Sports Journal of Central Indiana during national signing day in November. “It was a big moment for us. We were the favorite to win, and now we have to put it all together as seniors. It is our last chance; we are going to learn from our mistakes.”
Root pointed out that it was he, Perkins and Wade who were presented with some attractive opportunities when they were younger players, and in retrospect they might have taken those opportunities for granted a little bit. Not anymore.
“We would think that if the spring (high school) season doesn’t work out we still have the summer to look forward to,” he told PG. “This year the mindset is completely different because we don’t have anything this summer; we don’t have anything after this.
“This is our last high school season and probably the last time that we’re ever going to play together out on the field. We want to take this last opportunity and do something special with it.”