2015 Perfect Game High School Baseball Preview Index | Midwest Region Preview
The philosophy of the St. Rita High School baseball is program is spelled out distinctly on the school’s website, with words fitting neatly into the letters of the team’s mascot and nickname: M-U-S-T-A-N-G-S.
Maximize: Reach your potential; Unity: Win and lose as a team; Self: Know yourself; Team: It is amazing what a team can accomplish; Academics: Excel in the classroom; Never: Never give up; Gifts: Respect the gifts from God; Guts: Deal with your failure; Gab: People say good things about you, not you about yourself; Strive: Everyone desires, but few are determined.
Throughout the program’s 100-plus year history, the baseball players that have taken the field at the all-male college preparatory school that sits on a 37-acre campus on Chicago’s southwest side have followed that written philosophy to the letter. It’s made for a unique place with a unique way of going about its business.
“We try to continuously drive home that after faith and their families, St. Rita baseball is going to be the most important thing in their lives when we’re together,” St. Rita head coach and athletics director Mike Zunica told Perfect Game during a recent telephone conversation.
“We really focus on the kid and his experience,” he explained. “Our focus is rarely on winning; our focus is on doing things right for the development of a young man. Teaching him how to be a great teammate, teaching him how to be accountable and to deal with his failure.”
Coming off a runner-up finish at the 2014 Illinois High School Association (IHSA) Class 4A Spring State Tournament that left the Mustangs with a 37-5 overall record, they start this spring season on March 20 ranked No. 24 in the Perfect Game High School National Preseason Top-50 Rankings.
St. Rita sits behind only No. 13 Moeller High School from Cincinnati among teams from the PG High School Midwest Region (Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin) in the rankings.
“It’s always a challenge,” Zunica said of the attention. “We’ve been consistently ranked nationally and it’s always a new group of kids, so it’s always interesting to see how kids are going to handle something that really is just somebody’s opinion and nobody really knows with the game being as unique as it is.
“We like the exposure it brings to our kids because we feel it’s going to open some doors for them opportunity-wise, but we’re also on guard that it could get us in trouble. We never want to walk around thinking that we’re better than we are.”
St. Rita graduated seven seniors from last year’s state runner-up team that moved on to play NCAA Division I baseball at Notre Dame, Austin Peay, Western Michigan, Xavier, Utah, Pittsburgh and Indiana-Purdue-Fort Wayne. At least 25 St. Rita alumni are currently playing college baseball, according to St. Rita’s website, and 13 have been selected in the MLB amateur draft just since 2005.
Zunica enjoys the fact that so many of his former players have continued their baseball career at a level beyond high school. While he’s happy for them and wants them to succeed he also wants to make sure he never gets the feeling that his job here is finished – the next group is always ready to step in.
“Maybe I’ll look back one day and think, ‘Wow, we had a lot of great kids and they went on to do a lot of great things,’ but it’s a weird dynamic,” he said. “You’re just happy for the kids and I like to see happy people.”
SAINT RITA OF CASCIA HIGH SCHOOL WAS ESTABLISHED IN 1905 and is located in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago. St. Rita competes locally in the Chicago Catholic League (CCL)-Blue – it was one of the CCL’s founding members in 1912 and won its first league baseball title in 1922 – and is in Class 4A (big-school) as a member the Illinois High School Association (IHSA).
The IHSA offers both spring and summer seasons for baseball, and the Mustangs have enjoyed great success in each season. During the spring, they finished as 4A state runner-up in 2009, 2010 and 2014 and advanced to the Elite 8 in 2004 and 2007. They’ve been even better in the summer, with state championships in 2005, 2009 and 2013, a runner-up finish in 2000 and an Elite 8 in 2006.
The 2015 team is led by a group of four seniors that have already signed with D-I schools: shortstop/right-handed pitcher Tyler Halas (Tennessee); outfielder/utility man Shane Peisker (U.S. Naval Academy); shortstop Marty Bechina (Michigan State); left-hander/outfielder Matt Ryan (Butler).
Halas hit .345 (39-for-113) with two home runs, two triples, 13 doubles 34 RBI and 31 runs scored, and was 8-0 with a 1.47 ERA in 43 innings pitched as a junior. Perfect Game ranks Halas as a top-500 national prospect (No. 29 in Illinois) and he’s eager to get his senior season under way.
“Our mindset this year is to go out and create good team chemistry,” he told PG over the phone this week. “Last year we had real good team chemistry, we all knew everybody and everybody got along, and it was all like a good brotherhood with everybody.
“I do have a really good feeling about this team … and we’re all very confident that we have a good chance of going to state again and try to take home St. Rita’s first (spring) state championship.”
Peisker hit .324 with three home runs, six doubles, 21 RBI, 34 runs and 17 stolen bases last spring and with his 3.8 grade-point average and appointment to the Naval Academy he’s ready to take on more of a leadership role this spring. He shares Halas’s steadfastness when it comes to pursuing a single goal.
“We’ve just got to get back on the road … and our goal, automatically, is state; we’ve got some key players coming back and we’ve got good commitment from everyone,” Peisker said. “Our coach always tells us to work very hard and just win the next pitch, so definitely that’s the thing.”
Bechina was a .325 hitter a year ago (27-for-83) with a home run, two triples, four doubles 16 RBI and 23 runs; Ryan saw very limited action in 2014 but has apparently shown enough over the past couple of years to earn the scholarship from Butler.
Other top returnees are junior Danny Gleaves, who hit .519 (40-for-77) with five doubles, 48 runs scored and 31 stolen bases last spring and senior right-hander Matt Lenzen (5-0, 2.37 ERA); big things are also expected from highly touted sophomore catcher Cal Greenfield. This team might be a work in progress but it’s certain a lot of progress will be made.
“(Zunica) always tells us that we need to keep our heads up and don’t get overconfident,” Peisker said. “We always have to practice really hard – that’s a key thing for us – and when we are winning everything goes more smoothly and we’re out there having more fun; we have a lot more confidence than the other team.”
THE ST. RITA PROGRAM WASN’T IN THE GREATEST SHAPE BEFORE Zunica arrived in 1997 and it took time to get the ball rolling. The challenge initially was changing the mentality of the kids in the program to one where success was expected, and once that was accomplished everything kind of fed off itself.
“This year our new guys will look and see how our (older) guys work and think that’s just the way they always do it,” Zunica said. “Back in the day we were looking for leadership from a couple of our better players to really get after it, work hard, do well in the classroom and strive for excellence in everything they do. Once you get that going you attract kids to come to your school that like that approach and the job gets a lot easier. The kids know that we expect nothing less than everything they have.”
As the wins mounted – Zunica is 531-169 in 18 seasons as head coach – and a lasting pride in the program became instilled, the kids bought in more and more. The seniors, especially, began to feel a very real responsibility to the past, present and future each time they slipped on a St. Rita uniform.
“We are an all-boys’ school so the brotherhood is there,” Peisker said. “It’s definitely an honor to be part of the St. Rita baseball team. It’s a pleasure knowing that you’re going to be in (near the top of) the rankings every year and the high standard (Zunica) holds us to and all the fans put us to, they always expect us very high.
To that, Halas added: “To be a member of the St. Rita baseball program, it’s really nice, and it’s probably the best baseball program in Illinois, I think. St. Rita is like a brotherhood; it’s an all-boys’ school and we all get along. There is a lot of emphasis on teamwork … and every kid that is in the dugout is willing to help out the team.”
It is rumored that Yogi Berra once famously said, “Baseball is 90 percent mental and the other half is physical” and Zunica follows those wonderful words of wisdom by emphasizing not only the mental approach to baseball but the mental approach to life. He talks about welcoming adversity and using it as the greatest of all teaching tools.
A lot of that adversity has come St. Rita’s way due to the fact that Mustangs’ teams have lost three spring state championship games in the last six years and have never won a state title in the spring. Unica insists he never thinks about that, choosing instead to look at all of the program’s positives.
“As long as every year our kids have fun and we learn a lot together and we grow together, and we go to Mass together and we eat together and do things that families do, I really don’t care,” he said. “That being said, we’ll try to rip your face off when we’re playing you because we care, but we’re not going to hang our hats on whether or not we win that last game.”
Playing with confidence is big part of that mental process but Zunica calls it a “slippery slope” when teenagers start gaining confidence built on a top-20 national ranking. “That’s a dangerous deal when those guys haven’t really been between the lines in a big game for us,” he said.
The Mustangs find out soon enough just how slippery that slope really is when they host three games March 20-21, bringing in non-conference rivals Oak Lawn, Morton and Glenbrook North. That’s when the real fun begins.
ZUNICA FIRMLY BELIEVES THE COMPETITION HIS TEAM FACES in the Chicago Metropolitan Area in general and specifically in the Chicago Catholic League-Blue is as good as anywhere in the country. Prominent college programs recruit the area heavily, with No. 12-ranked Louisville seeming to pound the pavement the hardest.
“Our kids have not only gone on to these Division I schools but they’ve gone on and excelled,” Zunica said. “I think the level of baseball being played here at the higher levels is really, really special and underrated.”
In addition to being challenged locally, St. Rita will also head to South Carolina in April for a week-long trip that is more adventure than adversity. This year they will participate in the second week of the Mingo Bay Baseball Classic in Myrtle Beach, S.C., playing at least five games over five days (April 7-11) against teams from all across the country.
While the baseball will be fun and rewarding, it’s the journey that is the most intriguing. Zunica said the team will get on a bus and leave Chicago at midnight Easter night and head east through the Smoky Mountains, munching on homemade sandwiches and making only brief bathroom stops through the trip’s 15-hour duration.
“We could fly, but that wouldn’t be any fun. That’s the stuff that I really enjoy, is how much our kids enjoy being with each other and playing in the program,” Zunica said.
“Our conference is stacked with a lot of baseball (talent) … but just going down there and playing in nice weather it just seems like a different mindset with how they play out there,” Peisker said. “It is a (long) bus ride but when we get off it’s great to see that warm weather after five or six months.
“The South Carolina trip really helps a lot with coming back and realizing that we need to appreciate that we have a really good team.”
Halas also believes playing at St. Rita and facing the competition the CCL offers has left him better prepared for what he will face at Tennessee and in the Southeastern Conference in the coming years, if that’s the direction he goes.
Peisker is confident that attending classes at an acclaimed academic school like St. Rita’s has prepared him for what he will face at the Naval Academy, which also has a very high-level baseball program. “I go into (St. Rita) every day just knowing that I have to work hard to get my grades up and play sports, and make sure I have a good balance between sports and academics,” he said.
A “good balance” has worked well at St. Rita for more than a century and baseball players over the last couple of decades have learned well from following their M-U-S-T-A-N-G-S philosophy. “We all want to win, but it’s really not all about winning in the St. Rita program,” the senior Halas said. “It’s all about making sure that every kid is doing well, getting to where they need to be and making sure they’re having a good season.”
If the Mustangs’ 2015 spring season ends in mid-June with an IHSA Class 4A state championship trophy in hand, it would, of course, be all the sweeter. Just the fact that everyone will have to wait and see if that storyline does, indeed, play out is what enthralls Coach Unica.
“The greatest thing about baseball is that we don’t know how the season is going to work out and we don’t know how the game is going to go, but we know it’s going to be interesting,” he concluded. “Our big thing is to enjoy it, enjoy being together; enjoy the journey. I can’t tell you how it’s going to work out but I can tell you we’re going to our best to handle the ups-and-downs.”