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The Southampton junior high baseball team finished the season 8-2 and on an eight game winning streak. The team included
Head coach James Dorsa speaks to his players during a game this season.
Things were looking bleak for the Southampton junior high baseball team at the onset of this spring season. When tryouts began, only nine players, the bare minimum to fill all positions, showed up, forcing head coach James Dorsa to do a little bit of in-house recruiting.
Dorsa, with some help from fellow coworkers and players, made announcements and asked any player that wasn’t signed up for a sport if they’d be willing to play baseball. He got a handful of kids who had never played the game before to help out the team.
But then there was actually playing the games.
Southampton lost its first two games, in lopsided fashion, to East Hampton, after which Dorsa sat his team down and had a little conversation.
“I told the kids, ‘Look, we all want to win, we want to be competitive, but my job is to make you guys better, to get you ready for the next level,’” he said. “All we want to see is progress from day one to the last game.”
As Dorsa put it, the players seemed to take that message in stride. They won their third game, then their fourth, fifth and they just kept rolling. In the Mariners’ final game of the season on May 31, they defeated Springs, 10-0, for their eighth consecutive victory to finish with a sparkling, and unexpected, 8-2 record. Thomas Lavinio pitched a complete game with 13 strikeouts, allowed just two hits and one walk.
“It was all around a masterful performance for his age,” Dorsa said of Lavinio. “He wasn’t just throwing, he was pitching.
“It was really cool, as a coach, to watch them progress the way they did and play as a team,” he added. “To end on an eight-game winning streak is pretty impressive. It was awesome to see them play like that. We worked in the kids that never played before, and they just started playing as a team.”
Dorsa has coached the team the past four seasons, the past three as head coach. He has never had any issue with numbers prior to this season, he said, aside from when the junior varsity calls his players up during the season, which is typical at that level. But to make such an improvement in such a small period of time was really something to behold, Dorsa said.
“I would have loved to face East Hampton now,” he said, with a laugh. “It would have been such a great game. The kids really grew as a team, grew by leaps and bounds to the point where there was no communication from us as coaches. They were very much playing by themselves by the end of the season, communicating what they needed to do on the field. We really didn’t have to yell out too many directions. It was really one of my best seasons coaching because of all of that.”
This season’s junior high team included Hector Alvarez Rivadeneria, Iker Cruz, Quinn D’Italia, Kyren Duff, Benjamin Fischette, Thomas Lavinio, Demetrios Lazarakis, Ethan Mejia, Samuel Raynor, Charles “Charlie” Rouse, Luke Schmidt, Chayton Segree, Cole Senior, Samuel Telvi and Andrew Wetter.
