SCH head coach Joe Ishikawa, right, and Nick Rowland, left, react after a run in the team's contest against the Hill School last week. (Photo by Jonathan Vander Lugt)

by Jonathan Vander Lugt

Joe Ishikawa has been in charge of the Springside Chestnut Hill Academy baseball program for three full years now.

The first two years, he had a bit of help in the form of a handful of dedicated, talented players that he inherited. For 2016, they were gone, leaving a team that had just a pair of seniors starting, and a whole lot of questions.

Would they hit? Were they too young? Could they beat the reigning champ, Malvern Preparatory School? Could they travel a couple miles down the Wissahickon and take on Penn Charter, the team with more likely Division-I college players than you could shake a stick at? What would happen against the much improved Episcopal and Germantown academies?

The answers, in order: yes, no, yes, yes, and a combined three wins in four games. Mix it up in a bowl, and you get a recipe for a share of the Inter-Ac title and a world of good feelings surrounding the program, despite last week’s season-ending loss to Haverford School in the PAISAA quarterfinals.

“The biggest improvement was that they learned how to play unselfish baseball and come together as a team,” Ishikawa said. “We had so many different players playing different positions, and they really came together at the same time.”

A month ago, before the seemingly endless torrent of rain through May, the Blue Devils were at their lowest point. They had lost three straight Inter-Ac games by a total of four runs, and were beaten handily by Neumann-Goretti on the last day of April.

Ishikawa and the players blamed it on the normal drudgery: concentration lapses, youth, and overall poor play. April was, by and large, gorgeous, and players were starting to get antsy for the end of the school year.

Then the weather turned, and with it, SCH’s luck. The Blue Devils went a perfect four-for-four in conference games before a season-ending tilt at Malvern Prep (two of them by one run, and one via late comeback) that would force a tie had the Blue Devils won.

That game, another one-run nail-biter, went down to the final four outs.

“By the sixth inning, we were tied and Nick Rowland was at the plate with two down,” Ishikawa said. “He hit a one-hop line drive to centerfield—the ball that he hit was a single every other time, but as soon as he hit it, he knew he had to get to second. He knew he had to give us a chance to score.”

Rowland slid in safely, and Chris Alleyne came through in the next at-bat with an RBI single. In the bottom half of the seventh, Gunnar Hayes, the team’s other senior captain, gloved the ball in left for the game’s final out.

“To see your two senior captains succeed—one scored the winning run, and the other caught the last out of the year—that’s an embodiment of everything you work for,” Ishikawa said.

It’s the kind of happenstance that, for Ishikawa, made him realize that he was a part of something special.

“That’s when I stepped back and thought, ‘Wow, that’s pretty cool stuff right there,’” he said. “That’s the kind of stuff you can’t write.”

Rowland, the 5-foot, 6-inch (on a good day) centerfielder with an uncanny nose for hard contact and a motor that doesn’t quit was without a doubt the team’s most valuable player. He’s going to be playing ball for the Division 1 Campbell University Fighting Camels, and had he been four inches taller with an identical level of talent, he’d probably be playing ball in the ACC or the PAC-12.

No matter. As Ishikawa said, Campbell’s getting a steal.

“Nick performed, baseball-wise, to the level that I expected him,” Ishikawa said. That would include setting just about every scoring table that SCH needed, and playing routinely-excellent defense in center field.

“What we got out of him that I didn’t expect was the level of leadership he brought,” Ishikawa said. “He was a very quiet kid. He’s a shy kid, a very respectful young man. He’s very unassuming.

“To see him shed all of that and become that fiery, positive leader, was what, quite frankly, was one of the key ingredients to our success. That’s where he went from night to day. That had more of an impact on our success than anything else.”

He’ll leave some big shoes to fill, but the program has the right pieces in place to succeed. He and Hayes were the only two seniors that saw regular playing time, so the 2017 iteration of SCH baseball will look pretty familiar. The stepping stones for another winner, hopefully, have been laid.

“I mean, let’s face it, that (league) title is what you play for—regardless of the loss in the quarterfinals, we walk away from this year feeling very good about what happened,” Ishikawa said. “This is the third year building the program.

“Every year you try to accomplish the next step associated with building it, and sometimes you take a couple steps back.

“This year, we took steps forward. Our kids are learning on the job. They’re learning how to compete for championship—the first step was believing you could win one, the next winning.

“Now, it’s about maintaining that success.”