The Headliners

“None whatsoever.”

That’s the odds Glenwood baseball coach Brett Elam put on his team winning the state baseball title heading into the 2010 season.

Not that then fourth-year Ram head coach was down on his squad – far from it.

“We had talent but there was a lot of uncertainty on even what positions guys were going to play,” Elam recalled.

But Elam and that 2010 squad had a secret that didn’t show up in box scores and stat sheets.
Buy in.

That 2010 team bought in to everything Elam and assistant coach Curt Kaufman offered, from preparation and consistency to focus and intensity.

“They were such a tight-knit group they took in everything we were trying to do and preach to them,” Elam said. “They showed  up every day with great attitudes, willing to work hard and listen. They bought it and had each other’s back from the first game of the year to the final pitch.”

That final pitch resulted in the Rams’ winning the school’s first and only state baseball title 10 years ago this month. The 4-1 victory over Charles City in the final at Principal Park in Des Moines, the dogpile on the infield, the Gatorade bath and trophy hoisting, culminated a historic 30-win, championship season few saw coming.

“I would say, looking back at every team I’ve coached, I don’t know if it was top to bottom the most talented team, kid for kid,” said Elam, now the head baseball coach at Council Bluffs Abraham Lincoln. “But it was absolutely the team that played together, had each other’s back the most and more of a will to win, without a doubt, than any other team I’ve ever had.”

* * *

The 2010 season didn’t begin like many Glenwood baseball seasons.

The Rams rattled off eight straight wins to open the season and debuted in the Class 3A top 10 rankings in early June. The Rams had their share of success under Elam prior to 2010 – the previous year’s team won 28 games – but 2010 felt different.

Elam, a 1991 Council Bluffs Lewis Central graduate, took over the Ram program from former coach Jim Lovely in 2007. A former shortstop in the Colorado Rockies organization, Elam had a clear picture of what he wanted his program to look like from day one.

His program would be built on the basics: defense and pitching.

Trent Jameson was the starting right fielder on the 2010 team. But as a freshman in 2007, he saw first-hand the mental approach Elam was trying to install.  

“We all bought in to what he was teaching us about how we mentally approach the game and having the confidence we could win against any team on any given day,” said Jameson, who joined the Navy after graduation and works in IT in Oklahoma City.

Grant Loeffelbein, a captain and starting shortstop on the 2010 team, recalls Elam as a tirelessly energetic coach whose demeanor and coaching style encouraged camaraderie, teamwork and, most of all, leadership that was accountable to the team.

“He was great,” said Loeffelbein, who is in the construction business in South Dakota. “He’s a very technically knowledgeable coach. His personality made baseball fun for some of the guys that might have considered not going out. Baseball in Iowa can be tough. You have some pretty good athletes who would otherwise play if it wasn’t in the summer. He made it a good time while keeping it obviously geared toward success.”

Elam and Kaufman, who was the team’s pitching coach, constantly preached “throwing to contact,” and putting the ball in play for the defense. Seven or more times out of 10, Elam said, high school hitters are going to get themselves out.

“We threw strikes and we played very solid defense,” he said. “One of those two things is usually where you get the letdown in high school baseball. Usually teams can put runs on the board but then you also go out and walk people or give up runs. The big thing for us was, we threw a lot of strikes and made teams put the ball in play and when they did, we made the plays.”

After winning nine of 10 games to open the season, the Rams hit a rough patch in the heat of mid-June. They lost two of their next three, including an ugly, 13-9 loss to Sioux City Heelan that was not as close as the score indicated. Glenwood committed a season-high nine errors in the loss and looked far from a top 10 team.

Elam said the ugly factor in that game was a “total team effort.”

“It wasn’t like one or two people had bad days,” Elam said. “It was everybody.”

Kaufman called the loss a “turning point” moment that season.

“We got throttled,” Kaufman said, recalling closer to 15 errors in the game and not the nine as the official box score reflects. “I can still hear the late George Tucker saying to me after the game, ‘I’m just glad no one got hurt in that game.’ Sometimes it takes something like that for you to re-focus and get a little humility and to know you’re not all that. Although that wasn’t a real egotistical team. This was a great senior group with good leaders.”

Elam agreed the loss was the wakeup call his team needed.

“We’d been playing pretty good and we sat back a little bit and maybe complacency set in a little bit and it was the shot in the arm we needed,” Elam said. “We had to be focused every day. We had a pretty good record, people knew this, we couldn’t just show up and win. We needed to get after it every single day. That was the changing point for us.”

The Rams rattled off 16 wins in their next 20 games and looked like a top five team doing it. In tight, two-run ballgames, they were 7-1.

“They slowly progressed as far as getting that same fight day-to-day,” Elam recalled. “They were hard-nosed kids that when they showed up at the field and said, ‘We’re here, we’re going to fight and play hard – we might as well win the game.’ And that’s what they did. They never gave in. They thought they were going to win every game.”

Glenwood hit .323 as a team and belted a conference-best 26 home runs while averaging more than eight runs a ball game that season. As good as their hitting was – four starters hit .350 or better – the pitching was better. The deep staff had an ERA of 2.49 and they struck out 329 batters in 242 innings while holding opposing batters to a .196 batting average.

As many as five pitchers on the Rams’ staff might have been No. 1 starters on most Hawkeye 10 teams. The staff had an almost business-like approach.

“Nobody cared who was throwing or who pitched or how long they pitched, it was just kind of a ‘Who’s up next?’ thing and they’d step up and get the job done and they’d take the ball and go as long as they could,” Elam said.

Taylor Kaufman, who would go on to play for the University of Iowa, was the undisputed ace of the staff. The junior lefthander went 12-0 on the mound that season with a .90 ERA and 126 strikeouts in 70 innings pitched. In the post-season, Kaufman was nearly unhittable, notching and five wins in five appearances on the mound while allowing a total of five runs while striking out 45.

The Rams climbed as high No. 5 in the rankings that season but were still considered an unknown – and perhaps even untested – commodity in the post-season.

Coach Kaufman can still recall how tough those first two opening round post-season games were that season: both played in blazing heat against Hawkeye 10 Conference opponents for the third time that season. The 3-2 win over Atlantic in the opener and then the 3-2 victory over Harlan in the district final set the stage for the Rams’ historic run.

“Harlan had a runner on third and one out in that game in the bottom of the seventh,” Kaufman said. “You go into extra-innings against Harlan at their place, it’s tough. But we scratched it out.”

Against favored A-D-M in the substate final, the Rams jumped out to a 5-0 lead after an inning and cruised to a 9-1 victory and their first state tournament berth in school history. Glenwood’s hitters got to Tigers’ hard-throwing ace Alex Rash, who would go on to be picked in the second round of the Major League Baseball Draft two years later, early and often, finishing with 11 hits.

“We came out swinging,” Kaufman said. “It wasn’t like a gimme win by any means at all but by fighting in all three games it did prepare us for state.”

Upon their arrival in Des Moines, the Rams once again faced underdog status. After a bevy of upsets in districts and substate. Glenwood was the highest ranked team to reach state, and yet, were seeded No. 2 behind Knoxville.

Elam and Kaufman downplayed the seeding.

“Brett and I had both been around the game a long time and we knew we had something special,” Kaufman said. “In order to win at a lot of levels, but especially in high school, you have to have strength up the middle. You have to have a stopper for a pitcher, a strong No. 2 pitcher, you have to have a catcher, a good shortstop and a good centerfielder.

“And we had it all.”

* * *

The players wanted to stay in a hotel in Des Moines for the state tournament.
Elam nixed it.

“Too many things can happen,” he said. “You don’t sleep well on a hotel bed, and that first game was a late game so we stayed in Glenwood and drove up for the game that day.”

The Rams would bus to Des Moines the morning of the game. First pitch was set for 8 p.m. at Principal Park, the last game of the night.

Elam set a firm routine for the day: get on the bus, watch baseball movies on the bus, drive to Dowling High School for batting practice, then a team meal at the Jordan Creek Mall and then to Principal Park.

The routine went off without a snag.

The Rams trounced Algona in the state opener, 11-2 behind a 15-hit attack at the plate and six strong innings (four hits, one earned run, 10 strikeouts) from Taylor Kaufman on the mound.

But Baseball has long been known as the most superstitious of major sports. Elam is well aware.

“I’d say to the team, ‘I’m not superstitious but…’ and they’d stop me and say, ‘That means you are,” Elam said. “And I am, I am absolutely to this day the most superstitious baseball person you’ll ever meet.”

For the semifinals, Elam would stick to the same routine. No hotel, bus, BP at Dowling, meal, game.
It worked again.

The Rams got a two hit, 10 strikeout gem from Matt Schultz in a 3-2 win over Central DeWitt to advance to the Class 3A finals.

“I’m not superstitious, but I’m not going to screw anything up either,” Elam said. “We were staying with the same routine.”

And then the Rams – and their new superstitious routine – did hit a snag in the form of a sprinkler system.

On the way to Des Moines for the championship game the next day, Dowling’s coach called and informed Elam they could not host batting practice.

“The  sprinklers ran all night and the field was underwater,” Elam said.

The good news was the coach scrambled and found a replacement at Johnston High School. The bad news was the team’s usual routine wouldn’t be possible. He broke the news on the bus, 30 minutes from Des Moines. He can still see the faces of his team, crestfallen as they listened.

“I told them, ‘We got another field, we should be fine. It’s going to be okay.’”

Elam went on to explain he’d only been on Johnston’s field one other time in his life.

Jameson, a quiet leader who rarely spoke in team huddles, was the first to speak up, “When was that, coach?”

 “My senior year we stopped at Johnston to hit batting practice on the way to state,” Elam told his team.

“Well, we’re good then,” Jameson said.

Elam recalls the team breaking out in cheers and laughing. And he thought to himself, “Thank god, you broke the ice.”

Ten years later, Jameson recalls that bus ride and the superstition-breaking news with a laugh. He down-played his ice breaker role, however. But he does recall texting Elam a quote on that bus ride the coach would use in his pre-game pep talk that night. It was a Babe Ruth quote, Jameson that went:

“The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.”

Jameson still sees the quote as apt description for that 2010 team.

“We played for each other,” he said.

The superstitious worries behind them, the Rams had their batting practice at Johnston, their meal at Jordan Creek and arrived at Principal Park ready to play.

And play they did.

Pitching on short rest, Taylor Kaufman was masterful in the final. The southpaw scattered five hits, a single earned run and fanned 10 again in the complete-game victory. He also doubled and drove in a run. Nick Wells doubled in two runs and Loeffelbein added an RBI.

The Rams also stuck with a theme that defined that post season: they did not commit and error defensively in the championship game. In fact, Glenwood did not have a single error in the state tournament.

Elam still calls the Rams’ error free-streak that post-season “unbelievable.”

“Obviously with a state championship, we finished with a bang for sure but when you play error-free baseball while doing that, people don’t really realize how incredible that is in high school baseball,” he said.

The team dogpiled on the infield following the final out. Elam was bathed in Gatorade not once, but twice. Upon returning to Glenwood the team held a celebration at A.C. Nuckolls Field with a few hundred fans celebrating the school’s first team sport state title.

Loeffelbein said he’s always a little surprised when he returns to Glenwood and someone brings up that state championship season. He can still recall feeling, before his senior year, that team had the makings of a special senior season but just how special even he didn’t know.

“We allowed ourselves to believe it was perfectly attainable and possible,” he said. “That was a major thing for us. We believed in ourselves. We had a team meeting before the season about keeping our goals reasonable – and you never say, ‘Win state title’ – but we parsed out our goals and we we’re always shooting for a state championship.”

Elam, who took over at Abraham Lincoln after the 2015 season, said it took a few years for the state championship and what that group accomplished to finally sink in.  

“I still to this day still speak to kids from that roster and a few of them texted me this year and they all said, ‘I can’t believe that was 10 years ago,’’ he said “And I absolutely agree with them. Not only was it such a great season, and I still so vividly remember things about that season, and I’ve been a part of some great ones, but that team, that season, was the best baseball season I’ve ever been a part of by far in all my baseball career.”

 

The Opinion-Tribune

116 S Walnut St Glenwood, IA 51534-1665
P.O. Box 377, Red Oak, IA 51566
Phone: 712-527-3191
Phone: 712-623-2566
Fax: 712-527-3193

Comment Here