OZARK, Mo. — Retirment is a soft term for some people, namely coaches.
The itch that draws them to the game is hard to shake, regardless of what avenue brings them back to it.
Steve Lael has had some trouble filling the hours.
“I've been walking around Menards and Home Depot,” he said.
Lael made stops at Pleasant Hope and College of the Ozarks, but is most renowned for his time at Branson. He won 10 district and conference championships and made four Final Fours in 24 seasons. Sam Perez and Mike Compton, who both pitched in the NCAA Tournament, were among his last exports.
It's a laundry list of accomplishments, but he still finds new outlets to coach. When his longtime friend, Byron Hagler, asked him to join his staff for the Show-Me Baseball League, it was an easy sell.
“You get a great facility like this that’s right down the road and get to be around the game, it’s a good opportunity.”
Lael and Hagler, both MHSBCA Hall of Famers, are no strangers to sharing a field despite having never coached together. Hagler spent 12 years at Hillcrest, compiling nearly half of his 571 career victories and seven Ozark Conference Championships.
Safe to say, the Hornets and Pirates met.
With two state championships from his time at Licking High School also in tow, Hagler spent seven years as the pitching coach at Drury before retiring in 2014. He, too, could not resist another chance to lead a dugout.
“I’ve probably gone past the love and into passion,” he said.
Hagler made it clear that the transition was not quite what he had expected.
“I kept seeing press releases that I was a head coach and not a pitching coach. I just thought it was a typographical error. It looks like I was wrong. (Lael) didn’t want to be a head coach, so I gave him 49 percent of the responsibility and I took 51 percent.”
Hagler and Lael, along with former Drury and Mansfield standout Evan Jones, coach the Villains in this inaugural season of the four-team Show-Me Baseball League in Ozark. A collegiate summer league provides a mish-mash of talent from across the country.
That's the first hurdle.
“The key is to get some numbers on the back and figure out who everyone is," Lael said. "That’s basically what we’ve been trying to do these first few days."
Having only three potential opponents in a 31-game season assures that everyone will get familiar.
“We will get to know each other. It is more relaxed, though. These guys have all played quite a bit and have a certain skill set.”
Putting those talents on display is what draws many athletes from hundreds of miles to join such leagues.
“Have fun, work hard, and you never know who’s watching," Hagler said. "Do you want a scout to look at you? Do you want to go from a junior college to a Division I school?"
He pointed to that process as one of the most appealing parts of his job and something he constantly kept in mind at Drury.
"As a recruiter, I want to see them fail too. Obviously, you’d like to have somebody go 4-for-4, but that’s not going to happen every game. We want to explain to them that that happens. We want to see how you bounce back from that.”
With the Villains posting three losses and three ties through the first week of the season, the veteran coaches are going through that grind already.
They'll take it all the same. They've done it for decades.
