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By Michael Cignoli (For OzarksSportsZone.com)
OZARK — There is a point in the future, however distant it may be, where the Hollister baseball team will look at the award it earned on Thursday evening much differently.
The fourth-place trophy will not be a painful reminder of how its trip to the Class 4 Final Four ended, but a monument to one of the most incredible years the school has seen in any sport.
The Tigers concluded their season with a 12-2 loss to Lafayette (St. Joseph) in the third-place game at U.S. Ballpark, falling to a potent Fighting Irish offense and the run rule in five innings.
Hollister ended the season with a 25-7 record and became the third baseball team in school history — and just the fifth in any sport — to bring home a trophy from the state semifinals.
“Right now it hurts a little bit because you just feel like we didn’t have enough today,” Hollister coach Trent Oxenreider said. “Credit to Lafayette. They played really well. Hit the ball and we took our lumps there. But someday they’re going to look back and — like I told them — they have forever etched themselves into the history books. They can always say they made the Final Four. No one can take that from them.”
For the second day in a row, a slow start ultimately proved too much for Hollister to overcome.
In a semifinal loss to Blair Oaks on Wednesday, defensive miscues and great baserunning allowed the Falcons to score three runs in the second inning and hold on for a 3-2 win.
CLICK HERE FOR PHOTOS OF THE GAME
On Thursday it was pure brute force, as the Fighting Irish used a seven-run, nine-hit second inning to take an early 8-0 lead that Hollister never really threatened.
Hollister’s Cole Jones scored on an error in the fourth and Colby Teaster added a sacrifice fly an inning later to make it 8-2. But the Fighting Irish stormed back with four runs in the bottom of the fifth inning to end the game and the varsity baseball careers of Hollister’s four seniors.
It was a particularly difficult postgame conversation for Oxenreider, who has been coaching Jones, Teaster, Konner Hatfield and Landon Richards since the quartet was in eighth grade.
He’s watched them develop into leaders on and off the field and take this team to its best finish since 2006, when the Tigers placed third in the state for the second time in six seasons.
“This game does not define what they’ve done,” Oxenreider said. “Obviously, we want to be on the winning side of it but it doesn’t define them. They’re going to look back some day and they’re going to say we did something really good. Today, they’re going to say we played bad and they were better than us. But it doesn’t define them.”
The Tigers are still a ways away from being there collectively, but shades of the change in thinking were already emerging in the moments following the trophy presentation.
“We were fourth out of (78) teams, which is really, really great,” Richards said. “There’s nothing that can stop that. We’re upset right now, but looking back on it in 30 years we’re going to be feeling really great about it.”
For some, the wait won’t be nearly as long as that. After losing his junior season to COVID-19, Hatfield said he never imagined he’d be in the Final Four about 15 months later.
After all, it had been 15 years since a team from Hollister had made it this far in any sport.
“Not at all,” Hatfield said. “I’m not going to lie. I’ve just never seen anything happen like this at Hollister. I mean, Hollister is one of those schools that doesn’t win a lot. It was a good blessing from God that we got here.”
Oxenreider said this senior class has played a major role in changing the culture at the school, as they have been instrumental in elevating expectations across the board.
“I love them,” the coach added. “That’s the thing. These are hard. It’s never easy that last game. Win, lose, whatever. Say goodbye. But when you have four great kids that are going to do even better things off the diamond than they’ll ever do on the diamond, it’s a little harder. They’ve kind of laid a foundation at Hollister in all sports. Three of them are multiple-sport guys. So just to see them get here, I mean, this has been a dream of mine since I was a player to get to the Final Four. So for that to happen, I mean, I’m just thankful for everything they do.”
The quartet may be irreplaceable, but Hollister has reason to be excited about the future. Four sophomores and two juniors started Thursday’s game and they are all poised to return.
“We’ve got young guys that really, really enjoy baseball,” Oxenreider said. “We’ll work at it and the summer is big for them. We’re super excited for the group we have coming back.”
The seniors had one more piece of wisdom to share with the next generation of leaders.
“Walking away after a season like this, I would say don’t take it for granted,” Hatfield said. “Obviously I didn’t get my junior year, so that was kind of hard. … They still have a bunch of years left. I don’t want them to take it for granted. Just play your heart out because you never know when it’s going to be your last one.”
Though their last one wasn’t immediately memorable, there were plenty of others that were.
Richards said he’ll remember Hollister’s four dramatic victories this season, which all resulted in on-field dog piles. They beat Springfield Catholic twice, including in the game that got them to the Final Four. They upset top-seeded Aurora to win their first district title since 2006. And they defeated Seneca in the state tournament in the final home game of their varsity careers.
“At the end of the day, you remember the good things and not the bad things,” Richards said. “At least that’s how it should be.”
And one day, this memory will also be good.
“I’m sure we’ll get better,” Richards said. “We’ll look back on it and it’ll be a great memory.”
