1982-1986

·EC baseball down to the essentials There is a scene in every John Wayne movie, it usually comes early in the picture, where the good guys get creamed. their tuition and participate just for the tun of it. There are no baseball scholarships at East Central.

season. "We wer·e 8-8 and we had lost some tough I and 2 run ball games . But we had one kid quit who was pitching a lot and was one of our better hitters. We never did find out why , but it just broike our backs. We never were able to recover. It's amazing how much difference just one man can make." But, three sophomores and six freshmen didn't quit. They stuck it out to the bitter end . Against J ones last Thursday, Rives and Harrison fielded all nine gritty ball players: catcher Rodney Kight, pitcher Ray Willis, fir st baseman Mitch Alford , 2nd baseman Greg Nowell, shortstop Todd Allen, 3rd baseman Ricky Goss, left fielder Jimmy Horton, center fielder Byron Alex– ander and right fielder Kelvin Lyons. Three of the players: Goss, Lyons and Nowell attend EC on football scholarships and play baseball as a second sport. The other six are real student-athletes: they pay

pretty good shape when our pitcher hurt his leg sliding into second base. We had to pull him and bring in Byron Alexander from center field who was already hurt and didn't need to to be out there to finish the game. He gave it all he had, a nd we just managed to hang on ," said Rives. 1983 Union High graduate Ricky Goss was the difference, offensively, Tuesday. Goss , who hit .425 on the season and led the team ih every offensive category, smashed a long home run to provide the runs that were needed to nail down the win . Holding a team together with bubble gum and baling wire while less than a dou– ble hand full of spectators watch from the home stands may not be the way John Wayne would want to coach baseball. But, if you are ever going to win the big battle scene at the end of the movie, and kiss the girl , too, you have to start somewhere.

Either, ti.e Japanese pound the marines, or the Indians surround the cavalry fort , or the land-grabbers clobber the squatters. But, sooner or later, the Duke gets hi s G.l. 's-soldiers-settlers together and they stage the big battle at the end and wi n. You know everything turned out ol!;.rewarded with a victory in a final all-out battle. And, they're headed in that direction. After a total of two (that's just two) wins in all of 1984, Rives and Harrison have nur– tured the program off the floor and breath– ed life back into a ECJC's once laughable baseball team . The Warriors split a pair of games Tues- . day at Holmes to close out their season with a 12-20 record. 12 wins may not be overly impressive, but after last year' s anemic 2-22 worksheet it was a lot of im– provement. And the 12 wins is a little deceiving. Because this baseball team was a little bit different than most you'll see. For the last two or three weeks of the season, everybody played ... all the time. Rives didn't substitute. Not from the first inning to the l'dst. Not from one game to the next. Never. He couldn't. There were nine players... only nine. No more, and certainly not any less. Rives, who is also head of the men's basketball program on the Decatur campus says 1985 was a sobering experience. "I've never been involved in anything like this. Where we had so little talent and depth to play. Our hands were tied. We couldn't rest a kid who was tired or even hurt, sit a kid down who wasn't hustling or just give

Harrison said there was help on the cam– pus . "Sure, there are some kids who are not playing that could help us. But, we've done all we could, they just didn't come out. l don't know why." " What is looks like is we're going to have to make a committment. That means some kind of help for out of state players," said Rives . Rives is realistic enough to know he's not going to get a box of full– ride scholarships to hand out to high school stars, but he is hopeful that he can guarantee some baseball players a colleg~- . sponsored campus job to help defray their costs .' When you are only fielding nine players, positions don't mean a lot. Tuesday's 9-6 win over Holmes was a good example. "We were up 8 to 1 and cruising along in

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