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Photo courtesy of Todd Kwarcinski.
Chris Tinsley took control of the Clay-Chalkville program he played for to lead the team to the second round of the playoffs in 2016.
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Coach Chris Tinsley said he knows exactly what his baseball players go through at Clay-Chalkville High School.
After all, he was once a Cougar himself.
“It means a great deal because I wore the colors. The name ‘Cougars’ on the front means more to me than it would to anybody, because we were out there. We bled, sweated and cried on the field we coach on now,” Tinsley said. He has a pair of assistant coaches who also played for the Cougars.
That instant credibility with players is one reason Clay-Chalkville hired him to head a baseball program that had fallen away from its championship-caliber days in the early- to mid-2000s, along with the familiarity he has with the current roster, as a middle school and junior varsity coach prior to getting the head job.
“I’ve been around these kids since the seventh grade. They knew who I was; they trusted me because I was with them from day one of joining the program,” Tinsley said.
From the day he took over, Tinsley set out to take the Cougar baseball program to heights it had not seen in recent years.
“We just wanted to instill mental toughness in these guys,” he said. “We challenged them to get better every day.”
That mindset worked, as the Cougars ripped off nine wins in the first 10 games of the season, winning the Jefferson County Tournament in the process, highlighted by Blake Petty’s no-hit, 15-strikeout performance against Pleasant Grove.
After hitting a bit of a roadblock in the middle of the season, they turned it around and rode a wave of momentum into the state playoffs.
Clay-Chalkville won its first-round playoff series against Gardendale, winning Games 1 and 3 of the series, bookending a bad blowout loss in the second game. The Cougars picked themselves off the ground after that contest and moved on to the next round.
The Cougars then faced Walker and forced a third game with a shutout in the second game. In Game 3, senior Dayne Edwards hurled a gem, not allowing a baserunner until the fifth inning.
Edwards is one of four seniors Tinsley gives a lot of credit to for the team’s success. Thomas Johns, Andrew Blount and Jacob Duchock combined with Edwards to form the backbone of a successful team.
“They laid the groundwork for what we wanted to do. We sat them down early in the year, and we told them that this is their team,” Tinsley said.
Johns spent the first years of his high school career at first base before transitioning to catcher this season, while hitting leadoff. He will take that experience and continue his baseball career at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, joining Clay-Chalkville product Matthew Calvert.
Blount provided production in the middle of the lineup for Clay-Chalkville, and will attempt to walk on at Trevecca Nazarene University, where his brother, Micah, plays.
Despite the loss of those four key players, Tinsley said he feels good about the future of Cougar baseball.
“I think we’re in a good spot to build off this year,” he said. “We’re losing four guys, but the guys that we got coming back have a lot of varsity experience.”
