FORT MYERS, Fla. – As the head coach of Michigan-based Midwest Elite Baseball in 2013 and 2014, Brian Kalczynski was at the center of two of the most improbable championship runs in the long history of the Perfect Game BCS Finals national championship tournaments.
Upstart Midwest Elite shared the 2013 17u PG BCS Finals championship with the mighty East Cobb Astros out of Georgia. A year later in 2014, basically the same team returned to prove it was no fluke by besting the likes of Florida-based Next Level Baseball and the East Cobb Astros 18u on its way to winning the 18u PG BCS Finals national championship. One team, two improbable titles.
Kalczynski is back in Southwest Florida this week as head coach of the Warriors Baseball Club of Michigan, and the 14u team is part of one of the most unlikely final-fours in the history of the 14u PG BCS Finals, at least in terms of seeding. WBC of Michigan won second-round and quarterfinal-round playoff games Monday and enters Tuesday's semifinals as the No. 7-seed, tops among the other three teams still standing.
“These guys have been together since they were 10 (years old), and they’re a great group; they’ve played really well,” Kalczynski told PG before he sent his team out to face the No. 2 Colorado Yard Dawgs in one of four quarterfinal games at the Player Development 5-Plex Monday afternoon. “Hopefully we can get hot here at the right time, which is today and tomorrow.
Tuesday morning’s semifinal parings are certainly curious, at least when viewed through the lens of how pool-play results determined playoff seeding. The Nos. 1-6, Nos. 8-11 and Nos. 13-16 seeds all fell by the wayside during play on Monday leaving a final-four best described as “improbable”, “unlikely” and maybe even “wacky”.
Tuesday’s first semifinal at City of Palms Park matches No. 17 Team MVP (6-1-1) from Miami with No. 12 Team Elite Prime 14u (7-1-0) from Winder, Ga. The second semi, also at COP, has Kalczynski’s No. 7 WBC of Michigan (7-0-0) from Farmington Hills, Mich., matched with No. 14 Chaos (7-1-0) out of Denham Springs, La.
Team MVP, Team Elite Prime 14u and Chaos all had to win three times on Monday just to play on into Tuesday. Team MVP’s wins included an upset of the No. 1 Savannah Bulldogs in the second-round; Team Elite Prime 14u beat No. 5 Elite Squad Prime 14u in the second-round and its brethren from No. 20 Team Elite Black 14u in the quarters, and Chaos’s most definitive win came against No. 3 SoCal NTT in the second-round.
WBC of Michigan swept through pool-play with a 5-0-0 mark and received a first-round bye before beating the No. 10 Central Florida Wolverines Escobar (4-2-0) in the second-round and the No. 2 Colorado Yard Dawgs (6-1-0) in the quarters.
“They’re young, and they don’t know yet how they have to play (hard) all the time – they can do it here and there – but they’ll get there,” Kalczynski said of his WBC squad. “They’re good kids and they like to play but they’re young, so some of the things with their consistency and their hustle and their playing clean games, that’s the stuff that will come with age.
“I’m pleased with how they’ve done but to get where we want to go – competing at the 16, 17, 18-year old BCS (Finals) and getting these kids to go on and play in college – we’re a long way away from that.”
Kalczynski said that of the 28 kids he had on the Midwest Elite roster that won PG BCS Finals championships in 2013 and 2014, 26 went on to play college baseball and the other two moved on to play college football. This is a bit of different animal dealing with the younger kids, and Kalczynski is aware of that. He knows they have several more years to live and learn before they have to consider whether or not they want to play at the collegiate level.
When Kalczynski was coaching his 17u and 18u teams to PG national championships, he considered himself more of a manager. Now, he is much more a coach and a teacher. “Every day you’re trying to teach the game and get them where you want them to go,” he said.
The Colorado Yard Dawgs and head coach Scott Boyd were riding high with their No. 2 seed heading into the quarterfinals against the Michiganders, and justifiably so. They beat the No. 15 Seminole Knights, 1-0, in the playoffs’ second-round after a first-round bye, which set up the quarterfinal with WBC of Michigan.
“Our pitching has kept us in every game … and we got the key hits at the right time to win games,” Yard Dawgs head coach Scott Boyd said pregame. “We’re excited to be here, coming down from Colorado. It’s good baseball, good weather and all that kind of stuff, and I’m just proud of the way they’ve played, representing Colorado and getting to the quarterfinals.”
Boyd said there has been a little bit of a change in the baseball culture in Colorado, with more and more of the high-profile summer teams – at just about every age level – willing to leave the state to seek out the best competition. This particular group of Dawgs has stayed largely intact since they were 9-year-olds and they learned how to do the little things that need to be done in the game of baseball for a team to be successful.
The coaches of the teams that came to the 14u PG BCS Finals from points north – like the Warriors Baseball Club of Michigan and the Colorado Yard Dawgs – have had the unenviable task of trying to keep their young players focused on the job at hand as the days passed. The Dawgs’ Boyd said he was really happy with the way his young players were locked-in early in the week but as the tournament progressed he felt like maybe they were feeling the effects of the heat and starting to lose their focus.
“The thing we’re trying to preach to them, especially as they get older, is that they’re here to play baseball,” Boyd said. “We want to teach them to be mentally strong, mentally tough so that they can play day after day and in double-headers and all that kind of stuff.”
The 14u PG BCS Finals semifinals are set for 8 a.m. and 10:15 a.m. at COP Park Tuesday with the championship game scheduled to follow at 12:30 p.m. It’s a wild and wacky final four and it’s impossible to name a favorite unless there is a player on one of the teams that also happens to be a parent’s favorite. Kalczynski is taking the “Why not us?” approach.
“We haven’t played great, but we’ve played well enough to (reach this point),” he said. “Everybody you face from this point on you’re going to have to play your best game (to be successful) and if we don’t then we won’t (win a championship). If we do, then I think we have a team that can compete."