Coach gives freshmen a chance to shine

Sacrifices salary to save program

Salem High head baseball coach Mike Ward, who played for the Witches as a student, led his varsity team through a 3 1/2-hour practice last Tuesday. (Dina Rudick/Globe Staff)

Coach Mike Ward got his first look at Dan Reddy when Reddy was a freshman.

He was on the small side, Ward thought, but he looked like an athlete.

Ward, head man of Salem High's baseball hierarchy, figured he'd start the kid out on the Witches' freshman team.

Reddy didn't stay there. He was a junior varsity player by the end of his freshman year, then for his entire sophomore season. By the time he was a junior, he was starting in center field for Ward. And this season, he is one of Salem's three captains.

To this day, with the Witches off to a 5-2 start, Reddy said he appreciates the time he had to develop.

"I built my character," he said. "For a varsity player, you also need to have the attitude of a varsity player. It gave me time to develop as a player more from an attitude perspective."

This is why Ward was willing to sacrifice his salary for the freshman team this spring. He is a Salem alumnus, class of 1986. He played second base for the Witches, well enough to swing an acceptance letter from Tufts.

He coached the town's American Legion team for six years, then went back to the high school in 2003 to rebuild a program he cared about, hosting clinics and summer camps that drew 80 kids. In the meantime, he guided the Witches to the state tournament in 2005 and 2006.

With the Salem schools in the middle of a budget crisis this year, and his baseball program facing the threat of losing its freshman coach, Ward said he could sacrifice the "couple of thousand dollars" he earns for the varsity job, if it meant that he could keep a quality coach like Ed Mericier managing his freshmen and ensuring that the program continued to get better.

"When you're coaching, you're doing it for love of the game and the kids, not for money," he said. "You can't really complain about cutting a freshman baseball program when people are losing their jobs and there's less teachers. So I felt like I was just doing my part to pitch in and help the cause, but I was helping the program, too."

If last season's 8-12 record was a stutter-step backward, the Witches have more than made up that ground this season. In its last three games, Salem has scored 33 runs, beating Lynn Classical, 12-4; Gloucester, 11-8; and Revere, 10-4. The team's biggest win of the season is easily a 1-0 upset of the Northeastern Conference's newest bully, Peabody, in which the Witches watched their ace, Harry Noone, go pitch-for-pitch with the Tanners' Brad Linehan. Noone worked his fastball-curveball-changeup arsenal to near-perfection, topping Linehan's four-hit, one-run performance with a three-hit shutout. He hasn't given up a run in 15 innings.

The Witches also are swift on the bases, with 23 steals; Reddy is the team leader with 5. His cocaptains, senior catcher T.J. Larivee and senior third baseman Aiden Church, are .500 and .400 hitters, respectively, in the early going, which makes it easy to pile on the runs. The ingredients, Ward said: "Timely hitting and good baserunning."

But there's a larger recipe. About 75 percent of the players on the roster came through the freshman program, according to Ward.

"If you're going to have a good program, you're going to need to have a good feeder system," he said, noting that nearly 30 kids tried out for the freshman team this year. "A lot of kids need that freshman year to develop and they're not ready to go to JV yet, and if we would have lost that this year, I think it really would have hurt."

The program's strength, Reddy said, is in its layers. "It's really not all about the seniors and the varsity. What makes a championship team is the underclassmen and the following years after that. So you need to have that team that he gave up a salary for. It's building players for us."

And maybe more that that, Reddy said, "It rubs off on the community. People know who Mike Ward is. He's a good character."

It's common knowledge that Falcons senior shortstop Ashley Burnham can swing it.

But at the bottom of the order, sophomore third baseman Joanna Zecha's bat and base-running skills give head coach Tara Petrocelli a nice delayed 1-2 combination in her lineup.

"With Joanna in front of [Burnham], that opens up a whole host of possibilities," said Petrocelli. "The two of them are quite quick together."

Steals, bunt-and-runs -you name it, Petrocelli said. Putting Zecha in the last spot in the lineup allows the two hitters to feed off each other. Burnham is hitting .476 with 5 doubles, 2 home runs, and 8 RBIs from the leadoff spot. Zecha is a .333 hitter who has scored 4 runs, causing all kinds of havoc on the base paths. "She's quick and she gets our offense going," Petrocelli said.

Burnham, who has already got a roster spot waiting for her at James Madison next year, is as much of a catalyst from the leadoff spot, but as Petrocelli put it, "Ashley leads off the game once a game and that's it."

Having a quality bat at the bottom of the lineup helps more, Petrocelli said, because most teams are unsuspecting, which is why she has no plans to move Zecha up in the order.

Julian Benbow can be reached at jbenbow@globe.com.