FORT MYERS, Fla. – More than two dozen family members and family friends of the players and coaches with the McKinney Marshals-Crow 16u baseball team scrambled to grab their own little piece of the pie at Terry Park Sunday morning. Or, in this case, their own little slice of shade.
It was 10 o’clock, and already the sun was blazing like an enraged fireball, and the heat and humidity had turned the venerable Terry Park Complex into a sweaty sauna. As the “Marshal Family” gathered at Clemente Field, they chatted good-naturedly and then somehow managed to squeeze into a small section of shaded bleachers that down the first-baseline.
Nothing – certainly not a little Florida sunshine, heat and humidity – was going to keep this one, big Texas family from watching their boys compete at the 16u Perfect Game BCS Finals. And especially not after the McKinney Marshals-Crow 16u team had won its first three pool-play games, had already claimed a spot in the tournament’s 30-team playoff field and were about to take on the mighty FTB Pride out of Orlando.
“We do things a little bit differently,” head coach Virgil Crow told PG about a half-hour before the Marshals ran out onto Clemente Field. “We bring the families with us – we’re a family organization and we’re very family-oriented – and we have team meals, team meetings and all that stuff with the families. … That’s our deal. We’re the ‘Marshal Family’ and we push that.”
The team prays as a group before and after each game, and it does so proudly. Every player is told upfront how the McKinney Marshals go about their business, just how it’s going to be and what they’re going to do, and the players are all-in. They are teammates first, and will pull for each other above all else.
The McKinney Marshals Select Baseball organization, based the McKinney-Plano, Tex., area, has been in existence for nearly a dozen years and operates under the direction of Dallas-Fort Worth entrepreneur David Hadeler. Crow has been coaching this team for the last four years – Marshals coaches stay with the same group of players as they move up through the progressive age-groups.
Marshals Select Baseball is operating in 2015 with one 18u team, one 17u team, two 16u’s and two 15u’s. It also has several youth teams that serve as feeder programs for the older, high school-aged squads. Like so many of the other premier player development programs in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, the Marshals hand-pick their players and there is enough talent right in the neighborhood for every organization to be successful.
The core of this Marshals-Crow 16u team – with players coming primarily from the Texas towns of Plano, McKinney, Frisco and Sachse – has been playing for Crow and his assistant Clay Wilson for the past four years.
“It’s hard when you get to select travel ball because each individual wants to do the best that they can, and we want them to do that,” Crow said. “The hard part for me is to get them to play as a team because the team wins and loses, not the individuals. We work hard, we practice hard and we really play well as a team; that’s the key to our success.”
For the first three days at this PG 16u national championship event, the Marshals 16u really had it working. They opened with a 9-2 win over the East Cobb Nationals from Acworth, Ga., stopped the Randolph, N.J.-based West Morris Militia, 3-0, and then outlasted Chain Select from Warner Robins, Ga., 6-4.
Because FTB Pride also won its first three games, the other four teams in the pool could not finish any higher than third-place in final pool standings. That meant Marshals-Crow 16u and FTB had clinched the pool’s two playoff berths even before they went head-to-head Sunday.
“We came out here to play the best teams and (face) good competition; that’s what we came down here to do,” 2017 outfielder/right-hander Kyler Underwood said. “We’ve been throwing strikes, putting the ball in play, rooting for each other to do good (and) it’s been working. We really believe we can beat anyone if we stay together and play the game that we know how to play, and don’t beat ourselves.”
2016 right-hander/infielder Trevor Baxter spoke from the same page: “We came together as a team pretty well these first three games,” he said. “We’re getting used to each other out there … and we’re out here playing baseball together and winning; it’s just been a great time.
“I hope we can continue to play like this with each other every day, because we’ve really come together. I hope we can take this back to Texas and play the same way, and just go out and kick butt.”
Facing the FTB Pride Sunday morning presented a tremendous challenge, and the McKinney Marshals-Crow 16u players knew that going in. The Pride feature a roster with 10 prospects who have committed to NCAA Division I colleges – including Florida, Florida State and Louisiana State – and five prospects ranked in the top-100 nationally in the classes of 2017 and 2018. In those same two categories, the Marshals have zero and zero. But accepting such a challenge is the reason they’re here.
“It’s always fun playing the best competition,” top 2016 right-hander Logan Worswick said. “One of the things we thought about when we were coming in here is that we’re going to come out a better team one way or another. Either we’re going to come in here and get our butts whipped all five games and go home, or we’re going to come out here and win some ballgames and get going (in that direction).
“Once we get back home I know we’re going to be a lot stronger as a team and we’re going to put a whippin’ down on the other Texas teams.”
Crow was philosophical before the game with the Pride: “FTB is an outstanding team and we’re very honored to be able to step out on the field and try to play with them,” he said. “They’re 16 (years old), we’re 16; let’s go out there and have some fun, is how we approach it.”
It wasn’t much fun for the Marshals right from the get-go. FTB batted around on their way to putting up seven runs up in the top of the first inning and cruised to a 14-0, four-inning victory. The players’ families and friends remained supportive throughout the debacle, and the result didn’t change anything about what the Marshals had accomplished up to that point. The game wasn’t very much fun, but it did nothing to alter their sense of purpose.
“Our philosophy – and I always tell the kids this – is that when they say, ‘Play ball’ that means ‘Have fun,’” Crow said. “We want to have fun first – we have the family atmosphere as I’ve mentioned several times – and we want to enjoy the game, we want to respect the game, we want to play hard. We’re kind of old school … and we want to make sure the integrity of baseball and the respect of the game stays right there.”
Crow is currently an assistant football coach at Eustace (Tex.) High School, but his background is in baseball. He played NCAA Division-I ball at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Tex., and right after college he worked for four years as a bird-dog scout for the New York Yankees, so he’s familiar with baseball being played at the highest level. With that background, he knows what these young players experience at the 16u PG BCS Finals will be of benefit down the road, even absorbing one-sided losses.
“This is high-level; this is baseball at its finest,” he said. “With these great facilities and the people are so nice here – Perfect Game has been very good to us – and the competition has been very stiff all the way around. We’re very blessed and we think it’s going to really help us because we’re fixin’ to hit the stretch of our (summer) schedule. When we go home, we’ve got something like three weeks of baseball with three days off.”
The 16u PG BCS Finals schedule is structured so that during the first four days of the event each of the 90 teams plays only one game per day. That leaves a lot of welcomed down time for the players and their families, and they can out and visit Southwest Florida’s beautiful beaches, hang out at the hotel pool or do some shopping.
A group of the Marshals-Crow 16u players went para-sailing Saturday after their 8 a.m. game, and Crow was told that more than 400 photos were taken – if that doesn’t say “vacation” what does?
“It’s nice being out here with all my teammates; it’s just a nice change of pace,” Worswick said. “It’s good to relax and have fun but then we can designate two hours out of the day to come out here and really work hard and play baseball and do what we love.”
The McKinney Marshals-Crow 16u will still be playing when the first-round of the playoffs begin Monday afternoon. They play their final pool-play Monday morning against the Florida Canes (0-2-1) and it will be important for them to bounce-back from the loss to FTB so they can improve their playoff seeding.
But regardless of how things play out over the next day or two, the experience has been a positive one for this family-first team from North Texas.
“This has been really cool,” 2017 middle-infielder Zach Wilson said. “We’ve gotten to compete against a lot of really good teams and we’ve had a lot of fun. Everybody’s competing hard – everybody wants to win, of course – and that’s why we came here. We want to play the best and we’re ready to compete. We’re real close; we all hang out together all the time. And our families, they all get along. It’s really been a lot of fun.”