'Good players,' 'great kids' results in success for East Prairie baseball

Veteran East Prairie High School baseball coach Gary Scott probably wondered what he got himself back into after he resumed the head coaching duties in the spring of 2021.

The Eagles opened his second stint as the head coach with a win but then proceeded to lose their next six games, before finishing the spring with a 10-12 record. However, over the past two seasons, East Prairie did a lot more winning than losing.

“It’s our players,” Scott said about the Eagles’ success. “We’ve got good players.”

East Prairie won the MSHSAA Class 3 District 1 Tournament in 2022, as well as a Sectional championship.

This spring, Scott’s “good players” advanced to the Class 3 District 2 championship game before falling to a 20-win Scott City team, who the Eagles had beat in that Sectional game a year earlier.

Over the past two seasons, East Prairie baseball won 40 games, which blows any other previous two-year run by the program (at least as far as MSHSAA has records going back over a decade).

“Our players work hard,” Scott said. “They put the time in. They play all summer, and they love the game.”

The Eagles graduated senior Peyton Hodges, who was an All-State Second Team player this spring and is a candidate for the Player of the Year honor at the upcoming Semoball Awards. However, the cupboard won’t be bare next spring for Scott, who also served as the head coach from 2006 to 2014.

East Prairie will return senior Owen Knight and junior Noah Johnson, both of whom were named to the All-Scott-Mississippi Conference Team.

“Right now,” Scott said of his players, “they know how to win. That is Eagle baseball.”

This past spring, Knight finished with a 3-3 record on the mound. He had 64 strikeouts with a 3.111 ERA while throwing 45 innings. He batted .253 with 22 hits, 22 RBIs and 14 runs scored.

Johnson ended the year with a 5-3 record on the mound with a 1.567 ERA and 72 strikeouts across 44.2 innings. He also led the team with a .354 batting average, and 34 hits including 12 doubles, a triple, and a home run for 22 RBIs and 34 runs scored.

Scott served as an assistant coach for the Eagle program from 200 to 2005, as well as from 2017 to 2020. He is a former Eagle athlete himself and has known his players through their entire lifetimes, as he watched them develop.

“They are great kids,” Scott said of his players. “I love them to death. They do what I ask. They have good attitudes.”