Oran coach, players have learned lessons in quest for elusive state title

There is one moment above all others that stands out to Justin McAlister when he thinks about playing for Oran baseball coach Mitch Wood's during his first final four in 1998

"It was in the New Bloomfield game. I think it was in the fifth inning where we scored all those runs and came back," said McAlister, who was a senior on the team.

It wasn't the fifth inning, it was the fourth inning of a state semifinal.

"We were down seven or eight," continued McAlister.

It was seven. The team trailed 7-0 after three innings in the school's first final four appearance since 1981.

"I led off the inning," McAlister said. "Most high school kids, fifth inning [and] you're down five, six runs that late in a state semifinal, you lay down and melt. I'm thinking senior, I've got to do something. I hit a routine grounder to the shortstop. I just busted my [butt] down the first-base line as hard as I ever ran in my life."

This information is undisputed.

"It just so happens the kid short-hops the first baseman and he boots it, and I'm safe. I'm thinking, 'All right. Big deal.' That's the inning where we ended up scoring I can't remember -- tied a state record or broke a state record for most runs in an inning that year."

The Eagles scored eight runs in the inning with the help of four New Bloomfield errors. It wasn't a state record, but it did come within a run of tying one.

"I ran hard, got lucky, got on on an error. Now the dugout's kind of perking up. The next guy walks, the next guy gets a hit, here we go."

Actually the next guy reached on an error as well, but it's true that the rally had begun.

It's also true that none of these details really matter. They're not even what sticks out in the mind of McAlister, who now is a physical education and health teacher as well as an assistant baseball and basketball coach at Central. He admirably attempted to recount them on request, but the important part of the memory is clear.

"You've heard Tony [LaRussa] say 'Play a hard nine?' McAlister asks. "Well, Mitch was always, 'Play from the first inning to the seventh inning. I don't care what the score is. Down four in the last inning, who cares? We can come back and win.'"

These days McAlister is on a first-name basis with Wood, who will take his 10th and final Oran team to the Class 1 final four this week.

"Like I said, honestly that is the thing I remember about the final four was that moment, and I relate it to life every day," said McAlister, who added he relates it to his players as well. "I'm a dad. I've got kids, and it's like, 'Don't ever quit.' I got that from Mitch. I don't care if you were down 10 or up 10, you better play the game the right way."

The careers of coaches are built on stories like this one. In the case of Wood, his career has been built on more of them than there is time to tell. He is 487-149 as a baseball coach, including a 438-134 record and 15 district titles at Oran since 1993. He also served as the school's basketball coach for 10 years and won two district titles.

The details of the stories get embellished, skewed and all together forgotten, but in time a lesson is revealed -- usually not the day of the game or even in the days after but eventually.

"It seems like the longer I go, you start getting more of those kids coming back talking to you," Wood said. "I think it's just a separation thing. It's when that light bulb goes off in some of their heads and goes, 'Wow. They were trying to do some good things with me back then. Some of that stuff he said, it wasn't just about basketball. It was about some life stuff.'

"What's that old saying? The older I get, the smarter my dad gets? It's exactly the same."

***

Wood admitted his own father has seemingly grown more intelligent as he's aged.

"He got me in it early and loved sports," Wood said. "He followed me around all over the place, he or my mom. My mom was a house wife. She didn't work at that time, so she drug all of us kids around everywhere. Everybody else was semi-big in sports, but I took it up and just really loved it."

His father, who was a farmer by trade, also helped manage a bi-state league team that included players like Gideon native Mark Littell, who played for the Royals and Cardinals.

"Probably one of the biggest reasons I loved it was I was the same size I am now, I was 6-foot in the sixth grade," Wood said. "They thought they had a player at that point. My growth got stunted."

Wood, who once played every infield position during a state tournament, was on two final four baseball teams at Holcomb High School, although basketball was his preferred sport at the time, before playing at Mineral Area College. It was there his career choice was made.

"I was like any high school kid. I thought that once I left high school that I was going to play college ball, play professional ball because I thought I was good enough to play," Wood said. "But I went to Mineral Area, got hurt my sophomore year, was rehabbing my arm a little bit. During the rehab time I starting talking to our coach over there, coach [Hal] Loughary at Mineral Area. Just started basically hanging around more of the coaching part of it than the playing part of it.

"It was like a light bulb went off in my head saying, 'Hey, this is what you want to do.' And of course I wanted to coach the Cardinals at that point. I didn't want to coach Oran. I wanted to be a Cardinals' coach. I thought that was the way things went. I was pretty naive on that part of it, but at any rate, it worked out.

Wood finished his education at Arkansas State and started his career working for free as an assistant at Kennett and coaching Holcomb little leaguers before being hired as the baseball coach and assistant basketball coach at Hayti.

While he thought Hayti was "an awesome place to coach," he and his wife wanted a good school for their two children and weren't sure staying was the best choice.

He got a tip about an opening from his brother-in-law Gregg Holifield, the Sikeston basketball coach, who had seen a "great acting bunch of kids" from Oran at a summer camp.

"We had never been out of that area in our life, so we didn't know," Wood said. "It was a little scary for us, but we moved ... and the rest of it's been here."

***

Wood's players, both former and current, have been quick to praise him since he announced his intention to retire from coaching May 9. He will remain Oran's superintendant.

"I think it's awesome," junior Seth Ressel said about playing for Wood. "It's a privilege. He's one of the best coaches around, probably the best coach around here. He knows what he's doing, and all he expects out of you is to hustle."

This type of positivity is hard for some people to understand. Pretty much everyone who likes him is willing to tell you there are people who do not.

"He was very demanding, I'll say that," said Kody Campbell, a 2008 graduate who went to two final fours and played at Southeast Missouri State. "He realized our potential and wanted us to get the most out of it. So sometimes it seemed like maybe he was hard on us, or pushed us pretty hard, but looking back and now that you've had a chance to be kind of removed from it a little bit, you can see that he really just wanted you to be successful and be the best player and best person that you could be."

McAlister, who was the team's catcher during his freshman season despite not playing the position before, recalled a time when the team lost a game as a result of his passed ball. Wood told the bus driver to drop the players off at the field, where Wood told McAlister to put on his chest protector and mask -- no glove or shin guards -- and then hit balls at him for what McAlister guessed was 30 minutes.

"That was his way of saying, 'Hey, you want to play? This is where we need you,'" McAlister said, glowing at the memory. "'This is how you're going to make our team better. Figure it out.' I could have walked out of that practice and told him, 'Screw this. I don't want to catch. I'll just sit over here in the corner and do nothing until my sophomore year.' But that was him. He done what he had to do to get the best out of kids. Looking back now, I ended up being all-conference and never caught in my entire career, so it worked."

Wood's demeanor during games has most often appeared outwardly to range agitation to stoic satisfaction.

"His coaching style -- he's vocal, he demands a lot from his players," said Ryne Wood, the coach's son and a 2003 graduate who played on two final four teams for his father. "His players know that if I don't act right, I'm coming out of the game. If I don't hustle, if I don't play hard, if my head's not in the game, he's going to take me out. It doesn't matter who you are. He did the same thing with me. It was no different, for sure. I think that is his style -- he's just kind of, 'I am who I am,' whether it be right or wrong. It probably rubs some people wrong, but as far as how he approaches his mentality to the game, he's all in."

Plenty of coaches pontificate about playing right or sitting the bench regardless of an athlete's talent level, but Wood's success hasn't been built repeating platitudes so much as on following through on promises.

During his third season at Oran, according to McAlister, the team's senior leader and No. 3 hitter committed an error during the first inning of a district semifinal. The player took his glove off and threw it on the ground in disgust.

Wood walked out of the dugout immediately following the play and removed the player from the game, which Oran eventually won in extra innings.

"There's a right way to go on and off the field," Wood said. "I think there's a right way to hold your hat, to wear your uniform. I think there's a right way to do those things."

Most of those philosophies haven't changed during Wood's tenure.

"He's precise," Ressel said earlier this season. "He doesn't like slackers. He makes sure your hat's on straight all the time, no matter where you're at. You've got to be home to wear it backwards, so he can't see you. But he'll still probably find out then."

Wood has negotiated on the style of hats his team wears in recent years, but not on the way the hats are worn.

"To me, there's two ways -- a right way and a wrong way," Wood said. "Probably my biggest problem is there's not a lot of grey for me. That's probably another soft spot that they talk about. I've gotten a grey area along with grey hair over the last [few years]."

***

Ryne Wood and others have accused him of softening in recent years, and he doesn't deny it.

"No. 1 I've grown up," Wood said. "I matured also a little bit. I think if you don't learn from your mistakes, I don't think you're very bright. I've learned from mistakes I've made. I used to think you could treat all [players] the same, but you can't. I've been told that a lot, and it took me a few years to figure it out -- that you treat them the same, but you treat them differently. ...

"You've got to be fair and consistent with all of them, but all of them have different needs. Probably what helped me with that more than anything was when I did become superintendant over here and I started getting to see a lot of the K-6 situations and things that were happening. It's amazing what some of our kids become [with] where they start. There's reasons why most of the time that those kids do and act the way they do. I think that was a big thing for me."

Wood was named superintendant in 2004 and Oran has received the Distinction in Performance award from the state of Missouri every year since, an honor Wood attributed to the school's teachers.

"He can still be upset and aggressive, but at the same time he realized he doesn't have to do that all the time," Ryne Wood said. "Maybe in his younger years he thought that was kind of the only way."

Wood said he used to think that life was baseball and baseball was life, but about midway through his career began realize that he was teaching players about more than a game.

"Coaching your son -- you want a learning experience? There's one right there," Wood said. "It's tough. It's really tough. ... I'm not sure I'd recommend it to anyone, but it's one of those that I wish I had a do-over. I think I could do a lot better job this time around."

***

Wood said he doesn't spend much time thinking about the what could have, or even should have, gone different during his nine previous trips to the final four, none of which have resulted in a state championship, or the near misses of other teams. The Eagles have finished second in the state three times and third six times.

"You look back, and there were some teams on the verge of winning the thing right there," Wood said. "You could've have changed the total history of the whole thing. You never know. I've never regretted any game. You hear these kids talk about 'Boy, I think we could've done this, done that.'

"I like to see them succeed, don't get me wrong, because success is what I've built my life and program on, and that's what I want them to do. But they learned a lot of stuff from those things, I think, and hopefully it's helped them beyond the four years of high school."

Still, Wood never shies away from any questions about the lack of a state title.

"It's your last year and you haven't won one, so it's definitely important for us," Wood said following his team's quarterfinal win. "It's a big deal, and I think it's a big deal for all these players, too."

But should the team return to Oran with something other than a first-place trophy, it will provide another lesson in what he considers to be the most important part of his players' education.

"Probably the biggest thing that I've preached [is] how to handle adversity," he said. "That's probably the biggest thing. ... We're all going to have adversity -- they are -- and if you don't handle that correctly things aren't going to go good for you. I think sports puts kids in that position to fail, to see things and then it's how you handle it. That's a big thing to me."