PARKER — Colorado high school baseball, for all of its rewards, comes with a price.
“After 27 years, I’m cold,” Chaparral coach Steve Eaton said. “I can’t dress like a snowmobile operator to coach baseball to figure out what I am doing.”
So this will be it for the native Auroran, a former youth water polo player who is convinced he has battled enough fickle-weather springs in the Rocky Mountains. He’s looking for something else to do. Even a baseball diamond is hard and can cut.
“You get on a three-game winning streak, then you’re inside for a week and you sputter,” Eaton said.
Eaton, who enjoys a laugh but is no-nonsense, isn’t complaining, although he has always been realistic, never afraid to speak the truth, and most everyone who has encountered him knew where they stood.
He has paid his dues and then some. Although his reimbursement, considerable by anyone’s account and still paying dividends, as his Wolverines are one of eight teams that will begin Friday’s Class 5A championship series, has bankrolled his lifelong loves of baseball and teaching future generations how to become, well, men.
One of his proudest stories is the time his team was playing summer ball in Cody, Wyo., and a Rockies scout on hand made it a point to tell the coach “how respectful our kids are about themselves and to others, and the game itself.”
Eaton, who graduated from Aurora Central and Colorado State, began as a teacher at North Middle School. He dabbled in baseball and football at his high school alma mater and did likewise in moving on to Gateway, where his Olympians regularly challenged the state’s biggest baseball powers before jumping to the new Chaparral in 1997.
“Timing is everything,” he said. “I was lucky. Those kids in Aurora flat out got after it.”
So have the Wolverines, products of the decade-long boom in Douglas County. They earlier won four consecutive Continental League titles and will begin double-elimination play against defending 5A champion Rocky Mountain. The Lobos are a team the Wolverines have seen regularly in past seasons and summers.
Eaton’s teams don’t have any fear — the Wolverines had a late-season matchup against another of the 5A powers, at Dakota Ridge. They lost 16-12 on a walkoff grand slam, but they hit six homers to the Eagles’ three.
It’s part of their all-around makeup. The Wolverines have been taught by Eaton to lay down the difficult bunt and steal a base as well as crack the three-run home run. They take infield as if it’s the opening of a Broadway show, flashing leather and throwing clotheslines around the horn. They take the field and the mound before each and every inning as if their future depends on it.
Lollygaggers? They’re never issued a Chaparral uniform, a sense of pride tucked nicely within Brookstone Drive.
“We want good guys,” said Eaton, who counts former major-league pitcher Bruce Egloff among a teaching staff that requires players to listen, then implement what they’ve been told.
It may be a game of failure, but Chaparral players and instructors don’t fail to get something out of it.
For Eaton, Gateway’s field will always be in his dreams as it’s J.R. Eaton Memorial Field, in honor of his deceased son. Last month, grateful parents headed a scoreboard dedication as well as naming the home field after their retiring coach.
“It’s pretty neat having two of them named in the same league,” Eaton said. “And when your name’s on something, the next guy tends to respect it.”
The Wolverines’ next head coach will be assistant Tony Persichina. As for their current skipper, he’s debating whether to stay within the game at another level or maybe giving high-end golf a try.
To his prep end, he refuses to go out as a win-one-for-me guy, but should his Wolverines come through, he won’t complain.
“You gotta love it,” he said.
