Three years ago, my daughter and I showed up to T-ball practice for a new team coached by Brooks Roybal, a baseball all-the-time type of guy who, come to find, is more multilayered than his humble persona ever lets off.
I volunteered to be an assistant for that 2015 season, not knowing that meant trying to convince a dozen kindergartners to run the right way around the bases. Thankfully, I was alongside an actual manager, as Roybal was then the head softball coach at Columbine and was fresh off leading the Rebels to the Class 5A quarterfinals the previous fall.
Roybal, now in his second season as the head baseball coach at Columbine, is also a former Rockies associate scout and the son of Tony Roybal, a legendary Colorado high school coach who won state titles in baseball and softball.
And at the time we were coaching together, Roybal was also battling cancer — both thyroid cancer as well as mucinous adenocarcinoma, a rare type of cancer that formed beneath his eye — in addition to dealing with his mother’s ALS diagnosis.
But while helping him coach, in a setting where Roybal was patient while many would be frustrated, he never once mentioned his struggles. “I can’t complain, and I don’t like to complain,” he said in retrospect. He arrived with a steady smile to each practice and game as he showed the girls how to watch the ball into their mitt, or assume the ready position on defense.
Today, more than two years removed from the final of six facial/neck surgeries that called for the extraction of 75 lymph nodes, leaving him feeling “decapitated”, the cancer-free Roybal heads up a Rebels team that is 6-2 and capable of league and postseason success after missing the playoffs last year.
“I have to go through my yearly check-ups and get PET scans,” Roybal said. “If (mucinous adenocarcinoma) does come back, they get after it right away and cut it off. Any kind of suspicious things like that I get on my face or on my eye, it’s usually a phone call and I’m heading in for them to cut it off.
“But absolutely, more than anything, I’m grateful to be at the diamond every day.”
The 46-year-old is also grateful for the talent the Rebels wield in his second year running the program, as well as having assistant coaches with professional playing experience in varsity assistant Skip Jutze and pitching coach Craig Juran.
“We’ve got a lot of flexibility, defensively, because we’ve got multiple guys who play different positions,” Roybal said. “That gives us some defensive options, and pitching-wise, we’ve got a pretty good stable of young arms. We have more depth there than we’ve had in the past.”
A pair of captains in junior infielder/outfielder Logan DeArment and senior second baseman Vic Lara highlight the lineup, while the Rebels’ youthful rotation features sophomore right-handers Joel Basile and Luke Folsom and junior right-handers Chance Goodson and Jacob Gimbel.
And Columbine — unlike Roybal and my’s T-ball team, which usually lost interest in the game by about the second inning — has already proven its ability to scrap until the final out. The Rebels have come from behind in four of their six wins.
Two of those victories were earned with late-game rallies, as Columbine posted five runs in the seventh to beat Lawrence Free State (Kan.) on March 23 and five runs in the sixth to beat Monarch on April 3.
“We’ll be tested in league starting next week, but so far we’ve had some games where we’ve come from behind to win and we’ve had some tight ballgames — so what our team is doing together, and the fight that we have, is huge,” Roybal said. “There’s some games where we could’ve very easily tanked it, but we battled back. I’m really proud of that.”
There’s a ton of fight in these Rebels. There’s no need to wonder where they get it.
