Anniversary Dates in 2024

1979 – Magnolia Academy Raiders first baseball state championship (45th), 1984 – My First Hinds Team (40th), 1989 – The History-Making 1989 Hinds Eagles (35th), 1994 Hinds Eagles; Mississippi’s First Division 2 World Series Appearance (30th), 1999- The Miraculous 1999 Hinds Eagles Postseason Run (25th).

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2024 brings some anniversaries for some great teams I have been involved with over the years and I look forward to reminiscing on each in January stories.

It marks the 45th anniversary of the great Magnolia Academy team of 1979. The Raiders finished 31-3 and won the school’s first Academy AA championship with 4-0 and 6-0 wins over Greenville Christian. It included a great cast of characters and ballers who just missed a chance to win the championship the year before. We all still believe we should have. I’ll explain later.

It is the 40th anniversary since I became the Head Baseball Coach at Hinds; actually the only baseball coach at Hinds. Dr. Clyde Muse hired me because I became a squatter in the Sheffield-Wooley Dormitory apartment where I had lived with Bill Marchant during the 1983 season, and he hired me so they could get the apartment back. And they made me coach football, too. My goal was to the be the best baseball coach I could be and the worst football coach I could be. I accomplished the latter first. Dr. Muse was the president of Hinds long after I left in 2005, but he was always fair to me and let me coach my team the way I wanted to.

Next spring marks the 35th anniversary for the history-making 1989 Hinds Eagles. We won the South Division, State, Region 23 and Eastern District championships and became the first Mississippi team to play in the JUCO World Series in Grand Junction, Colorado. No other team has ever won all four championships in the same season and also played in Grand Junction. The team finished 40-14. Rick Collier’s Itawamba Indians won 4 championships in 2003, but played in the Division II World Series in Millington. There is also no longer any division play or district tournament/playoffs, so there’s that. But Hinds did something that no team had ever done in our state.

We were the Roger Bannister of Mississippi JUCO baseball that season. Bannister was the first man in history to break the 4 minute barrier for the mile once thought unattainable and within a month John Landy broke his record and 15 others broke the four minute barrier within three years. The number is is 1755 now. Nobody before, but 1755 since. No Mississippi team had ever won a district championship or played in a World Series until Hinds did it first. Since 1989, eight other Mississippi teams (9 including Hinds) have played in one of three different World Series 25 (26 including Hinds in ’89) more times, including five more by Hinds in 1994, 1995, 1999, 2014 and 2017. Nobody before Hinds in 1989 and 8 other teams, 25 times since. This is stuff nobody knows or remembers… except maybe me. I can’t wait to share some behind the scenes stories of this great team.

State Championship over Pearl River. Region 23 Championship over Delgado was next (Hinds’ first). Then the Eastern District Championship over Aquinas St. (TN) (Mississippi first) and on to the JUCO World Series in Grand Junction, Colorado. (Mississippi first). 35 years ago.

It’s the 30th anniversary of the great 1994 Hinds team which finished 32-24 and became the first Mississippi team to play in the Division II World Series in Millington, Tennessee where we finished 1-2. It was our first season in NJCAA Division II, offering 24 tuition scholarships. It sounded like the best move for us. In 2024, all Mississippi teams compete in Division II and our region is so competitive, the winner advances directly to the World Series in Enid, Oklahoma. P.S.- That World Series should be held in Region 23. Region 23 has won that tournament 9 times over the years. Just my opinion. 🙂

We won the Region 23 Championship with a 14-1 win over NW and then 10-2 over Co-Lin in the winner’s bracket again 11-3 in the championship game. We beat former big-leaguer Tim Hudson in a 9-6 win over Chattahoochee Valley at Livingston University. Dave Townsend went the distance for the win. He went on to win the NCAA Division 2 Player and Pitcher of the Year in 1996 at Delta State. Future major leaguer Chad Bradford lost a heartbreaker 1-0. He, too went 9 innings…. he was a starting pitcher at Hinds, and a darn good one, especially in 1995 when he won 13 games, pitched 15 complete games in 17 starts and broke 5 aluminum bats. We won the championship game 11-1. Right-hander Eric Bock also pitched a complete game and dominated the Pirates. I’ll share a great story on Eric Bock later. More behind the scenes story about this great team and great players in a future posts.

It’s the 25th anniversary of one of the greatest post-season runs in Mississippi JUCO history. The Cinderella story of how the Miraculous Hinds Eagles of 1999 overcame a brutal first six weeks of the season and although we had a 16-31 overall record, we had won enough South Division games to slide into the the Region 23, D2 Tournament in Senatobia. The host of the tournament was the Northwest Mississippi Rangers, coached by Don Castle, who were ranked #1 in the D2 national polls and had hit 102 home runs in the friendly confines of Jim Miles Field. The second seed was Itawamba, coached by Chuck Box who had won the Mississippi State Championship the week before. The third seed was our arch-rival Co-Lin, coached by Keith Case, who had beaten us 11 times in a row over the last three seasons. The lowly Eagles were the fourth seed. Fine. But these powerhouses didn’t know what I knew.

We won the Region 23 Championship by beating Northwest in the opener 10-2 in 7 innings, Co-Lin in the winner’s bracket game 7-3 and Northwest again, 12-10. We traveled to St. Louis, Missouri for the Central District playoffs. St. Louis/Forest Park was the defending district champion. We won 2 of 3, including 11-6 in the championship game in which Mason Chastain hit two tape measure home runs that have yet to come down. Epic home runs!

We headed back to the D2 World Series in Millington for the 3rd time in 6 seasons and we were a long rain delay from possibly playing for the national title. We finished 4th, best ever. Hinds has played in a total of 6 World Series, just missing a national championship in 2014. In our post season run we picked up a pair of championships, knocked off the number 1 team in the country 3 times, and wrote a storybook of great baseball memories to last a lifetime. That great run after a dismal start simply described what baseball is all about. I have some awesome behind the scenes stories that I will share in a future blog about this team, including some unique motivation that was used, the bus mishaps, communication magic, coaching while cross-eyed, some other crazy things that happened and more about the cast of characters who rose to the occasion for three weeks in what many of them have told me over the years, was their best baseball experience of their lives. That’s a pretty good stuff for guys who had played baseball since they were 5 years old.