CCHS baseball team receives title rings

Sunday marked the last gathering for the 2016 Central Catholic state champion baseball team as team members received their championship rings.
The ring presentation and baseball awards ceremony were held at the Yvonne Adams Life Center.
Head Coach Tyler Jensen said he knew going into the season that the team had a lot of talent but was concerned how the team “would mold together.”
The Eagles made their fifth straight trip to the state semifinals in 2016.
Despite their success in recent years, the team had not won a title since 2005 when Jensen was a Central Catholic High School senior and a member of the baseball team. But Jensen said he made sure the team didn’t focus on that statistic and just focused on winning two games.
In the semifinals, the Eagles beat Hanson Memorial in a game that “was about as good as it gets in high school baseball,” Jensen said.
Central Catholic then beat Oak Grove, 8-7, to win the state championship. Jensen said he was the most confident he had ever been for a baseball game going into the finals.
The state title game came down to the seventh inning and doing the “little things” right, Jensen said. Central Catholic started the inning with an infield hit, followed by two bunt singles.
“We get in the situation that we’re in,” Jensen said. “A guy (Samuel Guarisco) that we knew was going to get it done, gets it done. State champions. Not much better of a feeling than that.”
After winning the title, Jensen showed the players the three state title rings he got as a baseball player at Central Catholic. While the ring is an important symbol, the memory of the state championship is what they were playing for, he said.
“It’s just one of those moments they’ll cherish the rest of their lives,” Jensen said.
Earlier in the season, Jensen said he became “really concerned” after the Eagles played poorly in some district games. But a comeback district win against eventual state semifinalist Vermilion Catholic sparked the team to get “on a roll” the rest of the season.
Jensen thanked everyone involved with the team this season, including his assistant coaches, team parents, athletic trainers, school staff and his family, for their help.
Central Catholic will return 18 of 22 players next season. Among those are the team’s top two pitchers, all-state selections Blake Hidalgo and Gregory Leger, and all-state infielder Mitchel Lemoine.
Though the team’s four seniors are irreplaceable, next year’s team will do its best to fill the spots, Jensen said.
“We just want to have guys that can step in and come as close as they can to giving us that type of production,” Jensen said.
Samuel Guarisco, a four-year starter at shortstop, the Most Outstanding Player in the 1A title game and Class 1A’s Outstanding Player on the Louisiana Sports Writers Association and Louisiana Baseball Coaches Association’s Class 1A All-State teams, is among the four seniors who the Eagles will lose. The remaining three are Stefano Guarisco, Charlie Solar and Patrick Barron, who has committed to play baseball at Baton Rouge Community College.
Samuel Guarisco plans to attend Nicholls State and will try to walk on the baseball team.
“We were very excited to win a state championship,” Samuel Guarisco said. “We worked so hard. I can’t stress how … hard we worked the past year.”
In the state championship game, the Eagles proved they were a team, “not a bunch of individuals,” Samuel Guarisco said.
One of the games that stuck out the most to him was the Eagles’ win against an undefeated and highly-regarded Brusly team after losing the first meeting between the two teams by a few runs.
The Eagles realized “we can actually hang with these guys,” Samuel Guarisco said. The win against Brusly was “a big turning point for us in our season.”
Stefano Guarisco, who is preparing to begin his freshman year on the Nicholls State football team, said the four seniors on the team became close and appreciated the “little things” this season.
“We … knocked on the door for three years, and we finally knocked it over,” Stefano Guarisco said of the seniors’ previous trips to the state tournament in which the team came up empty-handed.
As a freshman, Stefano Guarisco had dreams of playing college baseball.
“But things changed down the road” and he said he is looking forward to playing college football. Just being with his teammates was the highlight of his senior year.
“This memory will last forever,” he said. “It’s just awesome.”