 | | | 5/31/2008 12:01:00 AM | Email this article • Print this article | Complete team means state title
SNELLVILLE - Rob English has seen a lot of baseball. It's what he does now as a scout for the Boston Red Sox, he watches games.
If a high-level major league baseball team values his word, it's good enough for me.
English, who led Brookwood to its first state baseball championship back in 1986, spoke strongly this week about this year's Bronco team and how complete it was, saying "they've probably got the most balanced high school team I've seen in a long time."
In short, the top-ranked Broncos didn't have a weakness. They were complete in every area, and that's why they swept Walton 3-2 and 6-3 on Friday night for the Class AAAAA state championship.
"Coach English has got a great point," said current Brookwood coach Rick Howard, whose team finished 34-3 with a school record for wins. "They do so many things well. That's one of the things I liked about these kids from the start. The pitching's there. The defense is there. The clutch hitting has been huge."
Anyone who saw Brookwood's first-round series against Alpharetta knew this team was clutch in a big way. Down two runs in the seventh inning, Jordan Erisman and Ross Heffley hit back-to-back homers to force extra innings. Then Erisman downed Alpharetta with a walk-off home run two innings later.
The clutch hitting delivered again in the state finals. Buddy Jones hit a two-run homer in the sixth inning for a 2-0 lead, but Walton scrapped back to tie it. But Heffley ripped an opposite field home run for the game-winner in the bottom of the seventh.
In Game 2, the Broncos scored five of their six second-inning runs with clutch, two-out hits. Erisman's three-run triple was followed by an RBI single from Heffley and an RBI triple from Ryan Lewis.
From there, the team's strong defense was quite a show. In the fifth inning, Heffley fielded a ground ball behind first base and spun to throw out a runner. Grayson Flack handled a hard-hit ball by the next batter.
The game ended on a sweet play by Erisman at shortstop on a short hop.
The mistake-free defense made winners of Chase Hawkins and Alex Beebe, who provided solid pitching as the Broncos won the county's first AAAAA baseball championship since the Jeff Francoeur-led Parkview juggernaut won in 2002.
This Brookwood team doesn't have a first-round pick like Francoeur, but it is similar to that Parkview squad because it's strong in every phase of the game.
That's a credit to the players for working hard on the details, and also to Howard and his coaches for their teaching of those fundamentals.
"It says a lot about those kids," Howard said. "There were some things we didn't do so well early on in the season, but they worked their tails off to make them better."
The payoff came Friday night.
It's so hard to win a baseball state title because so many things can happen in a three-game series. Teams have to play mistake-free in so many clutch situations, just to make the finals. When they get there, the most well-rounded team usually wins. That team did win Friday at Brookwood, bringing a well-deserved trophy to the school's best baseball team (sorry Coach English and the '86 bunch).
"It's awesome, it's the best feeling in the world," Hawkins said. "We'll be talking about this forever. It's just an awesome feeling."
Will Hammock can be reached via e-mail at will.hammock@gwinnettdailypost.com. His regular column appears on Thursdays.
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Saturday, August 02, 2008 
