By Mike Moritz
In a small suburban town in the south-western part of CT, Integrated Sports Training (IST) gets filled with kids, baseball players, from 8 years old to 18. Smacking baseballs around in small but just-barely-big-enough cages surrounded by mesh netting. Big, hulking former baseball players constantly give lessons day in and day out, night in and night out. Instructors from 65 years old to 26, which was the age of my fall baseball coach, Dennis Accomando, an instructor at IST in Norwalk, Connecticut. Dennis played at Western CT, UConn and in the Braves organization and then after a few years of coaching in my town, he got a year long tour with UMass Amherst only to end up back in Westport. It was a combination of Dennis and Jay Ruggerio, my long time companion and mentor in baseball, that turned my career right-side-up.
8 weeks go by. I have finished with a team lead in hitting as the number 2 hitter in the lineup and have been turned around so fast on a swivel that I even got to throw the most innings on the team, leading the way with a .86 ERA; giving up three runs all season.
But with Winter's hand on Fall's shoulder and Summer tucked away for months to come, I look forward to the cold air in and around Staples High School. The thought of being too warm in my bed, not wanting to go out before school reminds me of the times of my eldest brother, Sam- the Mountain Man as he was known in high school. This isn't a story of my fall baseball season, but rather it helps to set up the time frame.
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Sam and his friends- the JHuncket (silent "J") as they came to be known- gave me my first look into what high school was. In my eyes, they were living the life. And despite the fact that I have now been exposed to what senior year and high school REALLY is about, I reject the thought that it is not as glorified as when the JHuncket was my age.
The JHuncket was the name of the movie group that Sam and his friends made up. They filmed cheap movies with a single recording camera. Themes like James Bond and Back to the Future were favorites of theirs. And every so often, they would throw a "JHuncket Premier", sometimes being held in the basement of my house. Teenage boys and girls piled into the basement which now every piece of evidence of me and my brothers' childhood has been covered by my mother's kosher food company- the Challah Connection. And that's my favorite memory of being a young, naive little boy- seeing my brother and all his friends in the basement, in the middle of the winter.
And then there was Harry. And in the basement is where he and I sat for an hour one day- in the middle of a blizzard in my fifth grade year- watching my brother's first skateboard video, "Yeah Right!". We watched it on our old, dusty TV on the green couch in between two very small, white, wooden pillars.
But as mentioned before, the basement has been taken over by the Challah Connection. It was a slowly-but-surely movement in which it started with my mother putting one table in the corner and making the move to take over the entire basement, ridding our house of our one man cave.
But this winter is a lot a bit different than the previous ones. For one, I know what my future holds, and it's not college baseball.
And that's not the only exciting bit of information. My mother has decided to move company out of the house. Which means exactly what you think. And I could not be more excited for my man cave to come back to me, at the best time of year: second semester senior year.
