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On Friday night, Ardrey Kell High baseball coach Hal Bagwell will go chase his dream again.
Ever since he was a kid playing baseball in Charlotte, Bagwell dreamed of winning a state championship, dreamed of it the way some of us dream of winning the Powerball.
He was a good enough player at South Mecklenburg to be offered a scholarship to play at Lenoir-Rhyne, and the Sabres' teams he played on reached the state semifinals twice. Bagwell graduated in 1986. Three years later, the Sabres won the state title he craved.
By 1989, Bagwell's baseball playing career was over. He walked away from his scholarship at Lenoir-Rhyne to walk on at Appalachian State. A torn rotator cuff ended his playing career before his freshman year started.
As Bagwell watched the Sabres celebrate the 1989 state championship win against Wilson Hunt, he could only think of one thing: Someday he was going to bring South Meck another one, as a coach.
Bagwell was hired by his alma mater in 1997. Until then, I thought that Tom Knotts, then football coach at West Charlotte, was the most passionate high school coach I knew. Bagwell was a ball of fast-talking, gum-chewing emotion, determined to make his school great.
By 1999, he'd pushed an overachieving Sabres' team to the finals, where they lost to Greenville Rose, which might have been the nation's best team that season.
In 2005, South Meck lost to Greenville Conley in the finals. It was close and mistakes did the Sabres in. That loss, Bagwell said, is still tough to talk about. Two years later, Bagwell reluctantly left South Meck to coach at Ardrey Kell, falling in love with then Principal Mike Mathews' vision for the new school. Ardrey Kell was a mile from his house.
At the new school, he welcomed some former Sabres players who understood his system and others from Providence, whom he said “had been coached the right way” by Panthers coach Danny Hignight, his good friend who lives down the street.
In just its second season, Ardrey Kell lost to Greenville Rose in the 2008 finals. And after several come-from-behind wins in this postseason, Bagwell has his Knights back playing for a championship. This is his third trip in five years. And he's still chasing.
“I don't want to say I'm snakebit,” Bagwell said. “I think ‘unfortunate' is a better word. But I want this really bad. You want to be playing in June. That's the goal. If I didn't, we would just start practicing in February (right before the season). But it's tough. I've won 267 games but don't remember many of them. As a coach, you remember all the losses.”
Those losses fuel Bagwell. They keep him up at night watching film. They keep him coming back to chase that vision he's had all his life.
On Friday, he goes to N.C. State with his team to face Raleigh Sanderson in the best-of-three state championship series. He wonders if this is his time.
“I do,” he said, “I really do, but at the end of the day, we want to set ourselves up to play well at the end of the year – to get momentum and gain confidence and let that carry you to the state championship.”
And hopefully live your dream.
Langston Wertz Jr: lwertz@charlotteobserver.com
