My high school baseball coach passed away on Thursday
We lost a one-of-a-kind figure with the death this week of John Barsala who was one of the most intimidating, deeply red-blooded male figures I’ve ever been associated with in my life.
He was my high school baseball coach, a no-nonsense junior high science teacher chiseled straight out of the 1960s. The son of a World War II vet. Tough as nails. He expected you to be the same. A native of Turtle Creek, PA, Barsala was a star fullback at Wittenberg University for teams that went 33-2-1 during his three seasons before coming to tiny Brookville, OH for a teaching job.
“He taught us a lot about discipline,” Barsala once said of his college coach, Bill Edwards, who coached the Detroit Lions in the 1940s and ended up in the College Football Hall of Fame. Oh yeah, and Edwards was a high school classmate and friend of Paul Brown and is described as having had a big influence on Steve Belichick, the father of Bill Belichick.
“We don’t lose at Wittenberg,” Barsala later remembered Edwards saying during one locker room speech.
That’s the guy who was influencing Barsala, and he was about to unleash all of that discipline and philosophy on my hometown.
By the early 1970s with the Vietnam War still raging, my dad was crossing paths with Barsala who had strict rules, including curfews for players. He told my dad to cut his hair or he couldn’t play baseball. My dad defied the order and didn’t play high school baseball. I grew up with that story seared into my brain.
Here was this coach my father had dared to challenge in the early 1970s, and he was to be my baseball coach in the 1990s.
To say the intimidation factor was off the charts with the guy was an understatement. My friends called coach “Barbwire.”
I will never forget my senior year before some random game. Coach calls a pregame meeting and announces that I had been named the Dayton Area High School Athlete of the Week by the local NBC affiliate.
There was a major problem: I wasn’t having a season that warranted such an award, but I’d been in a bar to see a band I really liked and ended up next to the sports anchor for the local NBC affiliate. I got to talking and revealed that I played baseball at Brookville. It was an innocent conversation, or so I thought.
Weeks later, the anchor calls the school and tells them I’m the athlete of the week for the Dayton area, and he’d be out to do a feature story for the news.
Barsala announces this in front of the team & asks me if I know Dan DeCrow from NBC. At first, I had no idea what was going on. “Well he knows you,” I remember Barsala saying. Then it hit me, the guy at Canal Street Tavern. I was in a huge situation. Team captain…in a bar…Barsala’s going to snap and this isn’t going to be good. We’re ranked like #3 in the state. We’re rolling.
The feature story runs. He never investigated any further. I’d dodged a major life crisis.
Earlier this year, with it being 30 years since he retired and my high school career ended, I started researching Barsala’s life after retirement when I came upon an old news story about one of my teammates, Brandon Graveline, who had beaten me out for the catcher’s position.
“Joe is a great great team player,” Barsala told the reporter. “He was willing to do what was needed to make the team successful. When you have kids who are unselfish, you have a better chance to be successful.”
I damn near cried.
Graveline was way better than me at catcher and deserved the job. He was a great catcher. My arm was a noodle. Barsala wasn’t running a charity. We had a great baseball program, and he wanted to win, which was the same way I felt. Hell yes, Barbwire, let’s destroy teams. I’ll play wherever.
All I ever tried to do was play my ass off, win games and steer clear of his crosshairs, except for that one night at the bar. I wasn’t in some exclusive club. Many of us had the same plan.
By the end of the season, the one game we never won for coach was No. 400. Many of our baseball careers, and his, ended in 1995 at the state regional semifinals with him sitting at 399 wins, but he was done with teaching and coaching. Returning for a token season to cross over the 400 win total wasn’t his style. My senior class finished with back-to-back undefeated league titles, the only time that happened in school history, and sent him out with his fifth straight league title. It was plenty for his illustrious coaching career.
Looking back on life, Barbwire’s discipline was exactly what many of us needed. We were too young and dumb to understand at the time, but he was preparing us for real life and what we’d face in jobs and in tough situations, just like Edwards had done for him all those years before.
“Here at Brookville, we have that winning tradition in baseball,” he once told a reporter. “It’s ingrained in the kids. Kids see it, feel it, and it builds confidence in them. Psychologically, our kids expect to win. They don’t want to be the group that lets it go by the wayside. We don’t necessarily have the best players. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve had our share of tremendously talented players. Sometimes, tradition gives us the edge.”
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