For Athens baseball coach Chuck Smith, the final day of this year’s Golden Eagle Baseball Camp was a full-circle moment for him and his coaching staff.
“I just finished my ninth year here, and we have players now that play for us who were in this camp growing up,” Smith told The News Courier on Wednesday. “That’s an awesome feeling for me and my assistant coaches. Both the older guys and the younger kids leave here with smiles on their faces.”
The youth baseball camp, which was for kids ages 5-12, began around the time Smith took on the head coaching gig nearly a decade ago.
Since then, Smith has led the Golden Eagles to myriad wins and a handful of state playoff appearances. Last season, the team reached the third round in Class 6A.
“Whenever I first got here you would walk around town and you didn’t see a bunch of Athens baseball caps, and now they are everywhere I go,” Smith said. “Our community here takes care of us. We want to try and give back every chance that we get, and doing this each summer allows us to do that.”
This year’s camp featured close to 75 enthusiastic young players, according to Smith, almost all of whom were eager to get out on the diamond and learn the foundational elements of the game — like throwing and catching — from Athens coaches and players.
“Teaching the most basic parts of baseball is important, because if you can do the basics well it will continue throughout your career,” Smith said. “All of the older guys may say they don’t look forward to it, but they really do.”
Some of the players that helped coach the fiery group of kids were rising seniors Nash Hargrave, Walker Fleming and Jaret Johnson.
“We were all here at some point, so it’s pretty cool to be the ones doing the coaching now,” Johnson said. “We are really just passing on what we know to the next generation so they can be just as good, if not better, than us one day.”
Hargrave was another former camper who had the opportunity to scout the next generation of Golden Eagle players.
“There’s a bunch of good players out here, so I’m just trying to do my best to keep up with them,” he said. “I’ve been coming to this camp for many years. There were a lot of players who coached me when I was coming up, so this has just been great to do the same.”
Competition at the camp was lighthearted as groups of kids rotated between stations to practice their hitting abilities. But, according to Fleming, the fierceness picked up whenever the real games started.
“I like the wiffle ball games … the kids usually get pretty hyped and crazy for those,” Fleming said. “There have been some good celebrations so far. They have a really good time out here, and it is just fun to be around them.”