From the brilliant white gowns and sharp tuxedos to classmates cramming together on the front steps of the school for the class photo, commencement at Summit Country Day School is teeming with tradition.
Then seniors Dustin Cohen, Mike Keslosky, Mike Norman and Justin Sanders turned the typical proceedings on its collective head 25 years ago. They arrived at graduation wearing eye black and baseball jerseys caked with dirt.
Why the stark contrast in attire? They had just returned from winning the 1995 Division IV baseball state championship, the first title in school history.
“After we celebrated (the victory), they rounded up the seniors and told us we had to go. Without telling us where we were going, they put us into a vehicle,” Mike Norman said. “We were floored when we got to the airport and were told that someone had sent a private jet to fly us and our families back home so that we could make graduation. That was one of the craziest moments of my life. It was like being a superstar.”
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It was quite an ending for a team picked to finish fourth in the Miami Valley Conference.
“We had some pretty good athletes on that team so I’m not sure who was on the preseason ranking committee,” Mike Keslosky said. “They probably heard Adam Keslosky (his brother) made varsity and rightly knocked our expectations down a bit.”
Jeff Stayton, coach of the 1995 team, said the MVC, with the likes of St. Bernard and Cincinnati Country Day, was a tough conference but added that polls are only speculative. No one truly knows how a team will perform once the season starts.
That said, a coach knows when a team has talent. Stayton said he was like Sparky Anderson, the manager of the Big Red Machine era Cincinnati Reds. All he had to do was fill out the lineup card and stay out of the way.
Several players from that season continued their playing careers in the collegiate ranks. Stayton said the next year’s iteration of the team would have repeated as state champions if the ace pitchers were juniors instead of seniors.
“We were kind of like a bunch of misfit toys,” Dustin said. “We played as a team to win games. We were never flashy and rarely smooth. No one hit long home runs on a regular basis, and we did not have gold glove winners on defense. We all just did what we could to make the team better.”
That talent can be wasted if the team does not have good chemistry. The ’95 team had no issues in that regard.
“As far as chemistry goes, while we had some great individual players, no one's ego caused any problems,” Justin says. “Nobody made it about them as an individual. When we would huddle up before games or between innings, we would always break the huddle by yelling ‘1...2...3...Old School!’ It sounds silly, but that really is a perfect way to describe our team and the way we played. We all contributed in our areas of individual strength to help the team succeed.”
A successful regular season transitioned into an even more remarkable postseason run, fraught with ups and downs.
In the quarterfinals, Stayton recalled, the team was not playing up to its caliber. At one point, he remembers thinking the season might end with that game.
Instead, their opponent attempted a pick-off play at third base. The opposing pitcher threw the ball away, pushing the winning run across the plate for Summit.
In the fifth inning of the semifinal game against Galion Northmor, with Summit trailing 2-0, the Silver Knight offense came alive.
“I said ‘Guys, it’s getting close to the end (of the game). Let’s hit,’” Stayton said. His team responded to the plea.
Capped by a Mike Tudor grand slam, Summit scored 11 runs in the frame. The 11-run inning is still a state tournament record, regardless of division. The Silver Knights won the contest, 11-3.
After that drubbing, Summit met Greenwich South Central for the title.
Summit pushed a run across the plate in the bottom of the third inning, but South Central would answer in the top of the fourth.
With two outs in the bottom of the fifth, Tudor singled to center, bringing Mike Daly to the plate. Daly followed with the game-winning double.
Sanders entered the game in relief of Norman and allowed just one hit.
At that moment, Stayton believes the players knew it was the first state championship in school history, but it wasn’t something they mentioned before the game.
“We told them it was just an opportunity to do something pretty cool because not many people get that far,” the coach says. “We all felt that we had made it this far, why not go and win the last game.”
It would be easy to only wax nostalgic because it’s the 25th anniversary of the state championship season. However, that moment is not far from the team’s minds.
“I think about it often,” former assistant coach Joe Molony said. “I've had success at other schools and I often lean on the lessons learned from that year to get me through the current year. When I talk to new teams about climate, chemistry and culture, my thoughts go to that 1995 team.”
The team photo hangs above one set of doors in Flannery Gymnasium. That gives Stayton ample opportunity to glance at the past triumph and reflect.
“I still turn around and look at it,” he says. “But it’s not for me, it’s for the kids. You’re only as good as your players and coaches, and I was really blessed to have great kids, great senior leadership and great coaches.”
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