By Quintin Harlan
The Herald Bulletin
ANDERSON, Ind. —
A quick conversation with Highland’s Chase Freeman and you come away knowing one thing, if nothing else about him: he loves the game of baseball.
“It’s the best, my favorite sport. I like everything about it,” Freeman said.
Take that love for the game and add in a work ethic that few can match and you have The Herald Bulletin’s Player of the Year for the 2010 baseball season.
In his final campaign with the Scots, the Murray State-bound Freeman hit .447 with six home runs, 44 RBI, stole 14 bases and struck out only 10 times as the Scots won 23 ball games this year.
“When he’s out there you have to know where he’s at in the order,” Scotscoach Matt Bair said. “He constantly came up with the big hit.”
A fixture for three years in the No. 3 spot in the batting order, Freeman took his natural talent for the game and developed it into not only a good baseball player but a team leader.
“He’s a great leader in practice, he makes everybody better,” Bair said. “We would not have been the team that we were without him.”
Continued development of his skills has led to success at each level that Freeman has played the game at. It’s that work ethic that he believes will carry him through the inevitable valleys that come with the peaks in athletics.
“If I’m struggling in any area of the game, I won’t be struggling at it for very long. That I can promise you,” said Freeman.
“He’s a self-made player,” Bair said. “He put in the time to make himself the player he is. I think he’s made himself bigger and faster and I think you’ll see him turn into a prototypical draft guy (in college). I think Murray State landed themselves a draftable player.”
In a season where the Scots won 23 games and were ranked in the top 10 in Class 4A, motivation wasn’t hard to find. The fact of this being the last year for Highland High School wasn’t as big a factor as one would think, however.
The decision to close Highland as a high school and convert into a middle school came in December. By the time baseball season rolled around in the spring, the news was still a punch that landed but it wasn’t as much of an impact to the baseball team as it might have once been.
“I don’t know that they focused on that,” Bair said. “They focused more on the group. They had to play hard because they don’t want to let each other down.”
“I was playing with my best friends,” Freeman said. “We tried not to worry about it. Everbody like each other and that’s what we were playing for.”
