The Sidney Legion baseball team held its postseason banquet Monday night, with several players receiving awards.
Head Coach Jim Koewler presented six awards. The Offensive Award went to Daniel Berning, who hit .394 on the season. Keeton McEldowney was the recipient of the Defensive Award while the ERA Award went to Josh Nixon at 1.18. The Fireballer Award went to Maddux Liles, Coaches Award to Dylan Albers and the MVP Award to Austin McLain.
The MVP Award has been renamed the Tom Clay Memorial MVP Award. Clay, who passed away this winter, was involved with Legion baseball in one form or another for over 40 years. His wife, Deb, presented the award to McLain.
Junior Legion Coach Kenny Peters handed out four awards. The Highest Batting Average Award went to Trey Werntz, who hit .462 on the season, the ERA Award to Ashton Piper at 0.875, the Leadership Award to Jacob Francis and Bryce Kennedy the RBI Award.
Bill Lonsbury, President of the Baseball Committee, passed out seven $1000 scholarships to the graduating seniors going on to college in Liles, Kyle Subler, Austin Knapke, Tyler Louden, Nixon, McLain, Berning.
Following the award presentations, Corey Mee, the head baseball coach at the University of Toledo, spoke about “Attributes of Winners”, which included five bullet points of will to prepare, maturity, identity, confidence and an attitude about winning.
Mee also talked about what players can control and those were attitude, communication, energy, effort and hustle, focus and concentration and performance.
Mee mentioned former Sidney player Dalton Bollinger, who is currently playing for Toledo, Jared Hoying, who played for Sidney during his high school career before playing for the Rockets in college and is now in the Texas Rangers organization, and Jake Oester, the head coach at Urbana University, who also played collegiately at Toledo. He made the point about all three of these young men and their work habits, emphasizing that it takes a great deal of hard work to keep moving up to the next level of play.
