Baseball Team Commemorates Anniversary Of School’s First State Championship

Joe Cannon Stadium, the longtime site for Maryland’s high school boys baseball playoffs, is less than 10 miles from Severna Park High School, but for the 2002 Severna Park varsity baseball team that had just lost a tight 2-1 contest to South Carroll High School in the state semifinals, the ride home must have felt like an eternity. Even the hum of the bus engine and tires rumbling along the highway didn’t break the silence the players had in their heads. No one spoke. No one had to. This one hurt. Bad.

Junior pitcher Ryan Doot was on the mound. South Carroll scored twice in the first inning; Severna Park scored once. The rest of the game was a pitcher’s duel with neither team wanting to flinch. Neither did and South Carroll went to the championship game. South Carroll was ultimately crowned a state champion in 2002.

First baseman Alex Vitale, who was a junior, recalls the final gathering of that team.

“We had our final team meeting, put our equipment away and turned in our jerseys,” Vitale said. “I think all of the juniors felt really bad for the seniors, but we (the juniors) huddled together and collectively said, ‘We are not going to do this again.’ We knew we’d be back.”

The core of the team immediately went into the summer playing together on the American Legion Post 175 senior team. Jim McCandless was the head coach of both the varsity Falcons and the American Legion team. He made sure the team channeled the frustration of the close loss into tenaciousness on the field and fueled the players’ “team first” mentality.

By spring 2003, predictions from prognosticators at many news publications in Maryland had the Falcons at the top of early polls. With nine seniors returning, McCandless wanted his guys to make a statement to every team in Maryland by arranging the Falcons’ season opener to be against South Carroll. Doot was ready.

“At least once every practice, McCandless would ask us, ‘Who’s the state champion?’” said third-base senior Matt Wyble. “From the very first practice, we knew we were there for one reason: We were going to win the state championship.”

The South Carroll rematch would have to wait. When gameday arrived, Wyble joked, “There was one flake of snow and South Carroll canceled!”

McCandless used the “snow out” to further fire up his guys, suggesting the Sykesville team was afraid to play the focused, powerful Falcons. Rescheduled games were twice rained out.

The season went almost to plan. The 15-3 Falcons came up short to the 13-3 Old Mill Patriots in the Anne Arundel County championship on May 8, 2003, losing 2-1. Another stinging close loss for the Falcons, who were more focused than ever to bring home the state championship.

The Falcons cruised through regionals by beating Wilde Lake and Mount Hebron before a pivotal play against River Hill by a sophomore starter kept their playoff hopes alive on May 17, 2003. The Falcons were up 1-0 in the top of the seventh inning when River Hill first baseman roped a bullet over Andrew Ferris’ head in left field. Though he had practiced using a cutoff man hundreds of times, Ferris barehanded the ball that one-hopped off the fence and fired a missile perfectly into the glove of Greg Drenning, covering second. The River Hill player had expected a standup double, but instead was met with an easy tag. The Falcons got two more outs to earn the 3A East region championship.

“It was one of those do-or-die situations,” Ferris remembered. “There was no time for the cutoff, so I fired it as hard as I could and luckily it was right on.”

Starting pitcher Tom Howell was quoted in The Capital after the game as saying, “After that play, I was just pumped up. I think we all were.”

To get to the state championship, Severna Park would have to face a familiar opponent — South Carroll. After the season’s daily reminders that South Carroll beat them just a year before and won the state championship, the Falcons were ready for the rematch. This year, the ride home from Joe Cannon would be different. The Falcons unloaded on South Carroll with six runs in the first two innings, totaling 11 hits and five doubles in a 9-3 rout.

Twenty years after that important game, Doot looked stoic, remembering that day like it was yesterday. All season McCandless had made it clear that no one was pitching against South Carroll but Doot.

“It felt really good to go out there again when it really mattered and put something together,” Doot recalled.

The 20-4 Falcons squared off against the 10-12 Patuxent on May 28, 2003, and came up on top 7-1 to capture the school’s first state championship. In a feat that can only be tied, never broken, Doot (two) and Howell (three) pitched five complete playoff games for the Falcons.

Throughout the season, several Falcons up and down the lineup put up ESPN highlight-reel-type numbers. Pitcher Tom Howell and first baseman Vitale earned All-County honors, while Wyble, and outfielders Andrew Ferris and Andrew Jensen earned second team All-County honors. Vitale would ultimately be named Player of the Year, McCandless Coach of the Year, and Howell first team. Ferris and Doot earned second team. Vitale ended his senior season with a staggering .574 batting average, the third-highest in the state, though with 20 more at-bats than the players ahead of him.

“[The coaches] knew that team was special,” said former assistant coach Charlie Becker. “They were good in 2002, but that loss to South Carroll made them mentally stronger, and that’s what took them to the next level. They wanted it for each other.”

The Falcons captured their second state championship in 2005, making Ferris, David Sells, Chris Crum, Evan Richter and Harrison Taylor, the five sophomores from 2003, the only two state championship players in Falcon baseball history.