Book Review: "One Shot at Forever"

The subtitle of Chris Ballard's great new book says it all: "A Small town, An Unlikely Coach, and A Magical Baseball Season."

In 1971, the baseball team from Macon High School (enrollment 250) of Macon, Illinois (population 1,200) had that  magical baseball season by not only making the state high school championship tournament, but making it all the way to the championship game.  To make this saga all the more remarkable, this was at a time when there were no scholastic classification based on enrollment (as there is today), so the kids from Macon were going up against schools with much larger enrollments from all over the state, including athletic powerhouse Lane Tech of Chicago (enrollment 5,200, where over 400 kids would try out for the freshman baseball team).  

The key figure in this story is the unlikely coach, Lynn Sweet.  A young English teacher with some, shall we say, progressive ideas about teaching, Sweet was different in the small town of Macon in 1971:  he wore his hair long (down to his collar!), he had a fu manchu mustache, he drove a motorcycle.  Not what you saw during that time, especially among Lombardi wannabe High school athletic coaches.  His students took to him from the start and loved him.  In 1970, he took on the job of baseball coach for two reasons - he would make an extra $130 by doing so, and nobody else wanted it.

Sweet took his different teaching style with him to the baseball team, and they responded immediately.  School administrators, some parents, and most definitely other coaches were not as enamored of Sweet and his methods, but in his second year as coach - after the school tried to fire him - the Macon Ironmen had that magic ride to the State Championship game.

In the last section of the book, Ballard returns to Macon 39 years after the fact and visits with some of those kids, now middle-aged men, from that team and talks about how their lives have been affected, particularly Macon's star player, Steve Schartzer.  Even now, Coach Sweet remains an important figure in their lives.  The book shows the far reaching effect that a coach (or teacher, or any authority figure) can have on a young person's life.

I found this to be especially compelling due to the fact that in recent years I have begun to pay attention to high school sports due to the participation of my nephews, Patrick and Ryan at Central, and it also resonates after having attended the WPIAL Championship game just this past week.

This is a really good book.  I would hope that not only baseball fans would read this book, but I would also hope that coaches and high school athletes themselves read this book. 

As Sweet himself says in the book, it was a great story "because it can never happen again."