This is a collection of great stories from my longtime love affair with baseball. Over parts of two centuries, starting in 1971 at the age of 16, I coached hundreds of great players from Ricky Chisolm to Terre Woods to Chad Bradford to Warren Guerriero and so many more. It’s all I ever wanted to do. There were over a thousand games, a whole bunch of stories, great teams, good teams, fair teams, bad teams, and history-making teams. The stories are positive, entertaining, and true.
Thanks to all the players, coaches, umpires, teammates, family and friends who were a part of my great life in coaching baseball. Thanks to my high school coach, Bill “Moose” Perry, who “inspired” me to get into the coaching business. I am a “coach” only because of his influence. He left his mark on me, literally…and I’ve got the scars to prove it (said like Groucho Marx). Thanks to the board at Magnolia Academy who gave me my first job and paid me a whopping $9000 a year in 1976. Thanks to Ron Polk for not accepting me as a graduate assistant at Mississippi State in 1982. Thanks to Bill Marchant who took me under his wing as a lowly volunteer assistant coach (and roommate) at Hinds in the fall of 1982. Thanks to Dr. Clyde Muse who hired me as the head baseball coach, actually the “only” baseball coach, at Hinds in May of 1983, probably because I became a squatter in the apartment at the Sheffield-Wooley Dormitory when Bill left Hinds and they wanted to get that apartment back so bad. Dr. Muse always treated me in a first class manner, so I can’t thank him enough for giving my “dream” coaching job. Thanks to the Pearl High School athletic director and board for getting me out of coaching for the first time in 2006 and the Hillcrest “Christian” School administrators and board for putting me out of coaching for good, and out of my misery, in 2013. I only got back into coaching, briefly, so I could coach with my son Josh who had just graduated from Belhaven University. It was the worst coaching experience I ever suffered through in my life. The players (and one of the assistant coaches) hated having a new guy come in and change the way they did things. They loved Josh, but hated the old guy. I even dragged my 8th grader, Jake with me to experience the torment. I have been apologizing to them for years for that dumb decision.
But seriously, thanks to my dad for putting me through college when he didn’t have the money to do it, to my mom for running a great concession stand at Hinds for so many years and for smoking cigarettes when she was pregnant with me to form this brain I have and the way it works, to my sons Josh and Jake for inspiring me to get this project done by printing the original copy of Diary of a Mad Baseball Coach as a Christmas gift in 2020, thanks to my wife Patty for the two great sons and for being the best baseball wife ever and thanks to any of the other good and bad influences on my life and career. There are many of each. You all know who you are.
31 seasons, 700 plus wins, hundreds of players, 41 championships (26 at Magnolia Academy, 14 at Hinds and 1 at Pearl), 4 World Series appearances, including the 1989 trip to the JUCO World Series in Grand Junction, Colorado (a first for a Mississippi team) and the 1994 Division 2 World Series in Millington, Tennessee, also a first for Mississippi, a bunch of close misses, dozens of ejections… some deserved, and a lot of other firsts along the way. My dad used to say that there is only one “first.” We had quite a few firsts for Magnolia Academy (first Mississippi high school team to win 40 games in a season (1981), Mississippi high school baseball, Hinds, and Mississippi JUCO baseball. I coached in four World Series at Hinds which is more than any other head baseball coach in Mississippi history (1973-2025). Hinds is the only Mississippi JUCO to play in Grand Junction before their was divisional play (which began in 1993) and in the Division 2 World Series. Hinds is also the only team in history to win a division, state, regional and district championship and play in the JUCO World Series in Grand Junction 1989).
A few years ago I got this note from former Magnolia student Craig Stephens and I appreciate the kind words: From my buddy Anthony Thomas about Magnolia Academy Baseball. Anthony wrote: “I attribute our success to the one who set the standard and refused to accept anything but our best, Rick Clarke. Minus his unrelenting and maniacal pursuit of excellence, we were just goofballs.”
That is without a doubt, the greatest compliment I ever got in over 30 plus years of coaching baseball. Thanks Brick!
Regrets? I have a few, but I won’t mention those and I chose not to bash anybody on the blog or in the book (well, not yet anyway) who gave me a hard time along the way. There were quite a few battles fought with a few people through the years. I really did enjoy coaching baseball in the last quarter of the 20th century; it was a fun time to coach. The 21st century? Not so much. Things had changed, although the 2001 and 2002 teams at Hinds were pretty darn good. The days of the loud talking, selectively foul mouthed, dinosaur baseball coach, tough and demanding on his players, had come and gone.
But for the most part, I got to do things the way I wanted to and quit when I was ready…four times, Magnolia, Hinds, Pearl and Hillcrest. Make that five, including a role as assistant principal at Chastain Middle School for two years, which would make an interesting blog of its own.
I hope you enjoy the stories. Check back often. Hope to have some updates soon to help with searches and navigation. There are always new stories and other interesting features as well. Enjoy the photos below. There are many more.
Rick Clarke's Diary of a Mad Baseball Coach 