“This is probably the thing I loved most about him and it’s the thing that makes coaching him and being around him so enjoyable. “He worked with a sense of urgency each and every day, making it seem as though it was an emergency for him to be the best version of himself that he could possibly be,” Schilling said. It was how seriously Scott took the honor and the challenge of leading the team that impressed Schilling then, and is something he has never forgotten as he has continued in his coaching career. That all kinds of rubs off on everybody else.” I think it just kind of comes from how you go about your business and how you work when you get to the field and how you are in the classroom. Says Scott now about that honor, “What I’ve heard is that I had an innate ability to lead a group of people. “They just respected him,” said Schilling, then an assistant coach at McEachern, a year before he took over as the head coach. That was the same year his teammates voted him the team captain of the baseball team, an honor that usually goes to a senior. “My parents sat me down and asked me where I thought I could make the biggest impact and baseball was what I said,” Scott said. By the time he was a sophomore in high school, his thoughts had changed. I would probably be at 100 pushups at the end of the day with layout plays and everything.”Īt that age Scott thought he wanted to one day become a professional basketball player. If I dropped it he would make me do 50 pushups. “He would hit and I would try to catch everything I could. Scott remembers being about 10 to 12 years old when his father would take him to a local park near the family’s home and hit him fly balls with a small T ball bat. He knows each stolen base helps his team get closer to another run and hopefully another win.” “He’s always working, always studying and then always doing his best to go execute his plan,” said Karlton Schilling, his coach at McEachern High School. He knew early on that just being able to run fast wasn’t by itself going to be enough to make him successful, or to become the player he wants to be. The common theme, according to his coaches over the years, was all of the hard work that Scott put in trying to be successful. It has happened, however, in part because of the foundation instilled in Scott early in his life by his parents growing up in Georgia, through his experiences in high school and his years in college. “I would have probably shed a tear, honestly,” Scott said. Scott has made the most of it, rising to the Double A level with the Springfield Cardinals, ranking second among all minor-leaguers in stolen bases, and earning one of two spots as the organization’s representatives in the Futures Game on Saturday night in Seattle, part of the All-Star Game festivities.Īsked what his reaction would have been a year ago had he been told what would happen over the next 12 months, the 22-year-old Scott admitted he didn’t know what he would have said. The Cardinals gave him that chance, selecting him in the fifth round of the 2022 draft. It was less than a year ago that Scott was waiting for the major-league draft, hoping that he would get a chance to move on from West Virginia University and pursue his dream of playing professional baseball. But the speed with which he has begun his professional career has caught even him a little by surprise.
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