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Put me in coach

GSA forms team for Eddie Brooks competition

Wednesday, June 7, 2006

Click here to enlarge this photo David s. spence⁄the gazette Northwest graduate Jensen Pupa is spending this summer with the Gaithersburg Sports Association’s new Eddie Brooks League team. The team is filled with former Montgomery County stars.

The Gaithersburg Sports Association, through the hard work of player parents John Brady and Paul Mattes, as well as GSA fixture Joe Stolz, the manager of the Gaithersburg Post 104 American Legion team, has formed a new 22-and-under squad for play in the seven-team wooden-bat Eddie Brooks League this summer. Its roster reads like a who’s who list of former All-Gazette athletes, including 2006 honoree Andy Moldawer of Quince Orchard, and other former county stars.

‘‘It’s great for guys from the area to have a team they can play on,” said Gaithersburg High graduate Matt Brady, one of the GSA Eddie Brooks team’s catchers. ‘‘Just home-grown guys playing together.”

Those county natives include Patrick Aragon (Watkins Mill graduate), Jose Avila (Bullis), Daniel Bengston (Damascus), Marty Cornish (Wootton), P.J. Harbison (Wootton), Stephen Hinz (Gaithersburg), Tommy Luginbill (Richard Montgomery), Joe Mattes (Quince Orchard), Adam Melis (Wootton), Gaithersburg native Wade Newman (St. John’s), Jensen Pupa (Northwest), Brady Stouffer (Northwest) and Justin Wayne (Wootton).

Of those players mentioned, eight received first-team, second-team or honorable-mention All-Gazette honors, and most played with or against each other on the Gaithersburg Post 104 or Gaithersburg Post 295 American Legion teams.

‘‘I think Joe Mattes told me about [the team],” said Stouffer, who combined with Pupa and Mattes to win back-to-back Maryland State American Legion titles for Post 295 in 2003-04. ‘‘He said some other guys like Jensen were on it, and I played with him all through high school so it was fun. A lot of other guys from [Gaithersburg Post] 104 are on it, so it’s nice to play together for once. I played against most of them all through high school and with a few on legion.”

‘‘I’m glad I get to play with a lot of my friends,” added Joe Mattes, a rising sophomore at Southeastern Louisiana University. ‘‘It’s fun. It’s a good experience.”

Matt Brady and his father, John, got the ball rolling in January when Matt, a redshirt junior at California University (Pa.), started assessing his summer prospects at the start of his spring semester.

‘‘There’s only one other league as competitive as this [the Cal Ripken Sr. Collegiate Baseball League] and there’s American Legion,” said Steve Luginbill, who is one of three co-coaches who agreed to run the team after the original coach suddenly stepped down prior to the season. ‘‘Most of these guys are too old for American Legion, so where do you get competitive ball unless you put together a team like this? It’s mostly local guys given an opportunity to play college-level ball, which most are required to do because they all play college baseball. We got a team into the Eddie Brooks League, and we’re off and running.”

According to Matt Brady, the team struggled at first to get commitments but interest eventually swelled to the point where players had to be turned away. The addition of six players from this year’s Montgomery College-Germantown squad that reached the NJCAA Division III World Series helped fill out the roster.

Despite the team’s influx of local talent, GSA has struggled early, dropping its first three games, including a 3-1 setback to Howard County’s Hunt Manor at Kelley Park in Gaithersburg Saturday.

Pupa, an NJCAA Division III All-America second-team selection this spring for MC-Germantown, struck out nine in his seven innings of work, but two unearned runs on an error by Stouffer, plus a solo home run by Hunt Manor’s Rob O’Brien, spoiled his efforts.

GSA scored on a single by second baseman Brandon Oltra, a Pennsylvania native, in the second inning with the bases loaded. The local squad left numerous runners in scoring position. GSA’s second game of Saturday’s doubleheader against Hunt Manor was postponed because the umpires did not show up.

GSA followed with a loss to the Maryland Hurricanes Sunday. The second game of the doubleheader was suspended.