Berries baseball celebrates coaching greats

Sep. 30—In the heyday of the North Central Conference, the conference continually produced state champions in multiple sports.

Logansport's biggest contribution was in baseball, as the Berries won state championships in 1975, '77, '79 and '91.

Two of the great leaders of those glory days were honored on Wednesday as Jim Turner and Butch Jones were remembered during a gathering at the LHS baseball facility. Turner, 90, and Jones, 81, died within three days of each other this past week.

During a ceremony at the LHS barn on Wednesday, family, friends, colleagues and members of the Logansport baseball family shared stories of the two coaching greats.

Ryan Conrad, who now resides in Bloomington, was a starter on the Berries' last state championship team in 1991. He recalled a story about Turner.

"In the state championship game it was actually after I had hit a home run and I was coming around first base — and I was mainly a strikeout guy, OK, so hitting a home run was very odd — but coming around in the State Finals at first base, I had both my hands in the air kind of signaling that we're No. 1," Conrad recalled. "And I look over at third base, anticipating to see coach Turner just jumping for joy, but instead he was signaling very intensely 'get your arms down ... get your arms down.'

"So I score, the inning ends, and before I went back out onto the field, he called me aside and he said, 'Listen, you know better than that, that's not good sportsmanship, that's not who we are, that's not how we play.'"

Conrad said that is one of probably 10,000 stories he could share about both coaches' character.

Todd Stephens, who now lives in Carmel, was a member of the 1991 team and a starter on the 1992 semistate team and 1993 regional team.

"All the coaches I had, I think the thing that stands out is the leadership," Stephens said. "They didn't have to yell to be a leader. I was thinking about it on the drive from Indy, the attention to detail."

Stephens said the Berries played games just like they practiced.

"I can remember just practices being so intense. And our infield, if you ever watched our infield, it was perfect," he recalled. " But that's what those guys instilled in us was practice aspect, infield, you don't have to be perfect but try to be perfect, and the games took care of themselves.

"Now everybody is so focused on playing more games and winning, but all those details in practice and taking infield, that's what these guys were all about."

Bryan Gleitz, who is now an assistant coach for the Logansport baseball team and was also a member of the 1991 state championship team and a starter on the 1992 semistate team, said the players coming up through the Logansport youth leagues and freshman and JV teams were well-schooled on the fundamentals of the game and that Turner and Jones continued that when they got to the varsity team. Plus, Turner and Jones didn't overcoach their players as well.

"They summed it up at the funeral. The feeder system took care of a lot where they just let us be ourselves," Gleitz said. "They never embarrassed us, never yelled at us. When coach Turner retired and coach Jones took over, same thing, they just let us be us and play our own game.

"It was game situation in practice. We would compete in practice. That's why we were so good back then is we competed against each other. I wanted to be better than Todd, I wanted to be better than (Bryon) Ashby. I wanted to be good collectively as a team, too. We wanted to win but we wanted to compete with each other and that led to a lot of winning a lot of games."

Current Logansport head coach Dan Frye said that when looking through the old scorebooks, there were a lot more close games than he thought. He thought the Berries rolled more opponents, but it turned out there were a lot of close games, which needed the right tactical calls from Turner and Jones.

They will both be remembered as two of the greatest baseball coaches in state history.

"You couldn't ask for two better guys to play for," Gleitz said. "Like Joe (Ness) said today, you never wanted to fail them.

"It was just such an honor to have that jersey on, to play for them and to have the Logan shirt on. We're a family."