Hartselle Head Baseball Coach William Booth celebrate with players after winning his most recent state title in 2013. Booth has won 8 state championships with the Tigers since 1990. | Special to the Enquirer

Hartselle baseball Coach Booth looks to 1,000 wins

Caleb Suggs

Hartselle Enquirer

These days when you mention high school baseball in North Alabama you almost have to mention Hartselle High School in the same breath. Hartselle has obtained eight state championships since 1990 and have had plenty of other appearances in the state finals even though they might have came up short. Their head coach William Booth has never missed the playoffs, is responsible for all their state titles and is less than 10 wins away from 1,000 wins. However, what if I told you that one of the most storied careers in Alabama High School baseball almost didn’t happen.

While many people can look an easily see the success that Hartselle baseball has had, what most don’t know is that it wasn’t really supposed to happen. “In 1988 our baseball coach had quit and they came to me asking me to fill in until they found someone,” Booth said “I had never coached a high school sport before but I decided to do it for a year or two until they found someone.” Despite never having coached a high school team before, Booth decided if he was going to do it then he was going to do it right. “Before the season I looked to see who the toughest teams out there were,” Booth said. “Once I found them I scheduled them.” With this “to be the best, you have to beat the best” outlook, Hartselle began to quickly move up the ladder as they went 27-4 in just Booth’s second year. “We went 27-4 but we lost in the first round to a team we should have beaten,” Booth said. “I hadn’t planned to stay more than two years but I felt I owed it to them to stay the next year.” It would turn out to be a very good idea as the next year Hartselle won their very first state championship. It would actually be the beginning of a hot streak in which the Tigers won four championships in five years, including three straight from 1990-1992. In those five seasons the Tigers compiled an astounding 184-29 record to go with their four titles.

It would be in the 1994-95 season that the Tigers hit their first bump under Booth as they moved from class 5A to 6A. With this move to class 6A, the Tigers would be forced to contend with Vestavia Hills. “Going into the nineties, baseball wasn’t as big a sport as football and basketball yet” Booth said “but even though it wasn’t as big as the others, everyone knew that Vestavia Hills dominated the state.” Hartselle would go on to have several encounters with Vestavia including in a meeting in the state championship in 1998. Hartselle had defeated Vestavia earlier in that season which was a big deal because earlier that same day Vestavia had received the number one ranking in the nation. Hartselle also snapped Vestavia’s 27 game winning streak with the win. Hartselle would fall to Vestavia in the state finals but the impact of the meeting was still there. Vestavia went on to win the National Championship as well that year and Vestavia coach Sammy Dunn even gave a mention to how tough Hartselle was in his book “Dynasty on the diamond: Vestavia Hills’ unforgettable baseball legacy”. Hartselle would go on to win two more titles in 1999 and 2000.

After winning their sixth title in 2000, things began to get difficult for the Tigers as teams began to put a lot more emphasis on their baseball programs. Chief among those in North Alabama was Hartselle’s bitter rival the Cullman Bearcats. “We used to beat Cullman like it was nothing,” Booth said “well at some point they got tired of it and decided to do something about it.” While Hartselle didn’t lose their edge and made plenty of deep playoff runs, they failed to obtain a state title from 2001-2008 after winning six from 1990-2000. “That was a very frustrating time” Booth said “Its not that we didn’t have good teams but all the teams around us were starting to catch up.” It had been due to Hartselle’s influence that teams programs made a change for the better. “I asked a fellow coach friend of mine if I could come observe one of his practices,” Booth said. “When I got there he asked me if anything looked familiar and I realized they were doing exact same things that we did at our practices.”

When 2009 came around, Hartselle had grown tired of not winning the state titles. The Tigers amassed a 50-9 record that year and won the state championship. Four years later Hartselle would again find themselves as state champions when the defeated Spanish Fort. “I think a lot of people expected us to win in 2009. We just had so many good players” Booth said, “2013 was a little different, the big thing was us defeating Spanish fort because they had become the powerhouse from the south.”

In the recent years, Hartselle has had to deal with the big emergence of Cullman. The Bearcats have made three state final appearances from 2014-16 while winning one state title in 2015. Each year they have also put Hartselle out of the playoffs. This year particularly was a crazy year. Five of the top six teams in class 6A all came from North Alabama in Hartselle, Cullman, Decatur, Florence and Muscle Shoals. Decatur would be left out of the playoffs despite being ranked third because they finished behind Hartselle and Cullman. The other four would face off with each other in the first two rounds of the playoffs. Cullman reached the playoffs after just barely beating Hartselle in the regular season. “That just shows you that it takes some luck to win in baseball” Booth said “If we don’t get one signal mixed up then Cullman doesn’t even make the playoffs.” Despite losing to the Bearcats in the playoffs, Booth believes this will prepare his team in the future. “The teams around here get tougher every year” Booth said “playing teams like that make us better.”

The impact the Hartselle baseball program has had is widely known. “My friend Don Logan was speaking at an awards banquet and he said that I had always told him to play anybody, anywhere, anytime and he never knew what I meant,” Booth said “That is until his son took a trip to Spain and brought back a Hartselle baseball jersey that he had bought at a shop in Spain.” Hartselle has also become a major sports program. After only winning a title in basketball pre 1990, Hartselle now has a top tier sports program that is competitive in almost every sport imaginable. In addition, Hartselle has now won state championships in sports such as football, volleyball, softball, golf and track as well as just having an eight-year streak of winning a title in at least one sport snapped.

As Booth prepares for the 2016-17 season and a chance to achieve 1,000 wins he looks back on his career as something like a dream. “If you had told me before I took the job I would have achieved all of this I would have said you were crazy” Booth said “I have to give thanks to all the players and coaches who bought in and helped me to achieve all of this.”