- April 18, 2024
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FPC coach Anthony Campanella has seen a lot in his 30 years of coaching baseball. The comeback against Mandarin was a game he and his team will remember for a long time. File photo
FPC's Gavin Gotera pitched three shutout innings in the win against Mandarin. File photo by Jake Montgomery.
Anthony Campanella has coached baseball for 30 years. On May 2, he was as giddy as an eighth grader.
“It was freaking exciting. So awesome. Wow!” he said of Flagler Palm Coast’s astonishing 7-5 comeback victory over Jacksonville Mandarin in a district quarterfinal. “I’m so proud of my guys.”
Down 5-0, Campanella’s Bulldogs scored seven runs in the top of the seventh. Senior pitcher Gavin Gotera pitched the final three innings, closing the door on the Mustangs, and FPC got to live another day.
“The momentum changed in a heartbeat,” Campanella said on the drive back home from tournament site Creekside High School. “And it finally happened in our favor. You could see the momentum change from the first batter and then it steamrolled from there. They couldn’t stop the bleeding. One crazy thing happened after another. The baseball gods helped us out. It was totally bizarre.”
A hit. A walk. An error. A ball rolled between the first baseman’s legs in what could have been a double play.
“We were substituting guys in and out for baserunners, trying to get guys in position. They were playing in when they were still ahead, and we put the ball in play and put pressure on them,” Campanella said. “It was a total team effort. Everybody contributed. Everybody came together as one.”
“(Jesse Baugher) didn’t stop. He just kept on going. Our kids were going nuts. All our guys were on the field. The umpire was going nuts, telling them to get off the field.”
ANTHONY CAMPANELLA, FPC baseball coach
Jesse Baugher tied the score with an RBI single and then ran all the way home with the go-ahead run as an outfielder misplayed the ball.
“He didn’t stop. He just kept on going,” Campanella said. “Our kids were going nuts. All our guys were on the field. The umpire was going nuts, telling them to get off the field.
“You could see the confidence rising on our side and the letdown on their side, and it kept flowing. It was a fun game.”
It has not been an easy year for FPC, which improved to 10-15 with the win. The Bulldogs lost eight of their first nine games and closed the regular season with three losses.
“We don’t have the best record," Campanella said. “We battled a lot of adversity. We were on the other end a bunch of games where we just kind of imploded, but we came together at an important time.”
Campanella thought Mandarin made a mistake by starting its second- best pitcher, Nathan Webb, and saving its ace, Jordan Martin. Webb had a shutout going entering the seventh and didn’t get much help from his defense in the bizarro inning. But Campanella said he learned the hard way to never look past another team.
“You could see the confidence rising on our side and the letdown on their side, and it kept flowing. It was a fun game.”
ANTHONY CAMPANELLA
“They’re a really good baseball team, and they might have overlooked us,” he said. “They didn’t throw their best guy against us. I made that mistake a long time ago, and I said, ‘I’m never going to do that again. If I’m going to lose, I’m going to lose with my best on the mound.’ You live and learn being a high school coach.”
Campanella has been a head coach for 27 years, 24 at Seabreeze and the past three at FPC. He has celebrated championships and consoled his teams after tough losses. He doesn’t remember being more excited after a win than he was after this one.
The Bulldogs couldn’t celebrate for long, however. The next night, they had to do it all over again, drive back up to Creekside and face Bartram Trail in a district semifinal. The Bears came into the game as the eighth-ranked team in Class 7A.
“We told them, ‘Let’s be happy tonight, but when that sun comes up, we better be locked in or it’s going to be a long day.’” Campanella said.
