Cherry Hill Baseball Team Captures Unlikely State Championship

CHERRY HILL, NJ — The Cherry Hill American Little League accomplished something it literally couldn’t have done four years ago.

The Cherry Hill American Little League Senior all-star team captured the state championship this year. The accomplishment is remarkable given that the little league didn’t even have a senior division four years ago. This year, it had five teams.

Those teams came together to form an all-star team under the guidance of three coaches with no previous district coaching experience. Cherry Hill High School West graduates Mark Hutchinson, Nick Kleftogiannis and Chandler Dunoff were tasked with selecting the positional players, pitchers and alternates. They were also on the hook to train and coach a group of players that despite being from the same town, had largely not played together.

“The amount of work that went into putting the correct mix of players and personalities together in the correct positions with a sound and understandable game strategy within a 30-day window is beyond remarkable,” Cherry Hill Little League Board Member Scott Burnham said. “It would be remiss to exclude the fact that these three young men may not have been fully onboard at the onset. To paraphrase one of the coaches, ‘We were asked to coach without an option to say no.’”

The coaches met 2-3 times a week for practices, and daily for strategy and planning. They hosted Zoom meetings with local coaches more senior in experience, and they called parent coaches from the parking lots to throw batting practices, so they could run more active practice sessions.

More than 40 Senior Division players tried out for the Cherry Hill District Tournament team. Out of that group, 16 players and three alternates were chosen.

The team’s lack of experience showed in its first sectional game, in West Deptford. In that first game, Cherry Hill gave up six runs. They found their chemistry quickly, however, and never gave up that many runs again. For the remainder of the sectional and state tournaments they surrendered a grand total of three runs.

Although the offense was solid from Game 1 through the State Championship finals, scoring 30 runs over four games, it was their pitching and defense that set them apart.

Trent Doughty, 15, was the starting pitcher in both the sectional and state finals, and 15-year-old closer Kevin Rorke finished each of those games without surrendering a run. Jaxon Casdia started the first games of both the sectional and state tournaments and pitched a complete, 10 strike-out shutout in Game 1 of the state tournament against Manchester.

There were more defensively remarkable plays than one could count, and Cherry Hill rarely allowed another team to touch the plate. Some highlights:

• The error-free, remarkably solid play of starting third baseman Benny Garino;
• The stolen opposite field line drive that turned into a double up in the bottom of the seventh of the state final by Kori Williams;
• The defensive walls of Josh Janove and Joe Minessale behind the plate;
• Shortstop, second and center were shut-down solid;
• Ryan Lafferty, Zach Stein and David Kursman made up the middle for virtually the entire tournament run;
• Solid middle pitching contributions by Paddy Dougherty and Jack Dugan were key; and
• The outfield corners, played relentlessly by Jimmy Hutchinson, Kevin Rorke and Leo Orefici were “no-fly” zones.

The fans came through, too, and it was more than just the players’ families. The third base side of Leiter Field in Bayville, which hosted the state championship tournament, was a wave of Cherry Hill fans.

“Supportive and prideful from Game 1 on, this state championship was a town wide event, long overdue for the Senior Division but in line with a standing tradition of Cherry Hill baseball success,” Burnham said.