EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview with Highland baseball head coach Donnie Kline was conducted at the Hoof Hearted Brewery in Marengo. Outside on the back patio, which was up against a pond, woods and loud frogs, it was trivia night, and we sat in an open-air A-frame to chat. This is a deep dive into a coach with over 200 wins, eight league titles and two district championships, in his own words…
Coaching style
“All coaches, you find your niche because there are so many coaching styles, right?” Kline said. “There’s so many ways you can get the job done: Are you the stickler? Are you the Nick Saban? Are you the new age guy? Are you the player’s friend?
“A lot of my coaches growing up were of the yelling, screaming, belittling type. You know, it was OK to be physically flogged back in the day, grab someone by the facemask – I grew up in that era and I hated it.
“The first coach that I really thought that I wanted to be was Doug Rickert. He’s the athletic director at Madison [Comprehensive High School] now. He was my JV coach when I was a sophomore. He just exuded cool. He knew baseball and held you accountable.
“You have to be an insurance guy. The one thing about being a coach is the more hats you can wear, the better off you are. One hat is your strategy, one is personal development. You gotta be a freaking weatherman. You gotta be able to take care of your infield. You’ve got to be a PR guy.
The approach
“When I first started, I’m working them three hours a day and I realized it was a waste of time. And the kids hated being there, and I hated being there. So you start cutting back, and the more you cut back, the better the kids play.
“Our MO from a development standpoint is to run the best practices. We want to be in and out, but it’s got to be precise. I’m not always the best at keeping time, but the other coaches are. I’m pushing for another round, and they push back and say, ‘No.’ It’s good to have different philosophies and I really respect the coaching staff.
“We always say the bayonets have to face the same way. We’re in the trenches. If you have one person facing the wrong way and shooting down the line, we’re going to get hurt, right?
“One of the words we use a lot is alignment. We have to be aligned as a group.
“Coaches are so influential. Good coaches show you how to be a man and how to be a good person. It’s a great responsibility to be a coach and anyone who’s a real coach has to feel that way. Like, every decision you make, if you don’t like a call, am I going to throw my hat and start flipping out, run out there? What does that teach the kids next year?
“But at the end of the day, this is just a way of life. This is a brotherhood. These guys you’ll know forever. These memories. You don’t even know it. Like these are the best times.
“For some kids, when they go home, they don’t have anything like this. He doesn’t have a positive group of guys he can hang out with, or have that role model dude, or have a good message that comes from things. So our rules and things we focus on are trends for life.
“For example, you’re not allowed to blame anybody. You can’t complain, you can’t defend and there are no excuses. Whenever it’s a bad call, it’s an opportunity for you to get better. That umpire is challenging you. Was the pitch more on the ball side – it probably was. But guess what? Him giving you that ball challenged you as a man not to turn around and do one of these things at the umpire. You step up. It’s a challenge for you mentally; we work on things like breathing. So whenever it’s a bad call, you hear, thank you, thank you, thank you.”
Improvements to the game
“Magic wand, what would I like to see changed in high school baseball? Baseball and football to flip – baseball in the fall, and football in the spring. For the best temperatures and weather.
“One thing I don’t like about baseball is how it’s become monetized for the kids. If you’re good, you play travel ball. And then you have to have like five bats and you have to have all the swag. It just doesn’t resonate with me. I literally had two bats my whole life and one of them was used.
NOTE: A complete unopened Upper Deck 1990s box set was brought to the interview so we could go through old cards while we were talking. “Marty Barrett, Boston, yeah. Infielder-type dude. Otis Nixon,” Kline said.
Origin story
“I think I fell in love with baseball as a young person, just the tradition of it. We’d go to Cleveland Guardians games and it was such a special event. It was like a cathedral. Just the smell of peanuts and beer, it was intoxicating. And it was so special.
“The history of baseball was just overwhelming to me. It’s the one game that hasn’t changed. Pretty much baseball is the same game now as it was in 1890. I love the ability to tie into the past.
“I started to watch Field of Dreams, stuff like that, it hit home for me, you know? Baseball was just life. Everywhere you go it was baseball.
“My dad would go to the gas station, come out with baseball cards. He’d just throw you a pack of baseball cards and say, ‘Here ya go.’ And that would keep me locked in for a day.
“You’d get a magazine or when you went to Cedar Point, you’d come out with a batting helmet.
“I think I grew up in an era, because we were very blue-collar growing up, I almost feel like we were like hangers-on from a different era. I didn’t feel like we fit in. Everyone else was doing like modern stuff, we were just camping and taking a baseball glove and playing catch. Everywhere we went, we took a Wiffle ball bat.
“[As a kid] I was always addicted to things like statistics, to the organization of sports. I mean, we were playing Wiffle ball in the yard and I was keeping stats. And we would play like video games and I would be writing numbers down in notebooks.
“Growing up, when we moved to Annfield (Drive, in Madison), and all of a sudden I had cable TV, and I got to watch SportsCenter, and Baseball Tonight would come on. I was addicted. I had sports around 24/7.
“We had some football cards, a pack of basketball cards here and there. But for the most part, baseball was just a different sport. It’s like a way of life.
“What people see as this boring kind of tedious game – it’s like the flow of life. You go freaking months with nothing going on. Then all of a sudden you get a hailstorm, or you’re driving home and a semi-truck goes left to center…
“I’ll never forget my first assistant job, we went out, the head coach was a legend, a 600-win guy, and ordered water,” Kline said. “And he goes, ‘Never drink in public.’ And now I’m the same, just water, it’s about perception, what people see and hear.
“When I was young, I didn’t give up on anything, right, so I just risked everything. Then I went the exact opposite, you know, where I wouldn’t do anything.
Breaking into coaching
“My coaching start– I was an assistant coach for over three years at Gahanna. Then was an assistant for the first year and then the head coach the next year at Central Catholic. Then I started coaching travel ball.”
The trivia question overhead from the PA: “What two-time MVP terrorized opposing pitchers while anchoring the White Sox lineups throughout the 1990s?” asked the MC.
“Oh, Frank Thomas,” Kline said. (ADF: Do you think we’re going to find a Frank Thomas card in this Upper Deck box set?) “If so, it’s meant to be.
“In 2012 and 2013, I was assistant coach at Cardington.
“My kids were at Highland and they heard about me and said, ‘Hey, do you want to come and be an assistant coach for us?’ So I was an assistant at Highland in 2013 and 2014.
“The Highland program was different. Everywhere else was really laid back – when you got to Highland, it was like the Yankees. They’re really serious about baseball. Everything is prim, proper, tucked in.
**** Another Highland teacher approached Donnie to confirm the trivia answers: “Who was the ‘Say Hey kid?’” she asked.
“Willie Mays,” Kline said.
“The White Sox pitcher?” she asked.
“That was a hitter, Frank Thomas, the ‘Big Hurt,’” Kline said. “I’m the king of useless info.”
“[The Highland head coach stepped down at the end of the year and] the AD came to me and asked, ‘Hey, do you want to apply for the head coach’s job?’” Kline said.
“I said, ‘Nope. My son, Wyatt, he’s going to be a junior next year, I don’t want to be involved with that. I am not a Daddy Ball guy.’
“He called a second time, I said, ‘No.’ He called back a third time and said, ‘What if we give you a teaching job?’
“Well, now, you got my interest because it was about a $15,000 pay raise. So I interviewed for the job, and it comes down to me and I won’t say his name, but basically a legend. And they chose me; I don’t know why, but they chose me.
Living up to Highland’s legacy
“We are much more into tradition and accountability than a lot of programs. We do an homage to tradition. Our guys wear knickers.
“There’s been a shift in the way that kids are handled now. And the reality is most adults, at some level, are afraid of kids. Afraid of offending, they’re afraid of not being cool. And so this power balance has shifted to kids.
“When I first started, I was trying to be too cool, to be too young or too energetic. But the kids, they know who you are.
“You’ll hear me say ‘we’ a lot. I’m always happy to be the assist guy; I don’t need to score the goal.
“We won the conference the last seven years in a row, eight in total with 2016. The last four from the MOAC, then there was COVID, and we won in ‘17, ‘18, ‘19.
“We won two district titles in ‘21 and ‘24.
“I don’t know how many times we had 20 wins in a season – you only get 27 games [in a season]. Twenty is like that mark; it’s almost equivalent to going undefeated in football. And we do a lot.
“Our schedule is tough; we don’t play a lot of tomato cans. Our league, the MOAC, is a good league. But our non-league schedule, we’re playing Bishop Hartley, Marysville. Hillsdale’s by far the smallest school on our schedule, but they’re good!
Going through more cards“What about Chip Hale, Terry Mulholland, Gene Larkin, Dave Martinez.
“And the first year, we were talented, it was a good team, we won 20 games, but we didn’t win the league. It was the first time in three or four years we hadn’t won the league. And I was kind of shocked. I was like, wow, we have a good team and I’m a good coach, right? It’s not my fault, right? And it was definitely in part my fault.
“I had Tim Belcher’s kid on my team. I mean, talk about intimidating, like you lose a walk-off, and Tim Belcher could be scowling at you. Major League pitcher, pitched for the Guardians, he still works for the Guards. He graduated from Highland and was the No. 1 overall pick in MLB for the Twins.
“I bet he’s in this stack of baseball cards; let’s find him.
“The first time I drove by his house I thought, that’s a pretty cool retirement center for the old folks. Nope, that’s Tim Belcher’s house. Anyway, he’s actually a really cool dude. Puts a lot of money behind the scenes, but never takes any credit for it, one of those kinds of guys.
“In 2016, we won the league. It was Wyatt’s senior year and I knew a lot of those guys [personally].
“2017 was a step back – we won 15 games. That’s when I really kind of got into understanding how to coach. I went from just being a manager, you know, coming up with some practice plans here and there, to trying to develop a culture.
“The focus is more on, what can we do for these kids? That’s more than just baseball. And we started to focus on all these little things that were barely baseball related, but they were kind of like human development.
“Urban Meyer’s book – have you ever read that? I read that book and it absolutely changed my life. One of my favorite books I’ve ever read. And I know the shine around Meyer is kind of gone, which is totally fine. But it showed what it takes to be successful.
“You’ll see on the back of the guys’ shirts, ‘ATL.’ Above the line.
“There’s a line. And every decision you make is just like a line. Every decision is conscious and it’s either above the line or below the line. You see a little piece of trash on the floor? Pick it up. You know it shouldn’t be there. How hard is it to pick up that little piece of trash? That’s above the line.
“This mentality permeates into everything that you do. And it’s more than baseball. You’re building young men into men.
“We have a little handbook that we give the boys every year that has our core values, like brotherhood. Another one is elite preparation.
“We’ve had kids go to college to play baseball. And we have a rule. Every time you go to college, if you go play college baseball, you need to bring me back a t-shirt and a drill.
[In reference to the current players]
“Jaden’s been a four-year starter for us,” Kline said. “In our program, it’s very difficult to play four years of baseball. You have to have an attitude. You’re a 14-year-old kid and you run out there in front of the 17 year olds like, all right, I’m shortstop. He’s just got that personality. He’s like an alpha male. He is ultra-competitive.
“His summer teammate is Zach Church. Now Zach is the son of my assistant coach, who used to be the head coach. Zach was co-player of the year in the league last year and he’s signed to play at Findlay.
On coaching his kids
“I think coaching your kids is a challenge, right?” Kline said. “If you celebrate their success too much or are too critical, it can come off wrong. Other kids get a coach and they just hear dad’s voice.
“On the ride home we talk about the game, but as soon as you hit the garage door, we don’t talk baseball no matter how pissed off I am.
“Wyatt was all-league and had a pretty good career (and is an assistant on the Highland team).
“Hayden had a really good career; he was first-team All-Ohio. He set the season record for hits in a season. He had 50 hits. His senior year was like a fairy tale. We set all kinds of records as a team and during his last at-bat, at Coldwater in the tournament, he was tied for the school record with Hanson. Hayden lined it up the middle. That’s one of my favorite memories. He’s playing college baseball now.
“We’re 5-1 in conference. We went to Shelby, swept them. Split with Marion Harding the first week.
Great coaching memories
“First, it’s the relationship with the guys,” Kline said. “All of the one-on-one situations. I love to see the development of ballplayers. When you see a young man that barely hangs on or gets cut and comes back and all of a sudden he helps a team win – that’s what high school baseball is all about. That’s what sports are about. For the vast majority of our kids, this is the highest pinnacle of their sporting career.
“This group of kids in 2021 – they just went on a run. They just kept winning.
“I have to backtrack a little bit – at the beginning of the season, we had a coach that was an old [Highland] player, one of my favorite kids, his name was Jett Swetland. Phenomenal athlete. He graduated in 2015, goes and plays college baseball, comes back and asks to help coach?
“I’m like, ‘Heck yes you can help coach.’ He’s coaching for a couple months, goes down south and dies in a car wreck.
“That really hit the boys; they were devastated. They loved him. Right now, our field, his number 32 is everywhere. His number is retired, and we played 32 games that year.
“We win the league, and then we go to the tournament. In Highland’s history, even though we’ve been a very successful program, we’ve only had two district championships before that year.
In the sectional we walk off River Valley in a game we shouldn’t even have won.
“Then we played Bishop Hartley. They were really good. And we beat them after being down early and came back.
“We were hosting these tournament sites, so the crowds were big.
“Then we played in the district final. And we haven’t won a final since like ‘04. We played Lakewood and they were mean. The coach there, Don Thorpe, was the winningest coach in high school history. He’s won like 900 games and this was his last game and we walked him off! 11 innings.The suicide squeeze!
“Pandemonium. People were coming over the walls, it was a party. I got doused with ice water. It was one of the happiest feelings ever. We won a school record 29 games that year out of 32.
