It comes with every passing of the New Year and the changes in the seasons. For as long as fans can remember, late February has been a time when professional baseball teams report for spring training in Florida’s Grapefruit League. It’s a time when the games start anew and everybody’s team is again back in the hunt for a pennant.
For Scott Grove, it’s also a nostalgic time of year. One that takes him back to the days of staring down batters from a pitcher’s mound, and the lasting friendships forged with teammates during a month spent competing for roster spots.
It’s still his favorite time of year. Only by now his season has already begun as head baseball coach at Timber Creek High School. Since multiple shoulder surgeries forced his minor league baseball career to end in 1994, Grove has gone on to earn a degree at UCF and amass more than 200 wins as a coach at the prep level.
Counted among his accomplishments is preparing kids for life after high school and guiding Colonial High School to a state runner-up finish in 2000. Despite watching from afar as his peers went on to win World Series rings (with the Toronto Blue Jays organization in 1993) while he bussed from field to field, he’ll tell you that baseball has been good to him.
After all, if it were not for baseball, he may not have met his soonto- be wife while in Florida for spring training. But that doesn’t mean the game was easy to leave behind after bouncing between farm teams and dedicating his young life to baseball. “At first it was hard because athletics was my whole life,” he said of being forced to throw in the towel.
“And when you play as many years as I did, the first couple springs that came around afterwards made me realize I had to get back in the game somehow.” And so that’s what he did. Even without the Field of Dreams cliche that never came to be, he is using what he went through to help better prepare the student-athletes he coaches who may find themselves in similar circumstances.
“With the experiences that I had, I want to give something back to [the players] because it was such a great thing for me,” Grove said. “And actually baseball is the reason I’m teaching and coaching now. Baseball gave me a ton of different opportunities.” Grove was drafted out of high school as a pitcher in the 22nd round of the 1987 amateur draft by the Atlanta Braves.
He then passed up a scholarship to play quarterback at the University of Colorado to instead chase down the ever-elusive dream of landing in the big leagues. He spent spring training with the Braves in West Palm Beach and with the Toronto Blue Jays in Clearwater, while also doing a stint in Arizona with the Milwaukee Brewers’ organization.
“Being from Colorado, where you’re coming out of a snowstorm and coming down to Florida for spring training, that was the biggest thing I looked forward to,” he said. But those were also nerve-racking times, when consistency was key and jobs were on the line. “It could be your time to shine,” he said of spring training.
“Or, if you don’t do real well, you have a month before you could be getting your walking papers.” For many, like Grove, who pay their dues in the minor league systems of Major League Baseball’s elite, spring training is all about the opportunity to impress coaches. But it’s also about the friendships forged such as the ones he still carries with him today.
Those are the hidden blessings behind the damp mornings and cool Florida evenings. That, and a fresh start, which came with the belief that each March just might be the beginning of better days to come.
