William Schmidt on playing with top team in America: 'It was a lot easier to get better'
Yahoo Sports senior MLB analysts Jake Mintz and Jordan Shusterman are joined by the LSU commit to discuss what it was like to be part of one of the best high school teams in the country. Subscribe to the “Baseball Bar-B-Cast” podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.
Video Transcript
When you're around a high school program that has so much talent.
How does that impact your day to day?
I understand it's really your only understanding of high school baseball, right?
You didn't ever played mediocre high school baseball, but being around that type of en of environment, like, what did that do for you as a player?
I mean, to be the best, like you gotta be around the best.
So, like, I'd say, like being the best high school team in the country, like, I don't know, it was a lot easier to get better at baseball.
Like everyone on the team really enjoyed doing it.
There wasn't really anybody that brought the team down in any sort of way.
Um Just like a lot of good team chemistry.
Uh The senior class was super tight from like the previous years and like, what had happened during those seasons?
So, like, ultimately, I'd say like everything just happened to click at the right time in the right spot and this team just, it was amazing.
Did you, did you feel pressure?
Like, I mean, that's the kind of thing where it's a unique experience to have a high school team that is nationally ranked, there's only so many players that are gonna have that opportunity and especially in that situation, probably going out there expecting to literally win every single game.
I don't know how many games you lost a year.
222.
Right.
And I'm sure for those games, I, I don't know if you want to talk about this, but I'm curious like what happens in those situations?
I mean, I'm sure that's fun.
You have all these amazing players.
Was that challenging at times to, to be like, oh, no, we're expected to win every single game.
We're expected to win the state championship and all those things.
Yeah.
Uh, but I, I would say our team was really good at using that as like fuel instead of like playing, uh, like, really, like, um, shy, I guess, uh, like our two losses, we just ran into a good arm.
Like that's all, that's all that happened.
Like, can't win, can't win them all, I guess.
Uh, but like, during the year, we knew that we had a chance at it.
We knew we had like a super tough schedule and our coach, like, preached us about like, we're just get like, we don't care how many games we lose.
We just want to win a state championship and we know like, if we just go day by day that everything will take care of itself