After two back-to-back trips to the Class A semifinals, Harrison’s baseball team has been on a roll in recent years. And although the Huskies’ season ended on May 24 with a 6-2 loss to eventual Section I runner-up Nyack, head coach Marco DiRuocco is confident that his squad will come into next year with a lot to prove, and with an appearance in the title game in their sights.
Harrison finished the 2017 campaign with a 13-9-1 record and emerged victorious in two playoff games before seeing their hopes for a Class A title dashed in the semifinals. According to DiRuocco, although he expected the team to be competitive this year, the overall product turned out to be a pleasant surprise.
“It was a really impressive year,” he said. “I knew we had talent and would have a decent year, but if you told me early on that we would have this kind of success, I don’t know if I would have expected it.”
Especially considering the Huskies came into the season without two senior All-State hurlers that pitched the team to its solid finish in 2016, DiRuocco said that the ability of his team to find contributions from other players—including senior brothers Mike and Matt Hendler, who combined to go 9-4 on the year—rested on the overall depth and strength of the program from the youth level on up.
“When you can’t recruit, and you are just dependent on the kids you have in the program, you are only going to be successful when the kids are sold on the process,” the head coach said. “We had great senior leadership, great role models for these juniors, but the thing for us was that everybody bought in, everybody embraced their roles.”
In order to sustain the program’s success, he added, the Huskies will need its rising upperclassmen to continue to promote that mindset.
Although the Huskies will graduate the Hendler twins, DiRuocco is confident that he has enough capable arms returning to once again compete in the toughest league in Section I. Scotty Lobel, Jack Woolf and Luke McCarthy all logged important innings for the squad this year and should return another year older and stronger in 2018.
Offensively, Harrison will look for the continued emergence of players like junior Alex Cipriano, who hit .371 this season, and Mike Arlotta, who hit a team-high five home runs, to provide some much-needed firepower.
“What Mike [Arlotta] did this year, hitting five home runs, that hasn’t been done in this program for a while,” DiRuocco said. “At least in the 12 years that I have been here.”
But ultimately, the coach added, the key to continuing to play at a high level is simply maintaining a teamwide desire to improve.
“We don’t know what is going to happen or how guys are going to develop; roles change, positions change and a lot can happen,” he said. “But no matter what happens, everyone needs to be on board. This year, everyone was on board and you could see the impact that it had on the team, and that is why we flourished.”
