Gold Turns Silver: 25 years later, Boyertown state champ team recalls magical run

It was a championship team for the ages.

Or for at least a quarter-century.

While Boyertown High’s current baseball team is inspiring the region with its drive for a Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association (PIAA) Class AAAA title, another team in the storied program is celebrating a milestone of a similar achievement. The school’s 1991 squad won a state title that spring, the last time in program history it boasted such an accomplishment.

Click here for the preview on Thursday’s PIAA-AAAA Championship between Boyertown and Plum.

Those Bears — led by manager Ron Jameson and current head coach Todd Moyer, an assistant at the time — capped a 25-2 season with a monumental come-from-behind win over North Allegheny in the state title game Friday, June 14, at Shippensburg University. Trailing 4-1 when it came to bat in the bottom of the seventh inning, Boyertown scored three times to send the game into extra innings. It then got the winning run in the eighth to secure the program’s second Pennsylvania championship in a decade.

“It was a special year … a great team, a great bunch of guys,” Steve Mest, the Bears’ junior shortstop that year, said. “It ranked up there in my baseball memories.”

The 1991 Boyertown squad was one built years earlier. Many of the players were teammates starting at the Little League level, competing on tournament teams and in both Junior and Senior American Legion baseball.

“We grew up together, from Little League through,” Mest noted. “We had a great group of guys. We knew each other well. We were so well-prepared growing up. We grew up playing ball.”

A number of the players had experienced a state championship as members of the Boyertown Bear-Cubs Junior Legion team, headed at the time by Bob Houck. During the 1991 post-season, the Bears preceded their state run off an 8-4 loss to Chambersburg in the District 3-AAA title game.

“I remember talking to guys halfway through the (district) game. We didn’t feel it,” Josh Hartline, a junior who played center field and served as designated hitter, recalled. “Our emotion level was down. We didn’t have our ‘A’ game.”

They turned that around in a hurry, topping West Chester East (4-3), Liberty (6-2) and Neshaminy (3-1) to meet a North Allegheny team with considerable talent. The Tigers had a 1-2 pitching punch of Scott Schroeffel (9-1) and Lee Hendrick (8-1), along with the hot bats of shortstop Paul Faila (.415), right-fielder Kevin Rock (.338) and second baseman Mike McKnight (.336).

Boyertown countered with its own duo of hard-throwing pitchers — senior Matt Spade (11-1) and junior Jed Johnson (8-0) — and hot bats of third-baseman Jason Benyo (.417), left-fielder David Dykie (.407) and Mest (.400).

“Through the run, we were always loose,” Mest noted. “We were prepared. We had fun and were confident we could win every game.”

North Allegheny put the Bears down early, taking respective 2-0 and 3-1 leads in the second and third innings. They added another in the fifth to go up 4-1 — that score remaining unchanged into the bottom of the seventh.

Boyertown, facing a loss with two out and nobody on base at that juncture, responded in a big way. Derek Witman hit a double, and junior catcher Brandon Mohr followed with another two-bagger to score Witman.

Hartline followed by reaching base off a bunt single, coming home off Mest’s RBI single up middle 4-3. A wild pitch to Jake Brensinger score Hartline, making it 4-4 and giving the Bears new life.

“We never gave up,” Mest said. “That’s the breed of team we were. To win against us, you’d have to get the last out on us.”

“I went into the dugout knowing we had the game won,” Hartline added. “The momentum shift was huge.”

In the eighth, Benyo singled, Matt Spade hit safely and Dykie was walked intentionally to load the bases. Johnson then drew a walk off Schroeffel, who had taken over for Hendrick in the fifth, for the winning run.

“It was one of those games that goes in the story book tale,” Mest recalled. “It was a hard-fought game.”

“Whoever they had pitching kept us off balance,” Mohr, who threw out a North Allegheny runner trying to steal second base, added. “But we played the game like that, with a lot of confidence.”

Confidence was a large part of the mindset under which Boyertown operated that spring. The players came out to play like a very well-oiled machine, fine-tuned in the game’s skills and virtually of one mind.

“It was a real close group of guys, not a lot of high-school varsity experience,” Jake Brensinger, a senior who played second base, said. “Ninety percent of guys played together Little League through high school.”

“We ran through Berks and county,” Mohr added. “As a whole, we were pretty confident. We had pitching, hitting and defense. We did it all as a team.”

A nice complement was the way Jameson, with Moyer and Barry Irey as his assistants, directed the players in their championship season.

“Ron was a great guy,” Mohr recalled. “He never coached us that much. We worked to fine-tune our game.”

“Ron was very mild-mannered, a players’ manager,” Brensinger added. “He never lost his cool.”

He did, however, admit to feeling the Bears weren’t going to leave Shippensburg with the championship trophy.

“I made up my mind we lost it in the fifth inning,” Jameson said after the title game. “But the kids never gave up. They kept hustling. They wanted it … they wanted the championship, and it couldn’t have been any clearer than in that seventh (inning).

“To come back like that, well they deserve everything they get. They deserve all the credit in the world.”

The Boyertown lineup that day showed Mest leading off, followed by Brensinger, Benyo, Spade (first base), Dykie, Johnson, Witman, Mohr, Hartline and Chris Hurter (center field). Troy Moll and Dave Moser also got the call to pinch-run during the game.

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Many of the players from Boyertown’s 1991 squad continued in baseball at various levels following that championship season.

Brensinger played two-year stints at Penn State-Berks and Kutztown University, Mohr received scholarships to East Carolina and Marshall universities — while contending with elbow surgery his junior year.

Mest went on to Georgia Southern and Shippensburg universities, played in the College World Series as a junior and did a stint with the independent-league Newark Bears. And Hartline played ball at the University of Pittsburgh and Gabelsville in adult baseball’s Tri-County League, later coaching with the Bear-Cubs, Owen J. Roberts and Pope John Paul II.

“That was probably one of the most talented group of guys to come through, with all the years of great teams,” Mest noted.

“It was a great group of guys, all business,” Brensinger added. “Everyone hated to lose.”

For other players from the ‘91 team, winning the state title ranks among the best memories of their baseball careers.

“The memory, even though it’s been 25 years, I’ll never forget,” Brensinger said. “The friends, and the work they put in. It’s something I’ll never forget. We took the season as far as we could.”

Mohr, whose uncle Ivan Snyder played on the high school’s 1981 championship squad, called the ‘91 unit “the best (team) I played on, high school or American Legion.”

And Hartline, in his current capacity as head coach at Pope John Paul II, uses the example of Boyertown’s last state-championship crew as a motivating point for his high-school players.

“I tell them ‘Don’t ever give up on a game,’” he said. “I tell them you’re never out of a game unless you feel you’re out of a game.”