SENIOR WEEKS: Unionville’s Schilling knows football lessons will pay off in college baseball

The Unionville football team has had a recent history of success under head coach Pat Clark, and the 2019 season was no different.

Unionville advanced to the second round of the District 1 Class 5A playoffs before losing to Cheltenham, which went on to capture the District 1 championship. One of the most important Indians on this year’s Unionville team was rugged running back Connor Schilling, who was instrumental in both the Indians’ run game and able to catch any pass coming out of the backfield.

Now, Schilling, a hard-hitting outfielder for coach Mike Magee’s baseball team, which had high hopes of contending in the Ches-Mont League American Division, has to handle the rest of his senior year from home, with the baseball season cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic.

“I mean, you try hard to be patient for the season to start,” Schilling said. “But, it was getting real hard to be optimistic, and then we heard that the season was cancelled. It was a big letdown. It is my senior year and I want to be out there with my fellow seniors and I also have a lot of friends that this was going to be their first year playing varsity baseball, and I was looking forward to being on the team with them and seeing what we could do as a team. We wanted to compete for the Ches-Mont American Division and make the district playoffs, and I thought we had a real good chance of doing both of those things.”

Schilling, who will attend Eastern University next fall to play baseball, said his time playing football at Unionville has taught him to come to grips with a sport like baseball, where if you fail seven out of 10 times at the plate, you are still considered a success.

“Football taught me a lot of things,” Schilling said. “I mean, you fail a lot in baseball and playing football taught me to bounce back from adversity and keep grinding and giving it your best shot every time you play. Football teaches you to keep going when times are tough and that helps in a sport like baseball, where you fail a lot. You are doing really well if you succeed three out of 10 times you are up at bat. You have to keep plugging and football really teaches you to keep going when things looked tough.

“And I really wanted to play baseball in college and Eastern is a place that I can play and it is close to home,” Schilling said. “I really liked the coaching staff and I am really looking forward to going there. I know I made the right choice.”