The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Middletown’s Highsmith powering up
MIDDLETOWN — In the sweltering heat of a weekend morning at Snow School, Dominique Highsmith sprayed softballs all over the Snow School diamond. Into the left-field corner, to straightway center and into the gaps, with several shots clearing the fence.
Highsmith’s father was focused on putting pitches in her wheelhouse and didn’t say much, but the cuts would have made Bo Jackson proud.
Good hitters — softball or baseball, regardless of level of play — put in the hours to perfect the mechanics of their swing. Highsmith is trying to do just that now that she is an NCAA Division I athlete at Central Connecticut State.
The expectations have changed since her playing days at Middletown High, where Highsmith could hit a pitch to any field depending on what the situation called for. Without using the term “launch angle,” she made it clear that her coaches at Central want her to hit for power.
“All of last fall I was learning the different swing that they wanted us to have there, (which is) elevate, hit the ball to the fence,” she said. “I’ve always been a line drive, ground ball, gap hitter. But I really got the hang of it after the start of the spring semester. I came back from winter break just very powerful.
“Even coach Pat (Central hitting coach Pat Holden) said I was hitting the ball harder than I ever had. Our weightlifting program was intense over the winter and I think I caught his eye there.”
When the Blue Devils’ regular season began in February at an invitational in Nashville, coach Breanne Gleason wrote the first baseman into the clean-up hole three times in four games.
“It was a very exciting time,” Highsmith said. “I loved every second of it, from traveling in the airport with team, to getting there, to our first warmup. It wasn’t like I was shaking, but I was overly excited. I’m so grateful for the opportunity I have and couldn’t ask for anything better.”
And then, without much of a warning, the coronavirus pandemic killed the season.
Highsmith’s first year at the Division I level lasted just 12 at
bats, and she did not get that coveted first career hit.
“I’m not going to make excuses for myself,” she said. “I definitely put a little pressure on myself. I was over-excited to be there. I just was swinging at pitches I wouldn’t normally swing at. If I kept going, I would have figured it out. There is a lot more attention to detail with college pitching, sharper movements and a lot of upward movements now, which we really didn’t see growing up. That took some getting used to.”
A silver lining to the season’s cancellation: Highsmith gets an extra year of eligibility from the NCAA, since barely a fraction of the season was played.
“For me it didn’t go as well as I had planned, but once I warmed up to this level and got used to this level, I felt I definitely would have done very well,” she said. “I wasn’t really a deer in headlights, it was just like a new experience. I was very excited to get out there and play.”
Central lost three of the four games in Nashville.
“I’m very confident we would have figured it out if we kept playing,” Highsmith said.
Highsmith spent her varsity years at Middletown High and most of her travel team years at either shortstop or third base. Central’s starters on the left side of the infield were entrenched, and second baseman Kaitlin Paterson of Southington was a fifth-year player.
The opportunity at first base came about when a player transferred out of the program, Highsmith said.
“First base was definitely a new experience for me,” she said. “As a shortstop I know which balls are mine and which aren’t, so I had to used to the distance between first and second base. But having a player like Kaitlin at second base helped me out so much. I got very comfortable there.”
Highsmith’s summer has been spent playing for the
U23 Eliminators, who play on a tournament circuit plus exhibition games against the Junior Brakettes at the Stratford team’s DeLuca Field in Stratford.
Beyond competing with the Eliminators, Highsmith’s second fall at Central is not yet settled. She said she expects to have a combination of in-person and virtual classes, but she does not yet know if she will live on campus. Because of the pandemic, the softball program’s fall itinerary is TBD, as uncomfortable a scenario as when her world stopped in March.
“It was very different going from constantly being on the move with classes, workouts, practice, study hall, to just coming home and having nothing to do,” she said. “It’s not like I could go work out, go lift or go hit. The fields were closed, gyms were closed, everything was closed. Everything I had as a release point for my pent-up anger, I didn’t have. It was a tough first few weeks being home. I didn’t know how to handle it.”
Over the weekend, Highsmith was in her element, hitting sizzling line drives whenever her dad’s pitches found the zone.
“Now that I’ve spent nine months on this swing, I’m really excited to go back and play — if we get to go back and play,” she said.
REMEMBERING JACK
Farmington High athletic director Jack Phelan’s lasting connection to Middlesex County basketball is his successful recruitment of future NBA All-Star Vin Baker out of Old Saybrook High in 1988.
Phelan, who died unexpectedly on July 20 at age 66, was a big-time college hoops player at St. Francis (Pa.). He was selected by Golden State as the sixthto-last pick in the 1977 NBA draft (No. 126 overall; the NBA draft had six rounds in those days) but never made it to the pros.
Instead, he went into coaching. He was an assistant first at Niagara, then at St. Francis and finally at Fairfield before getting his one-and-only head coaching
gig at Hartford.
There, he landed the sought-after, 6-foot-11 Baker and coached him through his junior season. Phelan stepped down after the ’92 season, while Baker finished out his four years with the Hawks in ’93 and was the eighth overall pick by the Milwaukee Bucks in that summer’s draft.
I introduced myself (again, 30 years later) to Phelan in late October of last year, after Middletown beat Farmington in football on his turf. We shared an acquaintance, which was my way in after catching up to him in the parking lot, and those few minutes were enough to know he was as billed for so long — true gentleman, a pro’s pro and a champion of his school and its studentathletes.
Middletown football coach Sal Morello, who spends his winters assisting the Cromwell girls basketball program, had a good story that showed how Phelan felt about Farmington athletics.
“Jack was a class act, the nicest human being,” Morello said the other day. “He was a real people person and that’s how you should be when you have that job.
“I remember being at the girls state championship game with Cromwell in 2019 at Mohegan. Before our game, the Farmington boys were playing in the final (and won the D-III title, 55-45 over Amistad). There’s Jack, in the Farmington student section, in the middle, front row. I waved to him. He had a white shirt on, just like all of the kids did, and was cheering with them.”
R.I.P Jack Phelan.
THIS AND THAT
** Next Monday is a big day for fall high school sports. The hope is the CIAC provides specifics of what the season will look like. We already know that no fall sport will begin on time. I will proffer that some season is better than no season at all, so I like what New York decided: late start to the regular season and no sectionals or state championships.
** On Friday at 2 p.m., Middletown will hold a dedication ceremony at Crystal Lake to celebrate the renovations at Ron McCutcheon Park, which include a new and expansive playground, as well as the public facility named for educator Lowry Wilderman.
** The Packers’ Tim Boyle won the backup job to Aaron Rodgers out of training camp last year. This week, he’s back to battling for the role against the formidable Jordan Love, taken by Green Bay in the first round of this year’s draft. The competition last summer was fun to watch (not sure Boyle would agree with the choice of words) and this year should be no different.
** The Shoreline Conference has produced a Division I softball talent in left-hander Addy Bullis, who recently signed a national letter of intent to play for Dayton, of the Atlantic 10 Conference. In her junior season at Valley, Bullis was 21-2 with a 0.75 ERA and six shutouts.
** Could the bottomfeeding Orioles contend over 60 games now that MLB’s playoff field has doubled to 16 teams? Stranger things have happened. I like the young Baltimore lineup. The pitching, not so much. The O’s took two of three from Boston over the weekend. That’s a winning start in anyone’s book.
** Meanwhile, a friend checked in to declare the Red Sox’s season “a bust” and the pitching staff barely Double-A caliber. It looks highly doubtful that Eduardo Rodriguez will be available this season, leaving Nathan Eovaldi and a crew of who-are-those-guys hoping that the club can score at least 10 runs a game to have a chance to win night to night.
** Middletown’s Joseph Aresco died recently at age 86. Joe and his wife, Rose, owned Giuseppe’s Pizza on the corner of Church and Hotchkiss for many years, and many people will back me up when I say the snowball pizza was heavenly. R.I.P. Mr. Aresco.