Dave Pishkur: Mr. 1000
After all these years, Andrean coach still goes to sleep dreaming about the game
It never gets old for Andrean coach Dave Piskhur.
The winning, the losing, the planning, the anticipation and the timeless routine of reconstructing his baseball team for next season after this season is over.
Pishkur won his 1,000th game, a 12-0 victory over Beecher on May 10.
Sometime, probably in the state tournament, Pishkur will surpass former LaPorte coach Ken Schreiber on the all-time win list in Indiana. Schreiber finished with an 1010-217 record and seven state titles.
If it were realistically possible, the 66-year-old Pishkur would like to win another thousand. He’d be pushing age 100.
If anybody could figure it out, it would be Pishkur.
“Baseball is like a love affair,” he said. “It’s a 365-day process in my brain. I go to bed every night in the season thinking about my lineup for the next day. When the season ends, I think about what I have for next year.”
Pishkur didn’t bring baseball to Andrean, but he made it relevant. He played for Nick Crnkovich at Andrean, graduating in 1971.
It was casual then, fielding grounders and practicing “occasionally,” Pishkur said.
Pishkur played baseball at Purdue Calumet for two seasons before giving it up because he was “just done with it. I wasn’t going anywhere.”
In his first school year at Andrean, which was 1977-1978, Pishkur coached varsity volleyball, JV baseball and freshman basketball.
His first varsity team, led by Dan Dakich, Ray “Buzz” Gough and former Andrean athletic
director Bill Mueller, won the sectional.
In those days, there was no fence. Fans pulled up to the field and parked in their trucks to watch the game.
Pishkur dragged the field with a tire behind his car to even out the infield.
The 59ers have come a long way.
There’s now a fence, a press box and a working tractor.
Pishkur felt the magical pull of baseball in 1979 when he went to a spring clinic run by Schreiber, who lined up a half-dozen speakers who talked about baseball for the day.
Pishkur always loved baseball, but no one had taught him the game.
That’s when his lifelong project officially started.
Some guys go to their basement to build cabinets and tinker with car engines.
Pishkur goes there to game plan.
In 1983, Andrean received its break when LaPorte scheduled the 59ers. One of Pishkur’s biggest thrills was beating Schreiber the first time they played.
It took Pishkur 25 years to win his first state title in 2005. He has won five since. He’s painfully honest and self-critical.
In 2012, when a heavily favored Andrean lost to Griffith in the Plymouth Regional, he called it the “worst game he’d seen his team play in a decade.”
After the death of his mother and the stress of a difficult season, Pishkur took some time off in 1999. He couldn’t stay away, though, heading to the bleachers to watch what he called “with no disrespect, the worst team I’ve coached in 30 years. I had to get away. It was nerves and depression.”
That’s as close as he has come to having a bad time coaching.
Forever the innovator, Pishkur last year started using HitTrax, a computer program that calculates the flight of a ball off the bat.
This year, he added a simulator that throws live balls up to 90 mph to his players.
Next year, he’ll add KVest, which measures the muscle groups players use to hit balls.
Like any good coach, Pishkur is hypercompetitive. It comes from his connection to the game and the constant quest to learn something that could give his team an edge.
He has no plans to retire. He would coach forever if he could.