10 Edison baseball seniors play on after graduation

MILAN TWP. — Edison had to move its graduation rehearsal back a day. The baseball team was still playing. "Our principal was like, I want the 10 seniors that made us move graduation rehearsal to stand up," Xander Danner said. "We all stood up and got a giant round of applause, so that was cool." Those 10 seniors graduated a day after the rescheduled Saturday rehearsal, but they aren't quite done with high school yet. The Chargers (23-8) are still alive in the postseason, with a state semifinal game up next Thursday night in Akron against Roger Bacon (19-7) from Cincinnati. "It's kind of weird," Keegan Smith said. "It makes it feel a bit surreal that we're still playing even after we graduated. It's just like, oh you're done with high school, but we're still playing. It's pretty cool. I wish we could do it more often." The 10 seniors who have extended their high school careers to this final week are Danner, Brady Barker, Hayden Fox, Ben Hahn, Bryce Michaelis, Joey Pennell, Thomas Simon, Cameron Smith, Keegan Smith and Noah Smith. They've played baseball together for years, either as members of the same travel team or in Edison's local youth league. They went to school together even longer, growing up in the Edison Local Schools. And now it all comes down to this. No more classes or tests. Caps and gowns already worn and taken off. Just a final week of baseball that the Chargers hope is filled with two games, and maybe two wins. "It's just fun," Fox said. "I get to come out with my best friends every day and play baseball. Can't really beat that, especially once you've graduated." While this story has been written over many years, it starts in many ways a bit more than a year ago. Edison's baseball team was taking on Archbold in a regional semifinal in Elida. The game wouldn't end. Tied after the regulation seven innings. Tied after eight, and after nine, and after 10. Only in the 11th did Archbold pull off a 3-2 victory. It wasn't how Edison would've drawn up its season's conclusion. But with Luke Bissell the only senior starter in that group, the large batch of returners had learned a lot about themselves. "The kids just saw how talented they were compared to everybody else and what it would take to get back to that point," Edison coach Sean Hoover said. "You see the (DJ) Newman kid from Archbold, he's really good, and they're like wow, we just went toe-to-toe with that kid." Barker said the close calls last year, both in the SBC Bay Division and the regional, gave Edison a checklist for this time around. They took care of the Bay first, dropping just a lone game to Huron for a 9-1 league mark. Then the postseason came around and the veteran Edison bunch displayed what it had learned. The Chargers started with a 13-1 win over Western Reserve for a 13th consecutive sectional championship. Then came a massive comeback in an 8-6 win over Wynford, requiring seven runs in the bottom of the sixth inning. Edison shut out Margaretta 4-0 for a repeat district championship, then pushed past its regional demons with an extra-innings walk-off win over Fredericktown back in Elida. Michaelis put the ball in play with Barker on third representing the winning run. After a bobble at first, the senior classmates set off a Chargers celebration. "That group has been good at pretty much everything they've gone through and done here," Hoover said. "They get along great, which is a big thing, too. We've had a pretty big varsity roster the last couple years, taking a lot of guys to a lot of games. That means some guys are keeping charts and cheering and getting in sparingly at times. They've all handled that great." Winning that regional semifinal ensured graduation rehearsal would be pushed back from Friday to Saturday. But Edison still had to beat Ottawa Hills in the regional final to play on after graduation. Thanks to big contributions in part from juniors Ben Bates, Dominic Dymond and Hayden Fry, Edison's seniors got that privilege. "It's been something special getting this far, first team to do it in school history," Cameron Smith said. "We're just a great group of guys coming here to do this. It's just an amazing experience." The 10 Chargers seniors sat in a crowded gymnasium Sunday afternoon, the Thunderdome packed to the brim on both sets of bleachers and pretty hot, Danner said. No one tripped, Danner added, and Cameron Smith described the ceremony as normal. Much weirder was what happened Monday, the day after they graduated. Barker pulled his red sedan into a rather empty gravel parking lot behind the school. Simon followed in his white truck, younger brother Blake in the passenger seat. Soon, all the seniors and their teammates had arrived. Graduation was in the past. But high school baseball is still the present, at least for a few more days. The Chargers wouldn't have it any other way. "It feels kind of weird showing up back to the school," Simon said. "You thought after graduation we'd be done. But there's no other reason we'd want to be here than playing in state. Should be a good week."