The one year with the York baseball program will be the only year for head coach John Walters.

Walters now will take over as the baseball coach at Glenbard East next season. His final game at York was a 7-1 loss to Wheaton Warrenville South in a regional semifinal May 28 in Hoffman Estates.

“It was a great year, I had great kids to work with and the kids made it fun,” said Walters, who moved to the Elmhurst school from West Chicago last offseason. “Hopefully the staff made the high school experience, especially for the seniors because this was their last go round, as exciting.
“But I’m looking forward to another challenge. It’s difficult to go into a new place and implement your system. It’s not an easy thing to go, but I’m going to go in and give it my best shot.”

For a vast majority of the season, the York baseball team was either winning games or in a position to pull out a victory.

Neither was the case in the Dukes’ final game of the 2009 campaign.

York was limited to just three hits and saw its season come to a close against Wheaton South.

“It was a rough way to end, but like we told the kids, of all the 4A schools that compete in the playoffs only one of them gets to finish with a win,” Walters said. “It definitely ended a little more premature than we had hoped for, but I don’t want that to take away from what we did.”

The Dukes were not able to duplicate another 20-win season, but were solid nonetheless. They finished with an 18-14 overall record and went 11-7 in the West Suburban Silver, which was good enough for second place.

“There were opportunities out there all year long and some of them were successful and some of them were not,” Walters said. “What I liked is that in 90-percent of our games we either won or had an opportunity to win. The guys worked hard all year to put us in a position to be successful.”

In all, the Dukes will lose 11 seniors, including all-conference catcher Andrew Johnson (.362 average, 27 RBIs), and all-conference pitcher Shay Wagner (3-1, 0.66 ERA). Starting shortstop Tom Judge, outfielder Jeff Nowak and pitcher Dan Murphy (5-1) were three other top senior contributors.

The cupboard, though, is not empty as 11 players will be back.

On the mound, juniors Steve Adkins (5-3, 2.66 ERA), Kevin Flood (3-0, 2.39 ERA), Matt Pisani (two saves) and John Mellone made big contributions.

Offensively, juniors Steve Brogan (.382 avgerage, 21 RBIs), Ray Yong (.370, 16 doubles), Adkins (.348, 22 RBIs), Bobby Fisher (.337) and Jimmy Dickert (.280, 24 RBIs) were among the team leaders in hitting.