ALL-AREA BASEBALL: Saints' Jernigan named player-of-the-year

By Justin Hayes
Published in Sports on June 26, 2016 1:47 AM

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By JUSTIN HAYES

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DUDLEY -- The weight room at Southern Wayne High School is a smallish box of  bricks on the east side of its sprawling, hemispherical campus. Stationed in the foreground of the 700 wing, it houses archaic discs, bent dumbbells and lofty, teenage dreams.

Inside, just past the threshold, a curious odor fills the air. It's a cross-fit bouquet, equal parts sweat and time served, splashed with a hint of rear-view glory days.

Mostly, it smells like steel.

Signs adorn the abraised block walls, offering coach speak in varying degrees of witty, Lombardi-line format. The mirrors in place aren't for the purpose of your admiration -- they're for your soul.   

And after an abysmal junior season, one in which he pondered life without baseball, it was where Josh Jernigan went to reclaim himself.

By the numbers, his slump was epically brutal.

Base hits, four. Runs batted in, zero.

A batting average of .105.

"I would say I wasn't focused, and had the whole, 'here we go again' mentality," Jernigan said of the season. "I thought too much."

He chased pitches, wild ones.

He took pitches, really good ones. His lack of production at the plate eventually chased him to the mound, where he struggled to locate, manage counts and give his ballclub solid outings.

For a player who flashed prodigious shine as a sophomore, any and all manner of baseball's cruel alter-ego had become his new reflection.

"About halfway through the season... that was the lowest," Jernigan recalled. "You haven't had a hit in forever, can't throw strikes... Coach (Jackson) Massey's sitting you. I had to do something to get better, to progress."

But first, a question.

Why?

If everything about his season -- the o-for-everything outings, the expert naysayers, the battle for his baseball sanity -- was to hold permanent form, why on earth would he volunteer for more?

Jernigan was stuck.

"I really did have that uncomfortable, negative mentality the whole year," he said.

The circuit workout is head coach Massey's personal in-house version of the apocalypse. It's a heavily weighted, stomach-churning testament of one's physical dedication to the red, white and blue.

And the program's particulars --10 sets of 10 physical dilemmas -- include skull crushers, pull-ups, leg-press reps, tricep extensions, assisted lifts, bicep curls and lunges.

Led each week by Jernigan, the Saints worked death's wheel in groups of two. Willing or not, each combatant dialed into a specific higher-order goal per day -- often leading to a rendevous with the lullaby bucket.

"It's probably one of the toughest things I've ever done," Jernigan noted. "You push your body to a point you think you couldn't reach. Every day, people are throwing up."

But by degrees, also getting better.  

Apart from Massey's weight room folly, the lost boy also did station work on a hitting tee. Starting from the ground floor, Jernigan did the humbling work of retooling his entire approach to hitting -- back side first, one lonely pearl at a time.  

But that was only half the reincarnation.  

Jernigan also endured a mound makeover, finding reconstructive solace in another of Massey's offseason pets -- a velocity program.  

Week by week, toss by toss and bullpen by bullpen, the senior-to-be equipped his fastball with an additional six miles per hour. In Massey's opinion, the jump was vital to Jernigan escaping his personal house of horrors.

"I think he topped out at 82 (this year)," the coach said. "And 82 can get outs. (It just)  upped his concentration and his confidence every time he went out."

At winter's end, Jernigan was remade. All that remained was to face a live battery of opponents.

•

April 6, 2016.

Losers of two straight and in the throws of perhaps its toughest calendar stretch of the spring, Southern entertained neighboring foe Greene Central.

And Jernigan, the kid who surrendered himself to find himself, stole away with every bit of luster on the night's marquee.

Trailing 10-7 in the fifth inning, the senior closed the Rams' lead to a deuce with a merciless solo shot over the fence in left field. An inning later and trailing still, he dug in again, this time torching the visitors for a three-run smoke show to the same spot.  Both blasts -- the final salvos of an absurd 4-for-4, six-RBI effort -- ironically didn't render him an instant hero of a fabled, historic comeback. In fact, some considered Jernigan's night to be an odd capture of lightning in a bottle.

But to him, it was everything.

The outing was an authoritative, down-the-line salute with godspeed to the guy he used to be -- a backside-hitting, tee-committed shadow.

Resurrection complete.

"That (Greene Central) game made me feel like all the hard work I put in during the fall and winter -- lifting, throwing and hitting -- kind of clicked and fell into place, " he said. 

For Massey, who watched his senior hit .353 and account for nearly 25 percent of Southern Wayne's offensive production this season, the Greene Central shellacking still burns impeccably bright.  

""Some people don't have that (kind of night) in a career," he said.

Indeed.

The performance helped define a proper sendoff for Jernigan -- who was minted as the 2016 News-Argus All-Area Baseball-Player-of-the-Year.  

"His struggle was never because he didn't prepare himself," Massey noted. "(And) the biggest thing to take away from Josh's story... you can't dwell on the negative stuff -- if you do, it will kill you."

Not a chance.

It only made Jernigan stronger.