Middleboro mourns loss of longtime baseball coach Bill Lawrence

The local baseball community mourned the loss of longtime Middleboro coach Bill Lawrence, who died Monday at the age of 53 following a long battle with cancer.

Lawrence was a fixture of success at the helm of the Sachems from 1998-2018, which earned him a great deal of respect amongst his players and fellow coaches. Lawrence never once experienced a losing season and totaled 327 career wins to go along with two state championships.

“If you say Billy Lawrence, it’s synonymous with Middleboro baseball,” said Whitman-Hanson baseball coach Pat Cronin, who faced Lawrence for a number of years while coaching at East Bridgewater. “If you’re going to have somebody represent a town and a program, you couldn’t have a better person do it, that’s for sure.”

Lawrence graduated from Middleboro in 1984 and on the diamond that year he helped the Sachems to their first South Shore League Large Division title under Mike Perry.

Lawrence returned to Middleboro in the mid-1990s, this time as a sub-varsity coach on Perry’s staff. He worked his way up the coaching ladder and was an assistant on Middleboro’s 1997 state championship team. Lawrence took the reins from Perry the following year and Perry couldn’t have envisioned a better successor as Lawrence led the program to new heights.

“It’s hard to say all the good things a coach like Bill brings to the table,” Perry said. “Not just X’s and O’s, but the way he dealt with kids, the way he dealt with parents, the way he prepared for games, all of those things just make it a really unique situation. He’ll definitely be missed.”

Lawrence’s program became one of the premiere baseball outlets south of Boston as the Sachems never missed qualifying for the state tournament under Lawrence.

The team’s success caught the eye of neighboring Bridgewater-Raynham coach John Kearney. It wasn’t long until Kearney got in contact with Lawrence to set up annual scrimmages, knowing it would benefit his squad to go up against Lawrence’s clubs.

“Billy was one of the classiest coaches I ever met,” Kearney said. “He was a great coach and an even better person. We’re really going to miss him.”

While Lawrence racked up the wins, it wasn’t until 2013 that he claimed his first Div. 3 state title as a head coach with a 4-3 walk-off victory over Hopedale. Two years later, Lawrence and the Sachems were back at it, testing the definition of survive and advance with four straight walk-off wins before defeating Danvers, 4-3, for the Div. 2 state crown.

“He always had the makings of a leader and a champion,” said Perry, who served as Middleboro’s athletic director during those state titles. “He was all about teaching the game. He was all about having the kids play hard all the time.”

Lawrence, who taught physical education at Middleboro and also spent his spare time as a high school football referee, can also have his success measured in the scores of ballplayers that went on to play collegiately, including current Atlanta Braves pitcher Sean Newcomb. Eddy Hart played on both state championship teams and the UMass infielder lauded Lawrence’s ability to lift players up through a soft-spoken manner.

“He always had confidence in me and for a young kid that’s a big step because high school is an adjustment,” Hart said. “He was always really nice to me and I’ll always be considerate and grateful for that.”

Undergoing a partial knee replacement kept Lawrence away from the diamond in 2019 and he never got back there to coach the Sachems, but with his work there for over two decades, he left an indelible mark on a baseball-loving town.

“He was just a man of integrity,” Cronin said. “We all have to be heartbroken to lose a person like that. You don’t recover easily when you lose people like Billy Lawrence. We need more people like Billy Lawrence.”

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2VxcrXF