By DAVE O’SULLIVAN Publisher If you are a man, that means you were once a 15-year-old boy. A lot of 15-year-old boys lose their way a little bit, get a little too big for their britches, think everything is going to keep coming easily for them. After all, it has for the first 15 years of life, why wouldn’t that trend continue? You remember. You’re are a 15-year-old sophomore, you’re into baseball and that’s pretty much all you are focused on and want to do every day, and maybe you skip a few homework assignments or don’t study as hard as you should for a big history test. No worries, by the end of the marking period you’ll find a way to get a passing grade. Until one day you wake up and you don’t have a passing grade. And now you can’t play baseball. So this is the real world your parents have been warning you about for the last year or two. Tommy Burns got a wake-up call his sophomore year. He didn’t make the grades, and Bob Soifer, Holy Spirit’s varsity baseball coach at the time, had to tell the young redhead that he had to sit out his sophomore season. Ineligible. No daily practices with the guys. No busting his hump every day to prove to the varsity coaching staff that he was a solid, up-and-coming player. No yucking it up with teammates on a bus ride home after a big road win. Nope, none of that. See ya next year buddy, try to get those grades up. 
Head coach Steve Normane used a DH to bat in place of Tommy Burns early in the season, but by the time the playoffs rolled around, Burns had worked his way into the batting order as the leadoff man. (Glory Days Magazine photos/Dave O’Sullivan) Burns admits it wasn’t an easy year for him. And the following year things didn’t get much easier. He had to toil on the junior varsity team for much of his junior year. New head coach Steve Normane, who took over for Soifer prior to the 2014 season, wanted to make sure Burns was committed to not only the team, but his future as well by getting the job done in the classroom. Plus, by missing a whole season, Burns was behind a little bit and wasn’t ready for varsity competition until late in his junior season. “It was definitely a wake-up call. To hear I couldn’t play, I realized I was hurting the team. I had to play most of my junior year on JV and prove myself, and coming into this year I just kept working hard and finally got to the point where I am now. It’s been a humbling experience,” Burns said. “Growing up playing baseball, you work hard your whole life to be prepared to play high school baseball. To know you couldn’t play because of academics was tough. I don’t want to say I’m glad it happened, because I’m not, but once that happened my grades started coming up and I started working harder in school. It was definitely an eye-opening experience.” Burns isn’t a blazer on the base paths, doesn’t hit monster home runs and can’t throw 90 miles per hour. But he is a good, solid, hard-nosed player, and once he proved to the coaching staff that he could get the job done off the field, he started getting a chance to prove he could do it on the field as well. He started out this season as an outfielder who Normane would DH for. By the end of the season, he was the Spartans’ starting second baseman and leadoff hitter for a team that won five straight playoff games, including the Non-Public B South title and Non-Public B state championship. Not a bad way for the senior to redeem himself. He went from a high school baseball career in ruins two years ago to hoisting a championship trophy over his head with pride earlier this month. “(Assistant coach Jason) Downey and I always talk about Tommy and how he plays with confidence and how he plays with a little bit of a chip on his shoulder, and I think maybe it stems from that. If you broke down his skills as a hitter, a fielder, a thrower, he wouldn’t be near the top in any category, but he just gets the job done. He does it with confidence and with ease, almost. He’s such a natural athlete that he’s able to get the job done,” Normane said. “His defense was always there. He actually started out in the outfield for us, then we moved him into shortstop and he played lights out for about five or six games. Then he started struggling at shortstop so we moved him over to second base and that’s where he finished up. Once we let him hit for himself he just kept hitting and getting on base. He was batting eighth or ninth and we thought, well, he’d be the perfect leadoff guy. So we put him up there and he kept doing his thing.” Switching Burns to second base and the leadoff position in the batting order was one of the key moves Normane made in the second half of the season. That allowed him to put senior A.J. Russo in left field and insert sophomore Nolan Charlton at shortstop. The double-play combination of Charlton and Burns came up big in the postseason for the Spartans. 
Burns began the season as an outfielder, but when he was moved to second base things started to fall into place for the Spartans. “We DH’d for him early in the year. The way he looked in some of the scrimmages and in the cage, you kind of write him off, but we put him up in the games and he got on base, would get a hit, steal second. He’s a good base runner and with everything he does, he’s the definition of the word ‘gamer.’ He plays baseball the way you want every kid you coach to play baseball. I wish we had another year with him,” Normane said. “We didn’t turn a traditional ground-ball double play until I think the second-to-last game of the regular season, then we turned about four or five of them in the playoffs. And that’s huge, it really helps your pitchers out. Nolan and Tommy up the middle in the playoffs were almost flawless.” “I had a tough preseason, so I understand why they would DH for me,” Burns said. “But to know that you are a key player, a key hitter in the lineup and playing second base and knowing that the coaches have confidence to put you there in the playoffs was great.” Burns said he didn’t blame the coaching staff for making him pay his dues. He put himself in a bad position and knew he had to work hard to regain trust. He learned a life lesson without even realizing it. “Missing one year changed everything. My junior year I could have had more experience and been working with the varsity, but I had to struggle through JV. When I couldn’t play, that’s when it really turned around. It was killing me. Once that happened, I realized I had to step it up. When I was out for that year, I knew it was time to turn things around and start taking school more seriously,” Burns said. “When I came back junior year, they did the right thing by having me on JV. I had to prove myself down there for about two-thirds of the season. Being a junior on JV is not the best feeling, but I stuck with it and finally got the call up to varsity toward the end of the year. I think that’s when I started proving to (the coaches) that I was committed.” Normane said he knew that at some point Burns would make a big contribution to the program. He’s the kind of scrappy player that Normane loves to have on a roster. “Tommy was a pleasure to coach. He’s a gamer, and I don’t use that term lightly, because that’s one of the best baseball compliments you can give a player,” Normane said. “He’s not pretty in anything that he does, but he gets the job done.” Nothing Burns does from here on out can bring back that lost sophomore season, but in the end he finished his high school career as a state champion. He had that opp
ortunity because he owned up to his mistakes and failures, and set about making things right again. Holding that state championship trophy over his head meant that not only did he find personal redemption, but, more importantly, he came through for his teammates. “That made everything I struggled through worth it.” Contact Dave O’Sullivan: sully@acglorydays.com; on Twitter @GDsullysays [adsense]
Holy Spirit’s Tommy Burns found redemption on the road to a state championship
