[6/1/03]After eight long years, Randy Wright was on the brink of his first state championship. All that was left was to win one more game against the team that had denied him the prize in his last attempt.

He turned to his last remaining ace and asked for one more great game.

And just as he had done all season long, Ryan Hoben delivered.

The Porters Chapel Academy junior right-hander came through with a one-hit shutout in Game 3 of the Academy-A championship series to give Wright and the Eagles their long-awaited state championship.

In the process, he changed from a great pitcher to a Warren County baseball legend. He also cemented himself as The Vicksburg Post’s Baseball Co-player of the Year.

“Hoben just was outstanding for us all year long,” said Wright, who earned his second Vicksburg Post Coach of the Year award this season. Wright also won the award in 1999. “He just did a great job of throwing strikes, and throwing fastballs, and saying hit it if you can.’ And most people couldn’t.”

Hoben went 12-1 with a 0.92 ERA and 128 strikeouts in 83-1/3 innings. He led Warren County in wins, ERA, strikeouts, and innings pitched, and also hit .389 with two home runs and 29 RBIs.

In the postseason, though, Hoben took his game to another level. In four playoff starts, he was 4-0 with a 0.75 ERA and 36 strikeouts. Two of the wins, against Riverdale and Heidelberg, were one-hit shutouts.

“He set the tone in every playoff series we played, by going out and blowing people away,” Wright said. “He stepped up in the playoffs and separated himself from everybody else.”

Hoben was dominant, but not flashy. Mixing in only a handful of curveballs each game, he simply overpowered opponents. In two starts against Heidelberg in the state finals, he threw well over 200 pitches only 10 of them breaking balls.

In most of his starts, the numbers were similar. On average, only about 10 percent of Hoben’s pitches in each start were curveballs. That helped save his arm strength and gave him an extra boost at the end of the year.

“There were games I had to throw a bunch of curveballs and then had to go home and ice my arm. Throwing fastballs, it just felt like you had thrown in practice or something,” Hoben said.

The low number of breaking balls was Wright’s doing, and was part of the masterful coaching job he did all season long. From managing his pitching staff to making in-game decisions, nearly every call turned out to be the correct one for Wright.

He guided the Eagles to 23 straight wins after a pair of losses at their spring break tournament, and the team didn’t lose to an Academy-A team or on the road until a 13-5 loss to Heidelberg in Game 2 of the state finals.

The Eagles also went 14-0 in conference play, dominating a group of teams that included five schools that had reached the second round of the playoffs in 2002. One of them, Deer Creek, had won the Academy-A state title the year before. Making it through that gauntlet unscathed was one of the team’s biggest accomplishments, Wright said.

Most impressively, though, Wright led the Eagles through the minefield of high expectations. PCA was the highest-ranked Academy-A team in the Clarion-Ledger’s poll all season and was a favorite to win the state title before the season started.

“It’s just a wonderful feeling of accomplishment. Just a great feeling of relief. It felt like a 10,000-pound boulder was taken off our shoulders,” Wright said. “All year, everybody expected us to do it, and it’s even harder when everybody expects you to win it. Everybody was gunning for us all year, and to still be able to do it, that’s something special.”