HAVERHILL — While his senior season salvaged things – 11 victories and a trip to the state tourney was a heck of an accomplishment for the Hillies – Jack Kelleher didn’t do a ton of winning on the baseball diamond in four years at Haverhill High school.
Now a freshman at Northern Essex Community College, Kelleher is making up for lost time.
“We’ve won more games this year than we won in four years of high school,” joked Kelleher.
Thursday night (7 p.m.), Kelleher and the 27-8 Knights open what they hope to be a long and prosperous postseason with the start of the Region 21 Tournament vs. Bunker Hill CC at Haverhill Stadium.
“The goal is to win a national championship,” said Kelleher, who is penciled in to get the start on the mound on Saturday. “I think we’re pretty good this year. We have a lot of depth and we are playing well. We started 4-7, now we’re 27-8.”
Kelleher’s mound emergence has played a major role in NECC piling up the victories. Heading to the postseason, the 6-foot-4 right-hander is 5-1 with a 2.75 ERA and 42 strikeouts in a team-high 36 innings of work.
After picking up a pair of wins and posting a 3.26 ERA in 38 innings as a senior at Haverhill, Kelleher struggled in fall ball at the college level.
“It was a rough start. I wasn’t pitching well. Being a college pitcher and a high school pitcher are really two different things,” he said. “Learning how to deal with failure, having to sit with it for a week before you get another shot, finding ways to deal with it as a positive and take something out of it was something I had to learn.”
Kelleher went back to work, adding a “cutter” to his pitching arsenal over the winter.
“I played around with it in high school but didn’t do much with it,” Kelleher said. “I really worked on it this winter. It went from a pitch I wouldn’t throw in the fall to my best pitch now.”
Outside the lines, playing in one of the top D-3 junior college programs in the country also worked wonders for his psyche. Coming to the ball park is a blessing now, not a chore.
“There is definitely a big mental thing when you’re coming to the field and you know you’re probably not going to win,” said Kelleher, who also played golf for the Hillies. “Being named captain as a junior and going 2-18 on the season was really hard. That year was really hard to navigate, trying to lead as a non-senior and not winning.”
Those days seem like a distant memory, and success has Kelleher thinking big.
“The goal is to play the highest level of baseball I can, Division 1, 2 or 3,” said Kelleher, who will likely stay one more year at NECC before hitting the portal.