For the first time ever, Holy Cross is not involved in the Catholic League for baseball. To Greg Battistella, that meant only one thing heading into the 2008 season.

“When we started the season, I made the schedule out knowing our district was not going to be what we were used to,” Battistella said.

“We don’t have Jesuit. No Brother Martin. And No Rummel. The only way to prepare for the playoffs would be for me to schedule a tough pre-district.

“I may have gone a little overboard with it, but it’s paying dividends now.”

By Bradley Handwerger / WWL-TV.com

Holy Cross coach Greg Battistella has used motivational tricks to help his team turn around an 0-5-1 start. The Tigers are 16-10-1 heading into Tuesday's game against East Jefferson.

Indeed, a schedule that pitted the Tigers against Northshore, West Monroe, Zachary, Neville and Destrehan led to a 0-4-1 start. Their record plunged to 0-5-1 before they picked up a win.

But since starting 1-6-1, Holy Cross has gone 15-4, including victories in its past eight games. The Tigers are 6-0 in District 9-4A.

The turn around began in West Monroe during a tournament. Down and out after going down by three runs by the third inning, Battistella changed pitchers. Blake Crombie picked up 10 out and the game-winning run.

Everything changed in the matter of hours.

But it wasn’t necessarily the game itself that changed the momentum. Rather, Battistella said it was what the team did upon returning the hotel.

“One of the guys always wears a crew cut and he said, ‘All right, who wants to get their head shaved?’ ” Battistella said. “If we have 22 guys on varsity, 20 of the 22 kids said they’d do it. Since that point, we’ve won 15 out of the last 20.”

They call it team-building.

Some coaches might not buy into it. Battistella absolutely does. The head-shaving wasn’t the only thing the Tigers have done to slay the demons of a rough non-district schedule.

Battistella pulled out another motivational ploy at the end of pre-district. He printed 30 copies of the teams’ statistics up to that point and handed a copy to each player and assistant coach following an 8-5 loss to Destrehan.

They went over the papers, seeing just why their record was 8-10-1 to that point.

“I said here’s the things for us to be successful,” Battistella said. “ ‘We have a 78 percentage in contact. That needs to be 88. We can’t strike out as much. Our team walks are lower than team strikeouts and that needs to be reversed.’ ”

Those sheets of paper aren’t finable. Battistella wasn’t done motivating his young players.

“I had a big steel barrel and we doused them with a little bit of rubbing alcohol,” Battistella said. “We threw them into the bin and we lit them on fire. It was symbolism of pre-district being behind us. We can’t go back and change those games.”

Since then, Holy Cross hasn’t lost, winning by an average score of 8-1.

And, as Battistella is prone to say, the statistics don’t lie.

After having rough starts to the season, team leaders Joe Broussard, Matty Ott and Kal Bonura have picked up their games.

Broussard and Bonura both started the season batting in the .200s. Broussard now leads the team with a .342 batting average and a .450 on-base percentage. Bonura has 12 RBI and four home runs in the past seven games. He’s now batting .338.

And Ott, after a slow start from the mound losing his first two games, is 6-2 with three saves. He boasts a 1.31 ERA in team-leading 42.3 innings pitched. He’s even better in district play, carrying a .64 ERA while giving up only six hits in 11 innings.

If everything goes as planned for Battistella, his charges will go into the final game of the district season against Franklinton with a chance to win the district. And then he’ll see how far his team has come as they finish up the year with regular season games against former Catholic League rivals Jesuit and Brother Martin.

But for now, he can leave the motivational tricks in the bag. His team is on a roll. Regardless of what worked, it did, and that pleases the coach.

Holy Cross has gone from an afterthought to the front of their district.

“I don’t know if it’s luck. I don’t know if it’s hard work,” Battistella said. I don’t know if it’s the stat-burning or head-shaving, but I’m giving a little bit of credit to all.”