Routt Catholic baseball caps historic run with fourth-place state finish

Routt Catholic’s baseball season ended with a fourth-place finish at the IHSA Class 1A State Baseball Tournament, but the Rockets left Champaign with a standard that now defines the program’s climb. The Jacksonville, Morgan County, team finished 24-12 under head coach Ryan Turner, with assistants Kyle Chumley and Doug Thompson, and did it with a 17-player roster built around three captains, Brady Turner, Talon Thompson and Dalton Brown.

The path to state showed how steep the road was and how steady Routt remained through it. The Rockets beat Rushville-Industry and Liberty in the regionals, then handled Abingdon-Avon and Monmouth United in the sectional round before getting past Nokomis in the supersectional to reach Champaign. By the time Routt arrived at state, the group had already stacked enough playoff mileage to play with the kind of calm that usually comes only after years of March and May pressure.

State finally broke the run, not the season. Routt fell 10-3 to Riverton and then 10-0 to North Clay, with Jacob Brown taking the loss against North Clay as Samuel Long and Kale Reich also pitched in that game. The final score closed the bracket, but it did not erase what Routt had already built through the spring.

Inside that run, the senior class carried the emotional weight of the season. Samuel Long said the upperclassmen had strong leadership and spent so much time together that they felt like brothers. Ben Burger said the group stayed united through both the good and bad stretches. Jacob Brown said baseball only works when everyone steps up, and that his teammates left him with memories and lessons he will keep for life.

Brady Turner’s season stood out as both a production line and a capstone. He will play next year at Quincy University, a Franciscan Catholic university in Quincy, and he finished his Routt career with 19 wins, a .369 batting average and Western Illinois Valley Conference Player of the Year honors. His IHSA line was even stronger: a .416 average, 47 hits, 36 RBI, an 8-2 pitching record, 116 strikeouts and a 1.72 ERA. Bryson Mossman matched Turner with 47 hits and led the Rockets with 40 runs scored, another sign of how balanced the lineup was.

The comparison that gives the season its real weight comes from 2025, when Routt finished third at state and set a school record with 33 wins, the second-best finish in program history behind only the 2008 state championship team. Fourth place did not lower the bar. It raised it, and for a small-school program in Jacksonville, that is how a benchmark season is made.