Brody Wilcox moved to Ohio from Florida when he was in fifth grade and started his baseball journey anew at Avon Lake.
Years later, he continued to progress on the diamond and draw the interest of colleges. All of that led to his Sept. 18 announcement, when he committed to Wittenberg University on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Tiger up! @CoachGriff24 @coachmeansAL @OEBYoung2024 @shoremenbats @wittbaseball @CoachMcGee11 pic.twitter.com/YhzEAheABg
— Brody Wilcox (@BrodyWilcox7) September 18, 2023
“I went to a lot of colleges, looking for what would be the right thing for me,” Wilcox said. “When I got (to Wittenberg), I went through their facilities and talked to their coaches. It felt like a home. They make sure while you go there that you’re going to be doing well in academics and get your assignments done. They care about you on and off the field.”
Having a winning program and the coaches looking at the person and not just the ballplayer presented Wilcox, primarily a pitcher, the best opportunity to succeed.
Avon Lake has had players such as Dominic Poltrone, CJ Gurule, Logan Hamilton and others go off to college, with fellow senior Hayden Blosser committed to Michigan. Now Wilcox joins those former and current teammates, among others, in playing at the next level.
“It’s not easy,” Wilcox noted when people talked about getting Division II or D-III baseball opportunities compared to Division I. “It’s hard to make it to the next level.
“There’s a lot of hard work and even just working off the field, even just talking to a coach, you have to know the right people to be able to do that now. It’s just a long process and years of work go into it. It’s an exciting feeling when you get that call from a coach and an even more exciting feeling when you finally get to commit.”
There was an adjustment after being able to go from playing year-round down south to a more limited time frame in Ohio after the move back in his elementary days.
“It just depends on the Ohio weather,” Wilcox said on the amount of games he could get in over a year. “We have high school games with (weather) in the 30s and you play through it. Back there, you could play from January all the way through December. It was a big change for me.”
Those days in Florida in his youth, around 4 or 5 years old as Wilcox recalled, was when he first picked up a baseball and began pursuing the dream he had for all these years.
“It’s always been my dream just watching major leaguers and going to college games, I’ve had my mind set on making it to the next level to play,” he said. “Any opportunity is a great opportunity. You don’t want to retire and put the ball and glove down right after your senior year of high school. Some people do and some people don’t.
“For me, I never wanted to. So I just did everything I could to make it.”
