The 2025 season was a challenging year for the Berkshire Badgers’ baseball team, with longtime coach Nick Burzanko abruptly resigning in the fall of 2024. Craig Barstow will try to get the Badgers back on track, having been formally announced as the new head coach on July 7.
“It is an honor,” the first-year coach said. “I went to school at Berkshire High School. I graduated in the year of 2006. My parents went to Berkshire High School, so it is a very proud moment for me personally, my wife and our family as a whole. There is nowhere else I would rather be coaching high school baseball in the country than here at Berkshire.”
Barstow assumes the role of head coach after Athletic Director Brian Hiscox served as the interim head coach for the 2025 season. Although the Badgers’ alum is settling into his first stint as a head baseball coach, he brings plenty of familiarity to the program having been a three-year varsity player and serving as an assistant coach for the last five years.
After a tumultuous couple of months for the program, Barstow said that his goal is to bring some stability to a team that endured several challenges in addition to Burzanko leaving, posting a 5-15 record just one year removed from capturing a share of the Chagrin Valley Conference Valley Division banner.
“It is one of the things that I am able to provide compared to other people who applied for the job or wanted the job,” the Berkshire graduate noted. “Obviously it is still kind of my own touch on the program as a whole but just continue what we have done. We have been successful in the past and I can take a lot of the good we have done and mix in a little bit of my own and keep it going.”
Barstow not only looks to stabilize the program but also provides a familiar face at the helm after a turbulent 2025 campaign.
In addition to earning the stamp of approval from Hiscox and the Berkshire Board of Education, Barstow emphasized the unique feeling of having the opportunity to run the very program he proudly donned the Purple and Gold for during his high school years.
“That is probably the thing I most don’t take for granted,” he noted. “It’s the thing I enjoy the most about it. When I got into coaching, I played the game of baseball and I was very fortunate, Marc Smithberger was our head coach. He went to Ashland and played at the College World Series as a pitcher in Ashland.”
After Barstow’s playing career at Berkshire ended, his baseball days seemed to be behind him when he attended school at Hocking University and soon moved to New Jersey after graduation. Barstow returned to Ohio after nine years in New Jersey and met his wife and moved back to his hometown to start a family.
Once he returned to Burton, Barstow said he felt the itch to return to baseball and reached out to Hiscox about coaching opportunities with the Berkshire baseball program. He landed a position as an assistant coach on Burzanko’s staff before the 2020 season, but his debut as a baseball coach was delayed because of the entire spring season’s cancellation due to the global COVID-19 pandemic.
Once Burzanko left, Barstow said he and Hiscox discussed the open position and deemed it would be best that Hiscox fills the role as head baseball coach for at least a season before opening the position to external candidates.
Barstow said that while Hiscox served as the interim head coach, he gained a great deal of experience by seeing Hiscox guide the team through a difficult transition period.
According to Barstow, although the Badgers were shy of varsity experience, they still showed grit and competed fiercely against the CVC Valley Division, losing several games by only one run.
Although Berkshire’s resilience did not result in many victories, Barstow said that the overall experience gained should be beneficial as the team aims to get back on track for the 2026 spring season.
“We talked about going from being the hunter to the hunted and it’s like everyone was circling it on their schedule and granted we were young, but we competed,” he said. “We return six starters and seven players who played a significant amount of time. We are returning a lot of starters and I know we are also getting freshmen who are going to impact the varsity program this year, so we are excited about it.”
