Berkshire Badgers’ softball Coach Dave List said the most difficult thing at the spring award ceremony is saying goodbye to the seniors. However the only departure from the program this year was List himself, who retired after 24 years of coaching Berkshire athletics.
“It is a lot harder than I thought,” List told The Weekly Villager. “Obviously I am very excited to be entering this very next chapter of my life and excited to see what it holds, but it was a lot tougher especially to say goodbye to this last team because they will be the last team I coach.”
According to List, coaching several Badgers’ athletic programs has been quite an experience considering he was a graduate of neighborhood rival Cardinal. He grew up wanting to beat Berkshire in every athletic event but when it was all said and done, he handed his alma matter more than a few losses between basketball, golf and softball.
While at Cardinal, List competed in basketball, track and cross-country but started his coaching career early when he returned to Middlefield to serve as the seventh-grade basketball coach after being recruited by his former basketball coach during his sophomore year at Kent State University.
List noted that he already had considered pursuing a career in education but when he started coaching basketball, it confirmed his decision.
“Extracurriculars are an extension of the classroom and when you are coaching you are teaching and it obviously just seemed to fit so it made my decision to major in education that much easier,” he said.
He landed his first head coaching job at Ledgemont as the boys’ basketball coach in addition to his first full-time teaching job and stayed there for three seasons while also coaching some junior high track.
List joined his alma matters’ archrival in the 1997-98 season and started as the junior varsity boys’ basketball coach and then became the boys’ golf coach the following season. He soon moved up to becoming the varsity boys’ coach while still continuing to coach boys’ golf and expanded his horizons when he became the head softball coach in the spring of 2001.
He acknowledged that it was an adjustment coaching softball because there were several differences between softball and baseball.
“Obviously the most challenging thing is with pitching because very few male pitchers have been a softball pitcher,” he added. “I think that is the toughest challenge in terms of softball being the pitching aspect of things.”
List stopped coaching basketball after three seasons and finished with a. 35-30 record but coached the Badgers’ softball team for 10 years, leading them to seven Chagrin Valley Conference Valley Division titles and qualifying for the regional tournament four times.
“I would go to coaches’ clinics and I talked to people that knew the sport really well or at least knew baseball really well,” he said. “Obviously a lot of things transfer over from baseball to softball and you just learn and certainly I was a much better coach at the end of things than when I first started.”
He stepped down after his 10th season so he could spend more time following his son’s baseball career at Cardinal, becoming an assistant coach but still continued coaching golf in the fall.
List returned to the Berkshire softball program in the spring of 2016 and started as an assistant but assumed his former post as the head coach three seasons later.
His second time as the softball coach was a lot more challenging as the Badgers failed to record a winning season in the first four seasons. The Badgers finally turned things around in 2024 as they went 14-11 and posted a 7-3 record in CVC Valley Division play and List finished his head softball coaching career with a record of 218-159.
“It was a good one to go out on so we finished that season at 14-11 with a team that had no seniors,” he noted. “They are going to be very good and whoever ends up taking that position will really inherit a nice team and a really nice group of girls so I am pretty excited and will certainly be paying attention. This not the last time they will see me. I will come watch them play when I can.”
While List will be on the sideline for this season, he did not rule out a coaching return in the future but would prefer to return as an assistant coach as he believes his head coaching days are behind him. Although he bled the red and black while being a student in Geauga County, List concluded his coaching career proudly donning the purple and white.
