Basic baseball coach named Nevada Preps Coach of the Year

Basic’s baseball team and then-interim coach Gino DiMaria had to make some difficult decisions after an eventful 2024 season.

The Wolves, instead of getting the chance to compete for a state title, missed the playoffs after being forced to forfeit their league games for using an ineligible player. They also went through a midseason coaching change.

DiMaria and his players, after several conversations, chose to stick together and chase redemption at Basic.

“(The players) weren’t sure what was going on with the program and the comment was made back and forth, ‘If I stay, they’ll stay.’ And it was vice versa, if they stayed, I’ll stay,” DiMaria said. “We decided to both agree that we’re going to stay and we’re going to make this work and bring the state championship back to Basic.”

The Wolves accomplished their goal. Basic, after giving DiMaria the full-time job last summer, won the Class 5A state title May 18 by defeating Reno High 3-2 in extra innings at UNR.

DiMaria’s leadership through a difficult stretch earned him the honor of being named the Nevada Preps Coach of the Year.

“Everybody knows they can play,” DiMaria said. “The recognition I want them to have is to let people know they are great young men. They are respectful. People have praised them because of their personalities and how respectful and how good they are to people.”

‘Felt their pain’

DiMaria had a successful run as Bishop Gorman’s coach from 2015 to 2022. But he stepped down after the Gaels lost to Basic in the 2022 state title game.

DiMaria, who still teaches at Gorman, said he wanted to get away from the pressures of being a head coach. So he joined former Wolves coach Scott Baker’s staff as an assistant for the 2023 season.

But on April 10, 2024, Basic announced Baker was “no longer with the team” for unspecified reasons. DiMaria was named the interim coach, but said there were discussions about the players forfeiting the season since there were few answers as to what was going on.

The Wolves opted to keep playing, but then they were notified they needed to forfeit all their league games and an unspecified amount of non-league games.

“I fought and fought to get these kids to play,” DiMaria said. “We decided to finish the season and then before we played Green Valley our last game, it came out and (was) said to us that we had to forfeit all of our games. It was just absolutely a blow to everybody. I looked at these kids and felt their pain. I know they were really distraught about it.”

Baker was later accused of bullying a player, but he denied it happened. He is one of the defendants in a lawsuit filed by the player’s parents in District Court in May.

‘It was worth it’

DiMaria said there were a lot of “emotional, personal and private” conversations with players when he became Basic’s coach full-time. He said he told the team to leave the past behind and focus on winning a state title.

“They practiced hard because they had one goal in mind and that was to win state,” DiMaria said. “They were not going to let anything stop them. They didn’t forget.”

Basic had a flair for the dramatic in the postseason. USC commit Tate Southisene, a touted prospect in the upcoming MLB draft, hit a walk-off home run against Faith Lutheran in a 5A Southern Region winners bracket semifinal May 8 to send the Wolves to the state tournament.

Then in Reno, Basic beat Faith Lutheran in a state semifinal May 16 with a walk-off walk. The Wolves won the championship the next day on a walk-off wild pitch for the eighth state title in program history.

DiMaria said his players always believed they could win any game they were in, no matter the situation.

“A lot of times when teams get down big or something, they just fall apart. Not this team,” DiMaria said.

DiMaria said what meant a lot to him this year was other people saying how respectful his team was, and the fact that all his players made the school’s honor roll.

Basic will return much of its core next year, which should make the long drives from Gorman to Henderson a little more bearable for DiMaria.

“The drives are miserable, especially when you get in traffic,” DiMaria said. “But the minute I walked on that campus at Basic and I saw those kids, it was worth it. It was back to having fun, coaching baseball with a great bunch of kids. We were a very close group.”

Contact Alex Wright at awright@reviewjournal.com. Follow @AlexWright1028 on X.