Dylan Dando has been around baseball for a long time as a player, coach and as the former director of the Lehigh Valley Baseball Academy.<\/p>\n
He loves to develop players, and he thinks that the best way for players to develop is for them to learn how to win.<\/p>\n
As the head coach of the Allentown Railers in the Atlantic Collegiate Baseball League, Dando\u2019s teams won four championships in a span of five seasons from 2015-19. Only COVID-19 seemed capable of stopping the franchise\u2019s dominance.<\/p>\n
In a different college league, the East Coast Collegiate Baseball League, Dando has continued to be successful.<\/p>\n
His Southside team, based on the south side of Bethlehem, won the ECCBL championship last week, defeating the Mercer (N.J.) Mammoths 6-4 in the championship game at Quakertown Memorial Park.<\/p>\n
in a span of three days, Southside won three games, beating the Scranton\/Wilkes-Barre Miners 5-4 in the quarterfinals and the Pocono Timber Rattlers 13-5 in the semifinals before a tight finale.<\/p>\n
Southside trailed 4-3 before coming up with two runs in the sixth and tacking on another run in the ninth.<\/p>\n
Cole Cook, an Allentown Central Catholic graduate who is coming off a solid sophomore season at VMI, drove in two runs while Liberty and DeSales product Jacob Rivera had two hits and two runs. Moravian University\u2019s John Phillips, a Freedom graduate, and Jordan Tocci, a Salisbury High graduate, chipped in two hits apiece. Dylan Sattazahn, a Blue Mountain High School grad now playing at Penn State-Harrisburg, allowed just two earned runs and struck out seven in six innings to get the win.<\/p>\n
It was a satisfying ending to a 20-9-2 season for Southside, which also won the league\u2019s Keystone Division. The 12-team league is divided into a pair of six-team divisions with Pennsylvania teams on one side and New Jersey squads on the other.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had a good team with a lot of the same players we had last year,\u201d Dando said. \u201cOur No. 1 starter was Sattazahn and our Game 1 winner in the playoffs was Adrian Gonzalez, who also goes to Penn State-Harrisburg. The Game 2 winner was Andrew Sagrastano, who goes to Moravian. Brader Butz, who played for me at Allentown Central Catholic, was like our main guy out of the bullpen and he was phenomenal the whole year and really wasn\u2019t touched all season.\u201d<\/p>\n
Parkland\u2019s Will Dobil and Jack Streeter, Northwestern Lehigh\u2019s Ethan Konyak, Freedom\u2019s Chase Walker, Liberty\u2019s Mikey Mariano, Jr., and Whitehall\u2019s Tyler Sanders were among the other local products on the roster.<\/p>\n
The league was in its third year and Dando enjoys the competition.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think this was like my 11th season coaching summer collegiate baseball and my third with Southside after coaching eight years in the ACBL,\u201d he said. \u201cWe missed a bunch of years because of COVID, but I think we won five championships in eight years in the ACBL and now this year. Last year, the championship game didn\u2019t get played.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dando said that summer college ball is a lot different than it used to be.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have the transfer portal, and kids moving around all over the place,\u201d he said. \u201cThere are a million leagues. It\u2019s just different from a team and coaching perspective. You don\u2019t have the same leverage over players that you once did and that makes it more challenging. The teams that win are the teams that can keep together and get their guys there all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dando still believes in developing players a certain way.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe do a lot of developmental stuff and a lot of stuff before games,\u201d he said. \u201cWe do all kinds of things to make sure these kids are committed to playing baseball and are invested. Back in the old days in the ACBL, we played 40-game seasons. One year, we went 37-6 and that\u2019s 43 games. So, it has changed a lot and I don\u2019t necessarily like the changes because I feel baseball is a game that is supposed to be played every day. There are a lot of challenges in that now because I don\u2019t think you\u2019re going to find a lot of guys who will come six days a week.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dando remembers in one of his Railers seasons, he had a 25-man roster and made three roster changes the entire season.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, we had 28 players and the three moves we made were pitchers,\u201d he said. \u201cWe started that year with 12 position players, and we played the entire season with 11 position players and that year we played 43 games. So those same 11 guys showed up for 43 games. The chances of that happening now? You\u2019ve got a better chance of winning the lottery.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet, Dando enjoys teaching the game and winning. He has had a hand in the development of more than 60 pro players, including major leaguer Matt Swarmer, who played for the Railers.<\/p>\n
Dando now works independently, training high school and college players. He was also the pitching coach for ACCHS in the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference this spring and helped the Vikings go 13-10 and reach the league semis and District 11 3A finals.<\/p>\n
\u201cI still enjoy it, but it has changed a lot,\u201d he said. \u201cI enjoy developing players and making them better than they were when they first got there. I also enjoy winning, too, and it\u2019s important to teach these guys how to be valuable members of a team and to do the things they need do to for someone to want them to play for them and be part of their roster. That\u2019s still the enjoyable part of what I do.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dylan Dando has been around baseball for a long time as a player, coach and as the former…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":260465,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[153,155,154,305,726,432],"class_list":["post-260464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem-headlines","tag-bethlehem-news","tag-high-school-sports","tag-sports","tag-top-stories-tmc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=260464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260464\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/260465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}