JAY – He arrived on the scene with a flourish that few freshmen have, but all Ryan DiPompo wants is to go out the way he’s seen a lot of Jay High School seniors go out in recent years.
“I wouldn’t mind going out on top,” he said.
DiPompo came in on top. He was a bench-warmer on Jay’s 2002 Class C state championship basketball team and, four months later, a starting outfielder on the Tigers’ championship baseball team.
Since then, he’s added three more Western Maine titles to his athletic portfolio, one each in baseball, basketball and football.
“I don’t think there’s been many athletes, as a matter of fact, there haven’t been any athletes that have left Jay with that many titles under their belt,” said Jay baseball coach Chris Bessey.
DiPompo excelled as a guard in basketball and a wide receiver in football, but it’s been in baseball where he’s had the majority of his most memorable moments. Those include a spectacular catch in the state championship game his freshman year and throwing a runner out at the plate to negate a crucial insurance run for St. Dom’s in the Western C championship his sophomore year.
Ironically, DiPompo was a highly-touted catcher as a freshman. But a series of injuries forced Bessey to put him in the outfield before he could try on the varsity’s catcher’s gear.
“Coach Bessey asked me if I’d ever played outfield,” DiPompo said, and I said that I’d been out there before, basically a couple of inning here and there in middle school, but mostly I was playing catcher.”
“I think he became accustomed to it and enjoyed it a little bit more than catching, and he was pretty good at it,” Bessey said. “He’s gotten to the point where he’s arguably the best outfielder in the conference.”
He’s also gotten to the point where he’s among the best pitchers in the MVC. DiPompo picked up a lot of confidence last year as the Tigers’ No. 3 starter, going 5-0 and helping to lead them to their third straight Western C title game. He’s 5-2 this year, even though Jay has struggled to field the ball and score runs for him, or any of its pitchers.
The Tigers are 7-6, which is not quite where they expected to be this late in the season. But they picked up a big win against Monmouth Academy last week, and DiPompo hopes that means what has probably been the most frustrating spring of his career is in the process of duplicating the previous three springs.
“In my opinion, we’ve had some of the best pitching we’ve had here so far. Earned runs-wise, I’d put it up against any other year,” he said. “We’ve just made a lot of mental mistakes and a lot of errors. We haven’t really hit the ball that well, so to stay in all the games that we have making that many mistakes is something you can take with you, and hopefully by the time we get to a playoff run we can turn it around.”
“He’s very competitive,” Bessey said. “He’s just as hard on himself as anybody else is on him when he makes mistakes. But he’s confident enough where he wants the ball.”
It doesn’t matter to DiPompo whether he’s on the mound, in the outfield or anywhere else when he gets the ball. In fact, his career has now come full circle, as Bessey has started playing him more behind the plate.
“I don’t care. I’ll go wherever,” said DiPompo, who may be playing ball next spring at Salem State, Southern New Hampshire or Western Connecticut State. “Whatever is going to help the team win. That’s all I’m concerned about now.”
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