Photo of Kolby McBee courtesy of UMHB Athletics
BELTON — In each of the five full seasons that Mike Stawski has led UMHB’s baseball program, the presence of a Midway High School alum has been felt on the roster.
In 2021, it was sophomore Hunter Jones leading The Cru in batting average (.371) in 30 starts. A year later, Rhett Grosz came onto the scene as a sophomore, starting 42 games at third base as one of five players on the roster to hit above .300. Grosz continued that into 2023, leading UMHB in batting average (.336), homers (5), and RBIs (27), and just last spring, had his best season yet, finishing as the ASC Player of the Year. On the mound, current senior Reid Cromie has contributed out of the bullpen as a left-handed reliever since 2023, with 27 career appearances to his credit.
And it is that same pipeline from Hewitt to Belton that has produced one of the top freshman seasons in the program’s last decade, with freshman sensation Kolby McBee’s emergence through The Cru’s 24-16 campaign this spring.
It has been a breakout season, to put it mildly. The adjustment to facing experienced college hitters on a frequent basis typically has a longer runway to it, but McBee has jumped in feet-first and delivered for The Cru week after week through ASC play.
The stats speak for themselves.
McBee boasts the American Southwest Conference’s top earned run average at 3.07, a significant number considering the No. 2 pitcher in that category, ETBU’s Tyler Bogusz, is sitting at 3.93. Opponents are hitting just .287 against the right-hander, the sixth-lowest average of any starter in the conference. In 44.0 innings through nine appearances, his strikeout-to-walk ratio is an impressive 2.00, with 26 strikeouts and just 13 walks. All of which have made him a clear frontrunner for the conference’s Pitcher of the Year honor.
“Having a strong mindset out there, staying clear-headed, not letting things get to me — I think that’s what I’ve been able to do really well on the mound this year,” McBee told True To The Cru last week. “The defense behind me feeds off the pitcher’s energy, and I think that’s been evident this year.”
McBee is 6-1 on the season, and has stacked good outings upon each other while making strides this spring. As a starter, especially in the ASC’s new four-game series format, the right-hander has been nothing but reliable, highlighted by three different appearances spanning 6.0 innings with one or zero earned runs allowed.
That, he says, is a credit to emphasis he places on the mental side of pitching, something developed during his time working with Matt Young, a Midway graduate who is now a performance coach for the acclaimed pitching organization, Tread Athletics. McBee learned how to put himself in the right headspace to both execute in the moment and stay poised when other young college pitchers might wither under the pressure.
“As people say, baseball is 90% mental,” McBee noted. “When I was transitioning to pitching more in high school, my coach [Matt Young] told me, ‘When you have a bat at-bat, you can go to the dugout and calm yourself down before you have to go play defense. But when you’re on the mound, everybody can see you. The defense feeds off you. So he taught me to shake off the little things. I have some cues for myself I’ve incorporated in case anything happens.”
It also helps that he has been surrounded by veteran pitchers in his first year in Belton; seniors like starter James McGlumphy and relievers Nicklas Fenner and Reid Cromie. Watching the way they approach their outings and handle the mental focus required for success has been impactful for McBee, who started Game 1 of UMHB’s last three regular season series, followed by McGlumphy getting the nod in Game 2.
“I want to give credit to James,” McBee added, “because he’s good at this. He talks to the pitching staff a lot about having a good mindset out there. It’s a combination of learning from my pitching coach when I became a full-time pitcher, and then learning from those older guys like James, Nick [Fenner], Reid [Cromie]. It has helped a ton.”
He and Cromie overlapped by one year at Midway; Cromie an established senior on the varsity roster, McBee a developing two-way player on the freshman team. Four years later, they are part of the same program again—part of the same pitching staff, in fact—just 37 miles to the south. Seeing Cromie, and Jones and Grosz in prior years, go straight from Midway to UMHB and enjoy fulfilling college careers encouraged McBee as he weighed his college options. It didn’t hurt that Midway head coach Eddie Cornblum played for The Cru from 1992-1994 as well, and spent eight seasons at Belton High School’s head coach before taking over at Midway in 2016. Connections from the Midway program to UMHB run deep, and McBee loved the emphasis Stawski and his staff—which includes Jones—placed on building relationships, even with a larger roster.
“Seeing a place where guys I know, and guys who grew up in the same place I did, could go and be successful stood out to me,” McBee said last week. “Program-wise, when I came on my visit and met with Coach Stawski and Coach Wilson, something they put emphasis on was developing everybody and building a relationship with everybody.
“I know that’s harder to do with 50 guys on the team compared to a 30-guy high school team. But that was really important to me, having a place where I felt like I was part of a family. And I definitely feel like I’m part of a family on the team. I know I have any of the guys, any of the coaches, who would be willing to do anything for me. That was the biggest thing that stood out.”
Speaking of standing out, the fact that McBee is pitching as well as he is deserves added context: this is only his second spring as a full-time pitcher. Yet, his command, poise, and pitch arsenal seem to say otherwise. It is a testament to his work ethic and commitment to perfecting the trade that he is not only a starter for a team in serious contention for this week’s ASC Tournament title, but The Cru’s Game 1 starter in its weekend rotation, a role typically assigned to the ace of the staff.
For his first three years of high school, McBee primarily played the outfield, devoting most of his time to getting hits rather than preventing them. The time required to excel at the plate made developing as a pitcher difficult, and while he was always an available arm if called upon, it was not until after his junior season that McBee’s presence as a pitcher took off.
“I got injured at the end of my junior year,” McBee remembers. “So I took on more of a pitching role on my summer ball team. I transitioned from there into a full-time pitcher.
“I had always practiced pitching, but hadn’t put a ton of time into it, because hitting is also an art and takes time to master. I wasn’t necessarily drawn to pitching, but when I transitioned into it, I had that mindset of, ‘If this is what I’m going to do, I need to be the best I can at it.’”
He did just that last spring for Midway, putting up an 11-1 record and recording the sixth-most wins amongst Texas 6A pitchers in the 2024 season. His ERA sat at 1.23 by the season’s end, earning him a spot on the respected Super CenTex First Team, while also guiding the Panthers to a bi-district title. Looking back, he credits the level of competition he regularly faced as part of a top 6A program for easing the transition to his first college season. While there is no substitute for the real experience of pitching against college upperclassmen, whose hitting IQs are more fine-tuned than most high school hitters, McBee’s senior season proved to be adequate preparation.
Rockwall, who beat Midway in the third round of the playoffs, had a lineup that included Arkansas commit Dylan Cheek and Baylor’s current starting third baseman Pearson Riebock. The Waxahachie team that McBee and the Panthers beat to open their playoff run included Oklahoma’s Reid Graham and New Mexico’s Beck Sullivan, along with Texas commit Jax Robinson. And to start the 2024 season, he fired back-to-back no-hitters against San Angelo Central and Forney.
“One of the big tournaments we’d play in every year was in Frisco and we’d play Frisco High School, who is constantly top 5 in the state. We’d play teams like Hebron, The Colony, Westlake; a bunch of schools that are really good and give us experience going into district. Playing teams like that all the time obviously helps build experience for that season, but it builds experience for the future too. A lot of those teams have guys who are playing right now or will in the future. The same goes for the playoffs too. It helped me build experience for when I got to UMHB, because I’ve somewhat seen the level of talent. I think that’s been a big part of my success here this year.”
Nearly every one of McBee’s performances on the mound this season have been worthy of mention, from holding UT-Dallas—who finished the spring hitting .341—to just two hits in 6.0 innings, to striking out six in a six-inning start at Howard Payne. The only real blemish on his record is the lone loss he accrued in a brief relief appearance against Schreiner on March 4. Dispatched out of the bullpen in the fourth inning of an eventual 12-8 loss, McBee surrendered five earned runs on six hits, and it was his only outing of the regular season that spanned fewer than two innings (1.2 IP). But it’s the response that is impressive.
Eight days later, he threw six scoreless innings against Texas Lutheran, and he gave up a total of five earned runs over his next 26 innings pitched. It is that kind of maturity, to treat a rough outing as something to be learned from rather than a reason to diminish confidence, that seems to make McBee so difficult to beat when he is on the mound. He isn’t rattled easily, and his confidence is high, neither of which are favorable prospects for the opposing hitters he will encounter when he makes his ASC Tournament debut in the coming days.
“The mental side of that is really important,” McBee said. “At some point, everybody will struggle. Baseball is baseball. But knowing I’m here for a reason and can’t let one bad outing affect me…I think that allowed me to just work harder in practice. I watch film a lot, and that was a hard game to watch film for. But it’s having that strong mental side of, ‘I’m not going to let this affect me. I’m going to take what I see and use it in practice and be better.’ Taking that experience and using everything I’ve learned about the mental side of baseball helped me bounce back and be the best I can be on the mound.”
And as for continuing the pipeline of Midway standouts to Belton? Maybe McBee can provide the kind of motivation to up-and-coming Panthers that Grosz, Jones, and Cromie did for him as he considered his college options, and ultimately chose The Cru.
“It always seems like we have at least one [come to UMHB from Midway],” McBee said. “I’m hoping to see some of the underclassmen who were at Midway when I was there [choose UMHB]. It’d be cool to keep the trend going.”
UMHB begins its ASC Tournament quest on Thursday at 3 p.m., facing ASC co-champ LeTourneau in Marshall, Texas. The Cru is the No. 3 seed in the five-team tournament, and heads to East Texas seeking its first postseason victory since 2022.
