RUSSELLVILLE - Say this much for Devin Buckhalter: He knows how to make a first impression.
Long before he was Buckhalter’s varsity baseball coach for the past two seasons at Russellville High School, Chris Heaps and his family were neighbors for a few years with Tony and Dana Buckhalter and their two children, Jasmine and Devin. Heaps, who was hired to take over the Golden Tiger program in the summer of 2012, remembers 12-year-old Devin coming over to play in the yard with his young twin sons, Brayden and Casen.
“Just a great kid who wanted to play,” Heaps said of Buckhalter, now a senior at RHS. “He wanted to play basketball, front-yard football, whiffle ball. He came over and swam with us all the time. Devin is just a great person first, a great kid. My kids were younger, and he played well with boys that were two or three years younger than him. That stood out to me.”
That’s not all that stood out to Heaps about the kid from next door, who would go on to score more than 1,200 points as a varsity basketball player, earn All-State honors as a receiver in football and start in right field for a Russellville baseball team that reached the state finals for a fourth straight year in 2017.
“Very, very athletic,” Heaps recalled of Buckhalter the adolescent. “I was glad that he played baseball. When I moved here, it would have been just before he came into our middle school program. I knew right away—just watching them play whiffle ball and stuff, and I had seen him at our camp that year, I knew he was an athlete. I didn’t know…you never know how committed a kid is gonna be to something. That’s the thing he’s shown over the years.
“He saw that he was pretty good, and he saw a pretty good group of guys come in right before him, and he saw it pay off for them. I think he knows…and I’ve said it, and some coaches who’ve seen him have said it, ‘Hey, you’ve got big-time baseball ahead of you, if you’ll keep grinding and keep working on the little things that players have to do to go from this level to that level and then from that level to the next level and so on.’”
Heaps, who played at Hartselle High School and then Gadsden State Community College before spending three years in the minor league system of the New York Yankees in the mid-1990s, has a saying: ‘There is no elevator to the big leagues. There’s only a staircase, and you have to take it one step at a time.’ Buckhalter may never reach the professional ranks [so few players do], but he has the potential to take the first few steps in leaps and bounds. At least, that seemed to be the consensus on Wednesday afternoon in the RHS field house, where Buckhalter signed an offer to continue his baseball career at Calhoun Community College in Decatur.
“This will be the first year he’s ever had baseball fully to himself, and that’s the most exciting part,” said Ben Hawkins, who serves as pitching coach and recruiting coordinator on Cody Gaskill’s staff at Calhoun. “What’s gonna happen with Devin Buckhalter when he’s got two full years of nothing but baseball? Is it SEC? Is it the [MLB] draft? What is it? Who knows? That’s the exciting part.
“I’m just glad we got that guy in our program. I’d much rather him be in our program than have to play against him.”
Much like Heaps, Hawkins remembers the first time he saw Buckhalter in person. It was a brief exposure, but it was enough.
“I saw him one time,” said Hawkins, who traveled to West Point High School on April 9 and saw Buckhalter lead off the game by smoking a line-drive double off the left-field fence on the fly. “I saw him at West Point, and it’s a double, it’s a bomb…I called Gaskill right that second and said, ‘Hey, I know I’m the pitching coach, and I know you don’t think that I know a lot about hitting (just kidding), but this kid can flat-out rake it.’
“I’ve seen Bob Jones, I’ve seen [University of Alabama commit] Dylan Ray, I’ve seen all those guys that can hit. This kid right here is special. The bat speed is special. I said, ‘Just go see him.’”
Gaskill did just that, making the trip to Russellville to see Buckhalter with his own eyes. He saw the same thing Hawkins did, the same thing Heaps did.
“First at bat, he picks up the phone and calls me,” Hawkins said of his head coach, “and he says, ‘That’s unbelievable. You were right. You didn’t miss on this one.’”
In signing Buckhalter, Calhoun is getting a player who collected 90 hits in two seasons of varsity baseball at Russellville, a player who raised his batting average from .331 as a junior to .391 as a senior while nearly doubling his output of extra-base hits (from seven in 2018 to 13 in 2019). The Warhawks are also getting an elite athlete who excelled in four different sports [Buckhalter also ran track each spring until this year, when he chose to focus all his time and energy on baseball], but that’s not what had Hawkins raving at Wednesday’s ceremony.
“The thing about Devin is—and I’ll say it a hundred times—he’s a great kid,” Hawkins said, pointing out the same traits that Heaps first noticed in a 12-year-old Buckhalter all those years earlier. “The athleticism speaks for itself. The numbers he put up on the football field, the numbers he put up on the basketball court, the baseball field—we don’t even have to talk about those. It’s just the type of kid he is, the competitor he is. That comes from his mom and dad and what they did with him when he was younger, instilling that in him. You can’t teach that.
“When you bring a guy in who’s got that skill set and that kind of talent, it makes it easier on us as coaches. All we have to do is say, ‘Devin, go play.’”
Buckhalter has been playing…and playing…and playing since he first arrived as a varsity football player and basketball player in his freshman year at RHS. Needless to say, breaks have been few and far between.
“January to December, it’s been…hectic,” Buckhalter said on Wednesday. “I’ve been going from one thing to another—especially during the summer. I would go from football workouts to basketball and then baseball, and then on the weekends I would go play baseball somewhere. Then August rolls around, and I wouldn’t pick up a baseball until that December, because I was doing football and basketball.
“I was about five months behind everybody else by the time baseball season started, so the first couple of weekends, the first week or two, was very rough.”
Despite jumping from one sport to the next without any extended time to prep or fine-tune his craft, Buckhalter still managed to make a major impact for the Golden Tigers in 2018, his first full season of varsity baseball. He collected 45 hits, batting .331 with 26 RBIs, 29 runs scored, 15 stolen bases and 14 multi-hit games for a team that finished 30-17.
“Baseball is something I was naturally good at,” said Buckhalter, who took up the game as a three-year-old. “I worked very hard, and as I kept working, it got easier. I still haven’t had a full year of it. I think that’ll make a hundred-percent difference.”
There’s reason to believe that Buckhalter is right. The strides he made from his junior season to his senior season would seem to indicate that even more rapid and significant growth is on the horizon. Buckhalter batted .391 in 2019 and either led or tied for the team lead in home runs (two), doubles (10), RBIs (25), stolen bases (16) and multi-hit games (13). Most notably, he increased his walks (from just nine as a junior to 13—in 21 fewer plate appearances--as a senior) while cutting his strikeout total in half (from 40 in 2018 to just 20 in 2019). He made contact more often, and with more authority.
“The biggest growth was my approach at the plate,” Buckhalter said. “Coach Heaps and especially Coach [Jess] Smith, they helped me a lot. Everyday, Coach Smith was out there at practice working with me, getting me better, helping me improve my hand speed. My hand speed jumped from about 90 to 98 in just three weeks of him working with me. And bat speed is the key to hitting a baseball. You can hit it a lot harder and a lot farther, and it just makes it a lot easier.”
Heaps echoed Buckhalter’s self-assessment, also praising his leadoff hitter’s ability to wham the baseball back through the middle and to the opposite field.
“I think the biggest growth was his approach at the plate, his ability to drive the ball and hit for power,” Heaps said. “Last year, he had 45 hits, and most of those were singles. This year he had a whole lot of doubles and a couple of home runs. He started to figure out his approach. He learned how to hit the breaking ball and just became a better overall hitter.
“His commitment to what he was doing really stood out—showing up on days he wasn’t forced to, staying late or getting there early and working on some things before practice started. That’s the kind of commitment you’ve gotta make if you wanna be a big-time baseball player.”
Rest assured, that’s exactly what Buckhalter wants. And, according to Heaps, he has the potential to attain it.
“What got me drafted was tools,” Heaps said on Wednesday. “I wasn’t a polished player. They draft tools. They don’t draft polished players. They sign to the big contracts polished players, but they draft guys with tools who have an opportunity. They draft for ceiling, and Devin’s ceiling is as high as he wants it to be, as long as he stays healthy.
“Overall athleticism, bat speed, speed on the bases—he has all of that. Instinctual-wise, that’s the part he’s missing a little bit, just because of him arriving late [at the start of the season] every year and not getting that extra work that we give some of our guys. But he’ll get that.”
The opportunity to continue learning the game and tapping into his prodigious tools under the tutelage of the Calhoun coaching staff is a prospect that Buckhalter finds very exciting. Getting to do all of that less than 50 miles from home is an added bonus.
“I’m very confident about going and playing for Coach Gaskill and Coach Hawkins,” said Buckhalter, who also had an offer to play baseball at Bevill State. “There’s a big 2019 class coming, and I think we can make a big difference at Calhoun. It’s close to home. It’s a very home-like environment.”
Heaps is a big believer that anyone intent on pursing a baseball career beyond high school must learn to how to handle failure. It’s an essential skill in a game where even the best hitters fail more often than not. Buckhalter, who posted a stellar .463 on-base percentage as a senior, seems well equipped to deal with the challenges of such a hard game; in fact, he relishes the chance.
“I like it because you’re not always gonna win every time,” Buckhalter said. “It’s a challenge. It’s a lot like life—there’s gonna be hard times, and there’s gonna be good times. You go through slumps, and you gotta have a way to get out of it.”
Buckhalter, a highlight-reel defender in the outfield, said the defensive aspect of the game is his favorite. [“Throwing a guy out on the bases feels like scoring a touchdown,” he said with a grin. “It’s a great feeling.”] But there’s a reason people say that hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in all of sports.
“Pretty much, you’re gonna get something different every single time,” Buckhalter said. “In football, you’re gonna almost get the same thing every single time. In baseball, it’s completely different. You don’t know what they’re gonna throw you—fastball, curveball, you don’t know.
“The more I played the game from last year to this year, the better I got, as far as experience. Last year, I got on varsity; this year, I was the guy on varsity, and that makes a big difference.”
Now, Buckhalter begins his quest to become one of the guys at Calhoun. Hawkins told the assembled crowd of family members, coaches, friends and fellow students on Wednesday that Buckhalter will have the chance to earn a starting job in center field for the Warhawks as soon as he sets foot on campus. For his part, Buckhalter is grateful for the opportunity to realize his lifelong dream of becoming a college athlete.
“It’s a blessing. God did it all. I didn’t do anything,” he said. “Well, I did, but He gave me the ability to do it. I thank Him for it. I’ve been dreaming about playing college sports since I was a little kid, and now to actually get to do it is pretty cool.
“It seems like just last year, I was in the tenth grade, playing in my first varsity football game against J.O. Johnson, catching passes in the fourth quarter, and now I’m about to play baseball at Calhoun. It’s crazy. It went by very fast.”
At Calhoun, Buckhalter will join two of his former Russellville teammates—2017 graduate Skylar Holland and 2018 graduate Jaret Ward. Holland was in attendance at Wednesday’s ceremony and spoke glowingly of his once and future teammate.
“I’m very excited. I told Coach Hawk and Coach Gaskill, if they get this guy, he’s an athlete,” said Holland, who walked on at Calhoun this spring and proceeded to earn himself a scholarship by batting .370 with 12 home runs. “I watched him at Austin make two diving catches in center. I told them, ‘Ya’ll need to hop on this guy.’
"Like they said, he hasn’t played baseball full-time yet. He’s batting .400, and he hasn’t even focused on baseball for a full year yet. This is a huge, huge pickup.”