After a whirlwind few weeks, 15-year-old Deshorn Lake is on the move again — this time to Virginia, where he hopes exposure abroad will further his baseball career.
Deshorn recently came back from the International Baseball Federation’s AA Youth (16U) World Championships in Taiwan, where he and the other members of the USA Olympic (16U) Team captured the gold medal. Two weeks before that, Lake was in California achieving his goal of becoming the first-ever Virgin Islander to make the U.S. Olympic team in baseball.
Before heading off Friday, Deshorn sat down with the Source to share his thoughts on the whole experience. Overall, he said, the Olympic Team experience began and ended too quickly.
"I don’t think I’ll ever play with a bunch of players like this again," Deshorn said. "And the coaches — they knew so much and they were really good people to sit down and talk to about things. Since I’m from the Virgin Islands, they were always asking me all kinds of questions, and telling me to come up to Arizona and Florida for school. Everything was beyond what I expected. It was so great."
The coaches’ confidence in Deshorn was apparent during the team tryouts, said his father, Sylvester Lake.
"I went with him to California, and I know more than a couple of times he had some doubts about making the team," Sylvester said. "But I would listen to what everyone was saying about him around the field. They said, ‘Damn, this kid looks great,’ and from then I knew he was going to make the team even before he did. Everything he did out there everybody was really excited about."
Just making the Olympic team might have been enough, but being able to play in an Asian country made the experience extra special for Deshorn. As he touched down, he noticed that Taiwan was bigger than he thought, with buildings as tall as the ones in New York, and he was impressed with the size of the highways.
But the focus of the trip was always on baseball. The team started the tournament with three exhibition games, going 2-1 with a loss against Chinese Taipei. In pool play, the U.S. team won mercy-ruled victories over every team they faced, but struggled against Taipei again in the quarterfinals.
"They jumped out 8-0 in the beginning, but we didn’t want to lose," Deshorn said. "We were all like, ‘We didn’t fly 6,000 miles just to lose in the quarterfinals.’"
The U.S. team ended up winning the game 11-8, and the big comeback against such a strong team left them feeling invincible. Going into the semifinals, the team eased up on the throttle and squeaked by Mexico with a score of 9-5.
"We knew we were going to win the game, but afterward all the coaches were yelling because they knew we could have won by more," Deshorn said.
In the championship game against Cuba, the team was nervous, Deshorn said, and started doing "all kinds of superstitious things" — like picking up dirt and throwing it out like dice on a two-and-two count.
"It was a close, intense game," he said. "There was a good crowd. Some people were on our side, some people were on their side. We saw that it was coming down to the wire, so we were doing all kinds of magical stuff to win the game. Like whenever someone had two balls and two strikes, we called that deuces, and when the pitcher was about to throw, we would pick up some dirt and throw it out like dice."
Maybe the magic worked. Team USA edged Cuba by one run, 7-6.
And Deshorn is now off to Virginia to finish school at Menchville High School in Newport News, Va., and work on his pitching skills.
"I hope to increase in miles per hour and learn all the things a pitcher should be able to do over a certain amount of time," he said. "I want to become better overall, get better exposure and just be the best I can be."
