FERRIDAY &8212; Here&8217;s a guy who played five years of pro ball, caught big-league star pitchers Bret Saberhagen, David Cone and Danny Jackson and still conjures up memories from the veteran baseball fans of the Miss-Lou from his days in high school at South Natchez.

That, however, is all in the past. Living in it won&8217;t do Mitch Ashmore any good. But he&8217;s a baseball guy.

In the dugout now, you can drop the Coach Ashmore stuff. It&8217;s just Mitch.

&8220;I tell the kids from Day 1 you can call me &8216;Mitch,&8217;&8221; Ashmore said. &8220;Mitch is Mitch. You&8217;ve got to know what that means. I don&8217;t have to have &8216;Coach&8217; put in front of me. That doesn&8217;t bother me one bit. I enjoy it, actually. It&8217;s a business thing with me, and it&8217;s pretty much business with this program.&8221;

Some of the younger players who may not know any better may refer to the former Kansas City Royals farmhand as &8216;Coach Mitch,&8217; but the coach part gets dropped as they grow older.

It&8217;s just like managers in pro ball, where players just refer to the skipper by their first names. Ashmore picked up a lot of baseball from his stint in pro ball, and it carries over into his role as Huntington coach.

For what he led his club to this spring, he&8217;s All-Metro Coach of the Year for 2006. Last spring he shared it with ACCS coach Gill Morris, but this time it&8217;s his outright.

And it&8217;s certainly deserving.

A team with no defined superstar pushed its way through the Class A playoffs by doing the little things right. They executed the bunts, ran the bases aggressively, played fundamental defense, hit the cut-off man and threw strikes.

&8220;I&8217;ve always tried to take three seasons in a ball season,&8221; Ashmore said. &8220;We try to play that first season and find out who we can play and can&8217;t play. The second season is district, and the third season is the playoffs.

&8220;Our goal is to have kids that play who are comfortable with being uncomfortable. Once they get to that point, I think they can play baseball in a difficult situation. I think that&8217;s a perfect example of what happened with this team. They were uncomfortable early, they were uncomfortable in some situations in the second season, then they got comfortable and we were able to play some really good baseball throughout the latter part of the year.&8221;

It showed at the end when the Hounds took the opening game of the state championship series against Porters Chapel, lost in 10 innings in Game 2 and had the potential tying run thrown out at the plate for the final out in Game 3.

Every game was decided by one run, as was the Hounds&8217; loss to Class AAA Division I champ Hillcrest in Overall.

But for Ashmore, it was another trip to state without getting the big prize. He coached the Hounds to title in 1994 but has had four others appearances at state end the other way.

&8220;I didn&8217;t think I would do it this long,&8221; he said. &8220;We had a couple down years there, but hopefully we&8217;re back to playing well and getting a chance to play for a state championship every year.&8221;