NATCHEZ — For the third consecutive baseball season, Craig Beesley has earned All-Metro Coach of the Year status.

Over the span of three seasons, Beesley has compiled a 63-22 record, and he’s most recently coming off of a 25-4 state championship-winning season with Cathedral High School.

The statistics might suggest this was his easiest year of coaching. After all, Beesley’s Cathedral Green Wave won a state championship with eight starters hitting over .300 and three pitchers combining for a 20-3 record. But with great talent comes great pressure, and Beesley admitted coaching a talented team that is fully aware of its talent isn’t the easiest thing in the world.

“Coaching a talented team, if you don’t succeed, it’s a failure,” Beesley said. “The thing you have to worry about is them getting overconfident. I think we kind of did that in the first two rounds of the playoffs.”

Indeed, the first two series of the playoffs gave Beesley many sleepless nights. After a 9-6 victory and 16-8 win against Resurrection and a 6-3 win against Sacred Heart, Beesley was upset at the team’s performance, despite the winning results. He figured it was only a matter of time before the action on the field translated to a loss. On March 7, in the second game of the Sacred Heart series, Beesley’s worry became a reality when Sacred Heart tied the series at one with a 7-5 victory against the Green Wave.

Assistant coach Brett Hinson, who has been with Beesley for the past two seasons, said prior to the loss, he had never seen Beesley so upset.

“He really laid into them,” Hinson said. “Last year, we knew we had a good group, but they were young and we didn’t know how far we could go. This year, after we made the state championship game in 2014, we knew what we had to do to get back. The pressure just started building.”

After the loss, and chewing from Beesley, the team went on to outscore its opponents 50-7.

“I think it took a loss for them to wake up,” Beesley said. “We kind of hit our stride after we got beat by Sacred Heart.”

The Green Wave ended their season with starters averaging a .346 batting average. Of the 262 hits collected this season, nearly 30 percent were extra base hits, almost forcing Beesley to change his strategy from small ball to playing for bigger innings.

Because Cathedral returned more than half of its starters, and because those starters showed they could hit the ball out of the infield, Beesley took a more aggressive approach at the plate and on the bases in 2015.

“We gave kids more freedom, especially if the ball was in the dirt.” Beesley said. “Any ball in the dirt, we were trying to take advantage of it. Our kids, they know the game so well, we didn’t want to hold them back. And we have Andrew (Beesley), Craig (Bradley) and J.J. (Jenkins). Those are three fast kids that understand the game really well.”

Gabe Smith, who got the win in five innings pitched against Smithville in the 4-2 state championship win, said he could tell Beesley had more confidence in the team, as they were led by mostly juniors and sophomores, rather than sophomores and freshmen in 2014.

“You could say he was a lot more relaxed with us out there, but he would get pretty mad too, like when we weren’t playing so well early on in the playoffs,” Smith said.

After earning his second state championship as head coach at Cathedral, Beesley might be finished relaxing, as he’s already turned his attention to next season.

“That pressure is already there,” Beesley said, laughing. “We’re only losing one senior, and we’ve got a good group back.”