Within the next year or so, Yorkville junior Bryce Baxa will face a question about the next level that could be problematic. It is, however, a good problem to have.
What’s it going to be, baseball or football?
“It’s too early to say right now,” said Baxa, whose attention in July has been divided equally between summer camp workouts in varsity football for the Foxes and travel baseball tournaments with his North Aurora-based Team Elite.
Baxa had just finished a game of water balloon dodgeball organized by Yorkville coach Dan McGuire to lighten things up on the final day of camp. But thoughts quickly turned to the future.
“I think they’ll probably wait on his film from this season,” McGuire said of college recruiters going after Baxa. “Baseball or football? I think he’s good enough to do either one.
“And I think he’s definitely Division I in football.”
Baxa, who earned all-conference honors at defensive tackle last fall as a sophomore, does have a game-day invite to visit Kansas State in September.
As a freshman, he played varsity baseball for the Foxes. The primary position for the 6-foot-2, 225-pound Baxa is at catcher, but he also pitches and gets in at-bats as a designated hitter.
Which varsity promotion was the bigger surprise to him?
“That’s a tough question,” he said. “In football, our offensive line last year was a good, veteran group, so every single day in practice I was going against absolute dogs over and over again. That made me a lot better.
“And for baseball, early in the season, you would see a lot of dudes throwing 90-94 mph and I’d never seen anything like that. At that time, I think the fastest I had faced was reaching like 85.”
According to Baxa, hitters are getting acclimated to high velocity at younger ages.
“We train either at practice or in the offseason, setting up the machine so it’s 70 mph from 40 feet away,” he said. “It’s equivalent to like 95 to 105, so you get used to the speed.”
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Last fall in football, Baxa and junior tackle James Sapp Jr. anchored the middle of Yorkville’s defensive line and produced 47 and 48 tackles, respectively, for the Foxes (7-3).
“Our defensive line was one of our strengths last year,” McGuire said. “They were young but kept us in a lot of games.
“Bryce has a lot of strength, explosiveness and toughness and played well in a tough league. He’s disruptive and has a real high motor.”
His four tackles for loss included 2 1/2 sacks. He also blocked a field goal.
Baxa was a linebacker coming up and played that position on Yorkville’s freshman team before coaches raised the prospect of moving him to defensive tackle.
“I was thinking I’d be playing against dogs all year, and if I was undersized, I was going to get bullied,” said Baxa, who played between 235 and 242 pounds last season. “I had to get as big as I can.”
He has dropped much of that weight and is likely to move this season to defensive end.
Baxa’s older brother Blake, a senior linebacker last fall for Yorkville, was key in helping prepare Bryce for those early varsity starts.
“It all started in seventh grade,” Bryce said. “My brother was lifting and asked assistant coach Chris Galloway if he could bring his brother like he’d seen other guys do.”
Galloway’s go-ahead paid dividends.
“By the end of seventh grade, I was hitting a 225 bench press,” Bryce said. “End of eighth grade, it was 275 and it kept going up because I had that opportunity. My strength numbers, I’d say, are above average. I was in the right place at the right time.”
It still powers pursuit of his biggest goal — playing in college.
“It would mean a lot to me,” Baxa said. “To do it for my parents and coaches, who spent extra time and did so much for me.”