Will Garske hasn’t forgotten anything.

He remembers getting in the car with his mother in seventh grade and hearing the news he didn’t make the junior high baseball team.

Then when he made junior varsity the next year, he remembers the loss at Franklin-Simpson and being told his team would never play an inning of varsity baseball.

Garske remembers all of it vividly because he still uses it as a chip on his shoulder. The memories of failure helped drive him. This season, deleting an app that recorded his failures helped him become the hottest bat in the Purples lineup.

“I keep it with me to this day,” Garske said. “I still talk about it. It drives me.”

Garske hasn’t been the best hitter for Bowling Green (21-11) all season – far from it. In the Purples’ first 10 games, Garske was batting .160 with just a few hits. Then everything started clicking, and now he leads the team in batting average, hits and RBIs going into Friday night’s KHSAA State Baseball Tournament first-round game against Madison Central.

First pitch is 7:30 p.m. at Whitaker Bank Ballpark in Lexington, where Garske hopes to keep his senior season alive.

The right fielder batting third in the lineup currently boasts a .423 batting average with 47 hits, 37 RBIs and three home runs. Not bad for the kid who would never play an inning of varsity.

“It’s been awesome,” BGHS coach Matt Myers said. “This is a kid that got cut on his junior high team. Will set a goal for himself. He wanted to be region player of the year and those are big words.

“He’s tried to do everything he could to back that up. He got in the weight room in the fall, was struggling early on and was pressing. As any seniors do, they press when they’re not going good. All of a sudden, it started to click.”

Garske broke into the starting lineup as a junior, batted .214 and held high expectations for himself as a senior. One thing stood in the way: his view of the stat book.

Garske would rattle off numbers during practice that forced coaches to ask how and why he was keeping up with his own statistics.

“I deleted the GameChanger app off my phone,” Garske said. “This is really toxic. I’m more worried about my stats than being a good teammate and stuff like that.

“When I separated myself from that, that’s when the game started coming to me.”

It took 10 games for Garske to relax and ignore any statistic that wasn’t a win or loss. Ever since the District 14 opener against South Warren on April 17, he’s hitting .525 on 80 at-bats.

That stretch includes 13 extra-base hits, 32 RBIs and 30 runs scored. He struck out 10 times in those 10 games before the district opener.

In 22 games since, he’s struck out on 12 occasions. He started putting in an extra hour of work before or after practice on off-speed pitches and, more importantly, didn’t study stats.

“I got on him,” Myers said. “If you take care of the team, the individual gets taken care of.

“I remember him throwing out a stat and I asked, ‘How do you know that? Don’t be a stat guy. Embrace every at-bat you get.’ I thought it was kind of selfish. I think he realized it and when you start doing that, you start pressing. Now the balls are just jumping off his bat.”

Since deleting the app, Garske has asked coaches about his numbers just one time. A friendly bet between he and Tyler Stahl, a senior on last year’s Purples team, rides on whether Garske can hit better than Stahl’s .423 last year.

He couldn’t believe the number when the coaches told him.

“I probably thought I was .350, but that .400 mark is pretty big,” Garske said. “I didn’t realize how many hits I was accumulating and what impact I had. I really had to let go of the results. At the beginning of the year I would get frustrated with the outs and stuff, but now I’m even-keeled and when he told me that, I was glad.

“I’ve put in a ton of work this year and extra time before and after practice. The fruits of my labor have grown. I was really happy with it and hope I can keep improving.”

Because of his role as one of five seniors, Garske getting into a rhythm has helped boost the rest of the lineup. In its last 17 games, of which Bowling Green has won 14, the team is batting .386 and sports a collective .501 on-base percentage.

“I think all of those things are a combination of Will getting things going,” Myers said. “Will is a big personality. He’s kind of a goofball sometimes, but he’s very confident and a great kid. … I think it’s been kind of gravitating to everyone else.”{&end}