Anyone who was involved in Camp Verde High School’s basketball and baseball teams in recent years will likely look back on what their teams accomplished with happy memories. One of those multi-sport athletes is senior Coke Bast.
Bast was a part of the boys basketball teams that went a combined 50-10 over his junior and senior seasons. In Bast’s junior baseball season, the Cowboys won the region and made the state semifinals. The Camp Verde baseball team was 5-1-1 overall and 3-0 in regular games this year before the COVID-19 crisis ended the season. Looking back on those seasons in both sports, Bast expressed a great deal of pride for being a part of them.
“In basketball, we won the region my junior and senior years,” he said. “It was cool to be a part of that. In my last two years we were pretty good and that just hadn’t been something that Camp Verde basketball had been in a while. It was kind of cool to be a part of that.
“My sophomore year [in baseball] we weren’t supposed to be very good and almost won the region. In my junior year, we won the region and made it to Final Four. It was really cool to go deep in the playoffs and experience all of that.”
Bast wasn’t just a part of those teams but was a key player in both.
On the court, the Cowboys were a small team and featured a guard heavy lineup. That left the 6-foot-1 Bast to play a lot in the low post, often dealing with much bigger opponents. Despite that, he easily led Camp Verde in rebounds in both of his last two years, bringing in 7.2 boards a game as a junior and 6.2 as a senior.
Bast was also one of the top hitters on the baseball team. He hit .437/.518/.577 with six doubles, two triples and 17 stolen bases as a junior. In his abbreviated senior season, Bast hit .500/.538/.583 with a double and a stolen base.
The end of the baseball season also brought an end to Bast’s competitive athletic career. He’s been accepted into the Yavapai College Honors Program staring in fall.
“I want to get a degree in civil engineering or hydrology and pursue a job in that degree,” Bast said. “I’ve always kind of liked how stuff works, how stuff is created, how water flows and all of that stuff, I guess.”
With the shutdown, Bast acknowledged that all of the students at Camp Verde are “a little bummed out.” Bast, like students everywhere, is finishing his schoolwork online and said that part of getting through the experience is finding things to keep his mind occupied.
The challenges of COVID-19 makes the Class of 2020 a unique one, as they’ll be prohibited from enjoying the end-of-year experiences in the same way that other high school classes have.
“We’re the class that has seen it all, maybe — we’re really unique,” Bast said. “I guess you could say that it sucks. But you’ve just got to keep going and times will turn up from this. But maybe we can tell people that we were the ones that had to go through this and didn’t get all of that stuff. It makes us unique.”
