Ernest Radcliffe always wanted to be a college baseball coach, but the timing was never right.
Until now.
Radcliffe, the only Public League coach to win a state trophy in this century, has left Morgan Park after 16 seasons to take over the program at Triton College. He replaces Harry Torgerson, who stepped down after 20 years but will continue to work at the school.
The Triton job doesn’t open up often. Torgerson’s predecessor, Bob Symonds, coached from 1971 to 2004 and won 1,373 games. One year, his outfield featured eventual Hall of Famer Kirby Puckett and White Sox mainstay Lance Johnson.
Radcliffe said he appreciates the tradition of the program he’s taking over.
‘‘Bob Symonds was one of the greatest coaches in the country,’’ Radcliffe said. ‘‘It’s a tremendous opportunity to be able to associate myself with him, a Hall of Famer [who] had so many professional athletes.’’
Radcliffe, 61, has quite a baseball backstory of his own. He’s the nephew of Negro Leagues legend Ted ‘‘Double Duty’’ Radcliffe.
‘‘My uncles and father gave me some great stories about how tough it was to play [years ago], all the things they had to go through to play the game,’’ Radcliffe said.
He has some similar stories. There were the times Robert Freeman, Radcliffe’s high school coach at Harlan and also his summer coach, would load up players in the back of an Archway Cookies truck to take them to road games.
Radcliffe credits Freeman and Tony Hubbard, another of his coaches at Harlan, along with Steve Kring, his college coach at Central State in Wilberforce, Ohio, with inspiring him to get into coaching himself. That came after a playing career that featured three years in the minors as a first baseman and pitcher.
Radcliffe coached for 10 years at Hyde Park before moving to Morgan Park. His Mustangs teams went 244-170 with four regional titles, two Public League championships (2014, 2021) and a fourth-place finish in Class 3A in 2015. That’s the only IHSA state trophy a CPS team has won since 1998. Public League teams have won five state titles, but none since Hubbard in 1973.
Why hasn’t there been more hardware for city programs?
‘‘To be honest, resources,’’ Radcliffe said. ‘‘You’ve got to have the proper resources. There’s no way there should not be a turf field at Morgan Park.’’
It’s no accident, he said, that some of the Public League’s top teams — Lane, Young, Brooks and Simeon among them — are also the ones with the best facilities. An indoor batting cage, an amenity taken for granted at many suburban and Catholic League programs, is still a wish-list item for many Public League schools.
Besides coaching in high school, Radcliffe has decades of summer-ball experience with the Cubs RBI and The Show travel programs. And he’s involved in football on the grassroots level, too, with the Southside Wolfpack.
‘‘The one thing I do know is youth sports saves lives,’’ Radcliffe said.
That belief was reinforced in January, when he was the victim of a robbery near his South Side home as he loaded baseball equipment into his car before heading to practice. His gear was stolen, but it since has been recovered and Radcliffe wasn’t hurt.
‘‘I’m just blessed that I’m here and nothing happened to me,’’ he said.
Now he’s ready to embark on a new baseball adventure.
