Home of Champions

West Ashley’s East Coast Baseball Academy (ECBA), located inside an industrial warehouse along St Andrews Boulevard, is now home to a national champion.
Two weeks ago, ECBA’s 12U boy’s travel team began competing in a national “Perfect Game Super 25” invitational tournament held this year in Mt. Pleasant that welcomed teams from around the country.
The ECBA travel baseball team, primarily comprised of boys from West Ashley, played seven games July 11-15, culminating in a national championship win on July 15 against a team from the Atlanta area.
Anchored by pitcher and centerfielder Geoffrey Gilbert, the team went undefeated under the supervision of coach and ECBA owner Randy Carlson, and his two assistant coaches, Tim Lau and Dan Smith.
Gilbert got the team’s winning ways started with a first-game, 16 strikeout performance from the mound, and then capped it off four days later with a five-inning effort that netted the other team a single unearned run.
The ECBA Bombers won that final game 3-1.
Carlson said opposing teams had a tough time catching up to and hitting Gilbert’s 80 m.p.h fastballs. And with good reason: with a mound 50 feet from home plate, the pitch’s speed is the equivalent of a 96 m.p.h. heater from a big league mound.
By comparison, had lefty Gilbert been throwing his 80-miler from a Little League World Series mound, only 46 feet away from home plate, the batters would have seen the ball for the same amount of time as Major Leaguer would have watching an 106 m.p.h. pitch zoom by.
Gilbert, now 13, said it was a team win and that his pitching arm never hurt. “I just iced it for 20 minutes after games and then put on a heating pad.”
Gilbert said he was spending the offseason working hard with “Coach Randy” to get better, stay in shape, and was looking forward to fall basketball at Blessed Sacrament School, where he is a rising 8th grader, and spring baseball at Bishop England, where he had been promoted to the varsity this year at the end of this past season as a 7th grader.