- May 18, 2025
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The players on the Braden River High baseball team have been playing as if every game could be their last over the past few weeks.
That’s because it could be for many of its players.
The Pirates have 12 seniors on their 22-player roster, and that experience and talent has been paying off when it matters most.
Similar to last season, Braden River got off to a slow start, but that was more-or-less by design.
Coach Greg Creek put together the seventh most difficult schedule among Class 5A teams and front-loaded much of that competition.
That led to a 3-6 record through the team’s first third of the season.
Since then, however, Braden River (18-10) has gone 15-4 and hasn’t lost a game since April 7.
This hot stretch couldn’t be coming at a better time, either.
The Pirates won a district championship over Manatee on April 17 and swept Cape Coral Mariner and Manatee in the first two rounds of the 5A Region-3 tournament the past two weeks to advance to the regional finals against Fort Myers from May 7-10.
However, it would be a misrepresentation to say that this success is merely due to a few weeks of good baseball.
When Creek was hired as the Pirates’ coach in the summer of 2022, he had his work cut out for him, but knew he had the pieces to create something special.
Braden River went 19-6 in 2021 but lost a talented senior class that year, and plummeted back down to a 9-17 record in 2022.
Creek steadied the ship with back-to-back .500 seasons, but his teams have never been able to make a postseason impact until this year.
“Probably 15 of these guys I’ve known since they were 10 years old,” said Creek, who has been a baseball coach in the area for several years. “It’s taken a long time and a lot of effort from them and me challenging them every day for those six to eight years that I’ve been around them, and they’ve accepted the challenge. And they don’t want to lose. That’s this group. They don’t like to lose more than they like to win.”
The stats make it plain to see the impact these seniors are having.
Each of the teams’ top eight hitters are seniors, led by Nick Curbelo with a .411 batting average, 30 hits and 18 runs in 27 games.
On the mound, senior left-hander Rhys Klein has been the team’s ace while junior right-hander Denzel Diaz and Curbelo, who battled elbow and knee injuries this year, have rounded out the rotation.
Of the team’s 12 senior players, at least four will continue to play baseball at the next level, but that doesn’t make their final stretch of high school baseball any less meaningful.
Curbelo has emerged as one of Braden River’s stars this season, but he’s had to grind through dark days to get to this point.
Two years ago, he transferred to Braden River from Parrish Community for a reset and a fresh start.
“I was going through a struggle the past two years before that, and I knew I would thrive here,” he said. “Mentally I had given up on myself. I was going through a rut. In baseball, everyone has their ups and downs and it’s a game where you have to keep your head level no matter what, but I was struggling keeping my head level.”
Curbelo said he found support and a family-like atmosphere upon arriving at Braden River. Moving on from that is inevitable for Curbelo, who is committed to play for State College of Florida next season, but he’s trying to keep his high school career alive as long as he can.
Senior Luke Duffy has been at Braden River since his freshman year and didn’t experience a winning season until this year. Those tough losses and early endings to seasons have made Braden River’s current hot streak that much more satisfying for him.
“We’ve experienced adversity for the last two or three years now,” said Duffy, who will play at Minnesota Post Grad later this year. “Most of these guys have been on varsity for three or four years, and they’ve wanted it. I came up sophomore year and since then we’ve put in the work and grinded out games, and it just hasn’t gone our way. This year, it feels like it is.”
When Braden River finished off a two-game sweep of Manatee on May 1, it put itself four wins away from a 5A state championship.
The way the Pirates have played lately, it would be foolish to count them out.
They’ve won a close, low-scoring game — such as a 1-0 nine-inning win over St. Petersburg Hollins in the district semifinals.
They’ve won close, high-scoring games — such as a 6-4 district championship win over Manatee and an 8-7 regional quarterfinal game over Mariner.
And they’ve won games by blowout — such as a 7-0 win over Mariner, and 10-0 and 9-3 wins over Manatee in the regional semifinals.
If they can win two more games in a best-of-three series against the Green Wave from May 7-10, they’ll go to play in the 5A state tournament at Hammond Stadium in Fort Myers from May 14-17.
“We talked to them from day one in our first team meeting about their window closing,” Creek said. “The window is closing for a lot of these guys, and you don’t have a lot of time, so you better leave it all on the field. That’s a conversation that we repeat to them daily so they keep grinding and understand that not everyone gets this opportunity.”
