When the Glasgow baseball team played an early-season game at Allen County-Scottsville this season, the buzz in the stands before the first pitch wasn’t about the pitching matchup or who was batting cleanup. “Where’s Sam?” was the question heard in the bleachers, and for good reason.
It was one of a handful of games GHS coach Sam Royse missed this season while recovering from surgery, and his absence left some wondering if the world was still rotating on its axis. You can relax now. All’s right with the world, and with Royse. The veteran Scottie coach is back in his familiar place in the dugout, and his team is back to winning baseball games. 
It’s understandable, though, how some folks might think there had been a shift in the space-time continuum when they didn’t see Royse in the coach’s box. In his 32nd season as Glasgow head coach and 34th with the baseball program, Royse is more than a fixture; for many, he IS Glasgow baseball.
“He has been a father figure to a lot of boys for 34 years,” says David Lane, who played for Royse in the 1980s and is now one of his assistant coaches. “He teaches way more than baseball. He teaches young boys to become young men. What they learn in baseball is a bonus.”
Not that longevity is Royse’s only claim to fame. He has guided the Scotties to three regional championships, and the Kentucky High School Athletics Association listed his career coaching record as 689-350-1 before the start of the 2016 season. That’s 14th on the state’s all-time victories list. And climbing.
At age 57, and with the surgery behind him, Royse says he has no plans to give up coaching.
“Obviously, I really like coaching baseball,” Royse says. “I love baseball. I have always had really good assistant coaches. I have always had really good youngsters to coach. I have been in relatively good health, and I love what I’m doing. I have never seriously given much thought to quitting.”
That’s good news, says Glasgow Athletic Director Craig Cassady, another former Royse disciple.
“I hope he can continue to stay around for many more years,” says Cassady, who played football at GHS when Royse was also an assistant coach for that sport. “He’s a great influence on kids. He has such a love and passion for baseball and for Glasgow High School.”
Royse comes by that passion honestly. His father, the late Hank Royse, was the voice of the Scotties on the radio for more than 30 years and the GHS football stadium now bears his name.
“My father was around sports all his life,” Royse recalls. “I grew up in the sports programs at Glasgow. I remember going to a lot of practices and games as a young boy. It was just what I wanted to do.”
He did it well, excelling as a catcher and earning a scholarship to play baseball at an Alabama junior college and then at Troy State University. He graduated from Troy in 1982 and came straight back to Glasgow, where he has been ever since.
His secret to success at GHS? Royse puts it simply: “I’m no different than any other coach. We try to pitch and defend well, and we try to score any way we can. If you get enough pitching and enough defense and you score some runs, you have a chance to win. We just try to coach the fundamentals of the game the best we can.” 
Those who have played for him, like Lane, say there is a bit more behind Royse’s success.
“His philosophy is that he’s teaching these boys to become young men,” says Lane, a pitcher who went on to play at NAIA school Auburn-Montgomery after playing for Royse. “He teaches baseball from top to bottom, and he’s no-nonsense. He has his set way of doing things, and he hasn’t changed much.”
Royse hasn’t changed much, he says, because the fundamentals of baseball haven’t changed.
“In baseball, you have to pitch, defend, and score runs,” he says. “When I was younger, winning the game was the most important thing. But I’ve changed. If we win, we know we’ve done the things we try to teach. As I have grown older, it has become less about just winning and more about doing the things that it takes to win.”
Royse’s teams have done those things a lot over the years, including this season. The Scotties are again among the Fourth Region’s top teams, fashioning a 16-6 record through April 27. The team’s ace pitcher, junior lefthander Dalton Shoemake, says Royse deserves a lot of credit for that winning record.
“He’s a great guy who will support you in any way he can,” Shoemake says. “He will stay after practice and work on things, whatever needs to be done. He has helped me develop and made me pull out things that I didn’t know I could do. He’s a lot about the fundamentals. He’s always telling me to work on my pitches and make sure I perfect them.”
Players such as Shoemake, who has thrown two no-hitters this season, are adding to the Royse legacy and to the many memories Royse has of his long career. The veteran coach cites a 14-inning district championship game against Allen County-Scottsville back in 1990 and the 1997 team that reached the state final four as highlights of his career. But mostly Royse remembers working with individual players and helping them succeed on the field and in life. Players like Rodney Henderson, a 1989 GHS graduate who went on to pitch at the University of Kentucky and play 10 years as a professional.
“Coach Royse was a major influence in my baseball life,” says Henderson, now a scout for the Pittsburgh Pirates Major League team. “There was a lot of discipline and a lot of emphasis on doing things the right way. The fundamentals they work on in college and the pros, we were doing that when I was 15 years old playing for coach Royse.”
And those fundamentals should be the focus of the GHS baseball program for several more years, according to Royse, who retired as a teacher five years ago but has no plans to retire from coaching.
“I don’t golf or hunt or fish,” he says. “I don’t have a hobby. Baseball is what I have always done. It’s still about catching and throwing, running the bases and developing that one-ness where all the players are moving in the same direction. That’s the way I learned it, and that’s the way I’ve taught it. It seems to be pretty successful.”
