By JOHN JAMES MARSHALL, Journal Sports
If you told Trenton Lape two years ago that he’d be at Chipola College in Marianna, Fla., in 2025, his answer would have been along the lines of “what is that” and “where is that.”
But here we are in early February and the former Parkway baseball star will tell you that this is exactly where he needs to be. And he couldn’t be happier about it.
“I’m really glad I ended up here,” Lape says. “it’s pretty awesome. I weighed out the options and Chipola was really one of the most respected places that I had the option to go to. As it turned out, it was a no-brainer for me. Florida has the best baseball, this is the best conference in junior college and it was just all that I was looking for.”
Of course, it wasn’t a direct line from South Bossier to the Florida Panhandle. There was a stop at LSU, which offered Lape a scholarship when he was just a freshman at Parkway.
But things changed in ways that no one ever expected. Today, Lape describes his 1 ½ years at LSU with one simple word – “growth.”
It has been a long and winding road for Lape, an All-State selection in 2023, who has battled injuries for the better part of four years.
Even though he’s had more Tommy John surgeries than the actual Tommy John did, Lape was standing on a mound on January 24. It was his first start as a pitcher since a game against Haughton in April, 2021. He could hardly contain his excitement that day.
“There was a lot of me having to try to slow the game down,” he says. “A lot of adrenalin. It felt awesome, but it was almost a sigh of relief to get to go through the whole warmup process like I used to have. The whole thing was like nostalgia.”
In that game, Lape pitched three innings with four strikeouts and got the win in a 3-1 win over Polk State.
“It was pretty awesome,” Lape says of that first start in almost four years. “I’m figuring things out and learning a lot. It’s going pretty smooth right now. My arm is feeling great, my body is feeling great. I’m just glad I ended up in this spot.”
Lape has basically has an arm surgery every year since his sophomore year in high school. After arriving at LSU – it was always in the plan that his freshman season would be a redshirt year – he began to experience some finger numbness after his second Tommy John surgery, which came immediately after his senior year at Parkway.
But even though he was still recovering, it was still difficult to sit out his first year at LSU. “It wasn’t the best, but I had great training and great resources at LSU,” Lape says. “But not getting to travel, not feeling like I was part of the team was tough. Obviously I wasn’t out there but I knew my role was to get healthy, gain some weight and train hard.”
At LSU this fall, things were starting to look up. “I felt like I got a lot better in the fall,” he says. “But I wanted to put myself in a better position to pitch a lot more. Now the arm feels like its old self again.”
During the fall, Lape began to feel as though he needed a change. “It’s not the same program it was five or 10 years ago,” he says. “None of the coaches who are there now were there when I committed. I guess it just wasn’t the right spot for me.”
Through it all, he says his parents were a big part of the process. “They were a big motivating part of it for me,” he says. “They supported me in every way possible. They probably wanted me to play baseball at times more than I wanted to play baseball throughout that rehab process.”
It’s strange to think that it’s taken four years for Lape to feel like his old self. “The more I threw during winter break and then got here (at Chipola) and went through my starter routine, it came back to me more and more,” he says.
Contact JJ at johnjamesmarshall@yahoo.com