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Goshen High School Baseball Coach Chandler Avant, a Pike County native, was hired to lead the Montgomery-Catholic Baseball Program on Monday.

After two years at the helm at Goshen, Avant’s first head coaching job, he moves on to take over Class 4A Montgomery Catholic.

“They got into contact with me and I met with them and felt like it went really well,” Avant said. “They have a nice campus and it seemed like all the kids their work really hard, they have nice facilities and everything is really clean over there. I just think it was a good fit for me, so I decided to take it.”

Avant was a star player at Pike Liberal Arts School and went on to play baseball at the University of Alabama, where he finished his career seventh all-time in school history in assists, eighth all-time in doubles and 10th all-time in double plays with the Crimson Tide.

After a successful college career, Avant was selected in the 30th Round of the 2018 MLB Draft by the New York Mets. He spent tow years playing in the Mets’ minor league system before returning to his alma mater, where he served as a student assistant coach in 2020-2021 before returning to Pike County to lead the Goshen baseball program.

“I’ll take everything I learned (at Goshen) with me,” Avant said. “It was really good to get that experience (at Goshen) and having to make lineups and all of the ins and outs of baseball you don’t think of when coaching. That helped me out big time and then, also, understanding the high school side of things and how it works differently from the college side.

“You have to learn how to match different players in different ways and those are all things I’ll take with me for the rest of my career and will help me a lot down the road.”

When asked what his goals moving forward for the bigger Montgomery-Catholic were, it didn’t take Avant long to respond.

“My goal is obviously to win state, that’s the biggest goal for any coach,” Avant emphasized. “I really have two goals and one of those is to win. We want to win in anything that we do and second, and this may be actually my No. 1 goal, is to get our guys that can, and want, to play at the next level the opportunities to do so. Living out your dream is what every kid wants and I want to do whatever I can to help each individual do that. That’s what brings me great joy in this game.”