Baseball coach’s three decades of devotion capped with one last state title

“I was like, ‘Man, these guys keep on going. This is all the way to center field,’” Segars said. “I kind of ran out of gas.

“I thought I was going to pull a hammy, and I didn’t want to tweak my hamstring because I’ve got a lot of pickleball to play this summer.”

It was another benchmark for how far Loganville has come since Segars first donned a Red Devil hat in 1996. Segars served as head coach for 23 years until he became Loganville’s athletic director in 2021. He stayed on as an assistant, taking part in four more titles.

Loganville baseball has become Segars’ life’s work, so leaving on a state title made the finale that much sweeter.

“Just to see the success, especially in that moment and that environment, it’s a special feeling, obviously,” Segars said. “Being real, I was thinking at the series just how far the program had come over 30 years.”

Segars’ first job out of college was teaching at Loganville Middle School in 1995. He had an early opportunity to leave when Evans, one of Georgia’s top programs at the time, offered him a varsity assistant coaching position for the spring of 1996.

But Segars felt like he needed to stay, and he took a substitute teaching job at Loganville and served as a JV assistant coach instead.

“Our facilities weren’t very nice,” Segars recalled. “We didn’t have a hitting facility, we had a very small school board, we didn’t have locker rooms, and the dugouts were not too nice. The field didn’t have automatic irrigation, any of that. We had no equipment. We had one batting cage.”

According to Segars, Loganville had also never made the playoffs and had one winning season in program history. But the young coach saw potential and got his first chance to invest in it when he was promoted to varsity assistant coach in 1997.

Segars and new head coach Kevin Reach tried to set a new standard for Loganville baseball, which meant cutting some players while others quit. But the Red Devils kept a group of four seniors that Segars credits for Loganville’s first turnaround season.

“There was a standard that we were going to set, and I think that was big,” Segars said. “We had four that really stepped up and did a good job buying in and leading that.”

Loganville made the state playoffs for the first time that year. Two seasons later, Segars was named head coach.

Segars needed just four seasons to take Loganville to its first state championship appearance. Led by future MLB veteran Brandon Moss, the 2002 Red Devils fell two wins short of the program’s first title.

“Brandon Moss’ senior year, that group of seniors did a good job of saying, ‘You know what, we’re going to win. We can win a state title here. We can do this,’” Segars said. “Getting to that state title kind of put us on the map a little bit.”

Segars’ Red Devils finally broke through in 2008. Loganville capped a 32-7 season with an upset of two-time defending champion Greenbrier, overcoming inclement weather that canceled the second game, which Loganville led in the fifth inning.

The Red Devils had to drive home and return the next day to replay Game 2.

“I think a lot of that came from Coach Segars, the way that he handled it,” said current head coach Bran Mills, who was an assistant coach at Loganville in 2008. “He didn’t harp on it and gripe about it, so we didn’t, either, and the players didn’t, either.

“We just picked right back up and got into a battle.”

Loganville won Game 2 in 10 innings, and a Game 3 win sealed program history.

“Winning that state title and getting to that, I think people got excited about Loganville baseball,” Segars said. “Each group from 1997 to 2008 I think really built it and kind of got it going.”

That excitement translated to a bigger booster club, facility improvements and better youth development programs.

“When you get everybody on the same page going in the same direction and you keep people together, good things happen, and that certainly happened at Loganville,” Segars said.

The Loganville baseball buzz also led to Segars’ next four state titles in 2012, 2017, 2018 and 2019. Segars’ second major leaguer, outfielder Clint Frazier, was selected fifth overall in the 2013 MLB Draft.

The Georgia Dugout Club Hall of Famer won five state championships and totaled a 548-212 career record by the time he stepped down to serve as an assistant in 2021. Segars’ culture was established, and he turned the program over to one of his longtime assistants in Mills.

“There’s a saying coaches have, kind of a golden rule: You don’t follow the legend. You follow the man who followed the legend,” said Mills, who joined Segars’ staff in 2004. “So that went through my head the whole time, like, ‘What are you doing?’

“But then again, having been here for so long, like, how do you not?”

Mills didn’t disappoint. Loganville went 32-9 and beat Cartersville for the Class 5A title in 2022, and the Red Devils won it all again in 2023, 2024 and 2026.

Mills can catch Segars’ state championship total next season. The sixth-year coach credits his success to lessons learned in 23 seasons under Segars.

“He’s a good listener, and I think learning to handle situations so that it doesn’t cause a problem, but also learning to walk kids through situations so they can see and understand and be on board, even though it’s not what they want at all,” Mills said.

Ultimately, Mills said, it’s about keeping the same process and standard that Segars helped establish 29 years ago.

Credit: Bran Mills

Credit: Bran Mills

Segars isn’t sure what comes next beyond pickleball, but he doesn’t plan on leaving the Loganville area. He hopes to keep watching Mills and his other former assistants lead the Red Devils at that same championship standard.

“That’s kind of why I got into coaching, man,” Segars said. “I wanted to provide the best possible opportunity for kids to play high school baseball, and then I wanted to try and help them go on to play college baseball.

“Really just lock in on the year and develop a program, not just a team.”