To feel Joe Brooks’ impact with Longmont baseball, fans need look no further than the back of the high school. The foundation he laid is still there.

Brooks, who owns the only state championship (1973) in school history, arrived in town in 1967 to find that Longmont didn’t have a field, much less a Little League team to speak of. He knew that if he built it, they would come.

His few years coaching in Las Animas, his hometown, couldn’t have prepared him for what he would experience with the Trojans.

“Longmont was a brand new school,” Brooks recalled. “We had a place for a field, but I was given an hour — or maybe two hours — to lay out the baseball field so we could start, and that was in the fall. In the spring, we started this season. And from then on, it just grew into a baseball program. I had been given an hour or two to get it laid out so we could put a home plate in and pitcher’s mound and bases, and didn’t have dugouts or anything. Just had a piece of grass and a backstop. That was the first thing we had, and we built from there.”

Brooks, now 88, amassed a 166-95 record from 1967-1981 and was recently inducted into the Colorado Dugout Club’s Hall of Fame alongside Bill Stephens, 78. Stephens briefly served as his assistant before moving into head coaching jobs at Niwot and Skyline, which at the time were just beginning their programs.

The Colorado Dugout Club exists to promote high school baseball among all of the teams in the state and “to foster relationships with other national, state and local baseball organizations,” according to its website. The organization’s hall of fame was introduced in 2010 and includes many coaches and umpires who have served at various participation levels, from youth to college.

Stephens himself had a hand in building the baseball infrastructure at Longmont High. He ended his coaching career with the Falcons in 2006.

In the early 1970s, when batting cages were beginning to rise in popularity, he, Brooks, and the rest of the coaching staff reached out to one of the city’s engineers, Jerry Trotter, for help. Trotter provided the metal arms from streetlights that had just been taken out of commission, and the coaches took care of the rest.

“We took them up there, cut them off, set them in the ground, so that the arms touched each other, forming an arch,” Stephens said. “That gave us a tunnel, a frame, to suspend our net and we had our batting cage, probably before most any other schools around had them. We cut them off, welded them together, and put them in.

“Joe sent us to lunch the day we finished it and poured the concrete. He said, ‘Well, I’m going to stay and make sure it gets dry,’ and so on. But when we came back, he had put his initials in it. But he didn’t put ours in it. We always gave him grief about that. But that cage is still there. It’s still being used.”

Both men said they were humbled to be recognized by their induction into the hall of fame but know they couldn’t have gotten there without all of the coaches, parents and players who they encountered along the way.