Durango High School has its next girls soccer and baseball coaches. Durango Athletic Director Ryan Knorr confirmed on Jan. 3 that Masen Hibbeler was hired as the new baseball head coach and Zac Keeler was hired as the new girls soccer coach.
“The quality of candidates for who we moved to the finals for both were phenomenal,” Knorr said. “Sometimes I feel like our committees feel like they need to settle sometimes or have in the past. In both of these cases, they were slam dunks to where we feel really good about the candidates.”
Hibbeler takes over for Austin Anderson, who was the Demons’ baseball coach last season and moved to Denver so his wife can pursue a doctorate in occupational therapy. Anderson and the Demons went 8-15 overall last season and lost their final 11 games.
A Cypress, Texas, native, Hibbeler was an all-state high school baseball player and helped lead Cypress Ranch High School to a 6A state title. Hibbeler then played college baseball and finished his college baseball career at Division I University of Texas in 2019.
During his senior season at Texas, Hibbeler took a leadership role with the freshman and after the season, he bypassed the MLB draft and he was ready to sell oil and gas. But he was given the opportunity to manage a baseball training facility in Austin out of college. Hibbeler had success with it and then opened up his own softball and baseball training facility in Houston called Reps Baseball.
“I had one of the top training facilities in Houston for baseball and softball and we were at a point where we're going to keep expanding because I grew it so fast,” Hibbeler said. “We had three expansions in three years and it was at the point where I thought, ‘Okay, are we going to sell it or are we going to expand again?’ My wife said, ‘How do we move out here (to Durango)?’ I said, ‘Let's see what’s going on.’ I didn’t know if I’d have to go sell oil and gas but I wanted to stay in the game. Sure enough, the coaching job was open … and it all went through, so we're up here full-time now.”
Hibbeler and his wife, Aubrey, married in October at Purgatory Resort. They’ve vacationed in the Durango area for the past four years and it was always an end goal to end up living in Durango.
One of the main reasons the Durango High School baseball job was attractive to Hibbeler was the Demons’ young roster. He’s excited guys will be in the program for multiple that Hibbeler can develop and hopefully send to college baseball if that’s their goal. Hibbeler said he’s made plenty of relationships with college coaches while he was in Houston.
“You give me a good athlete, I can teach them how to play baseball,” Hibbeler said. “The attraction here is they're not specializing in just baseball. We have legit athletes in this town that do a bunch of other stuff. So, in comparison to those guys in Houston, the makeup of the player is very similar to them. Now they need that guidance and the sky's the limit with a good athlete.”
Hibbeler wants his teams to play fast, steal bags and take advantage of small avenues in baseball that people don’t know about so the game is played at a higher pace. He thinks if baseball is taught the right way, it can help players win in life.
Durango baseball is at a crossroads and it needs guidance that goes beyond the high school team, according to Hibbeler. He wants to start summer organizations that get the players traveling and playing.
A lot of that guidance outside the high school will be found at Choice Athletics, an indoor training facility off US-160 that opened a few years ago. Hibbeler is training local players there and he said there’s already been a buzz with some of the local players who have come back from college baseball to train with him.
Hibbeler believes that with a solid varsity team, these kids can be the local baseball celebrities and inspire the younger generation to be on the team.
“When I grew up, my high school won a bunch of state championships and when I was eight years old, you wanted to wear that hat,” Hibbeler said. “Durango is such a cool, attractive town as it is, let's throw baseball in the mix.”
Keeler is a more familiar face around Durango High School sports; he was an assistant coach on Durango boys soccer head coach Sean Ackerman’s staff last season. He takes over the girls soccer program from Melissa Halonen, who led the Demons for four seasons before stepping away from the program to move to California. Durango finished 9-3-3 last season but lost in the first round of the state playoffs.
“It's an absolute pleasure,” Keeler said about getting the job. “Getting to be with the boys team this past season, and also working with Rio Rapids and getting to see those girls play from time to time. It was something that when I heard Melissa was not going to be returning, I was hoping that I could try to make it happen. I'm looking forward to it. Durango has a reputation of having excellent girls’ sports, so I was looking forward to trying to make sure that continued to happen.”
Keeler’s coaching career began in 2005 when he began coaching at Fort Walton Beach High School in Fort Walton, Florida.
He continued to coach high school teams in Florida before he got the opportunity to come out to Bayfield and Durango. He fell in love with the area and started assisting with the Bayfield girls and boys soccer team. Then last season, he worked with the Durango boys soccer team’s goalkeepers.
Keeler wants to build versatile soccer players that are ready to play in any position and situation. He wants his players to have a great first touch and to move the ball to their teammates.
“I want players to be lifelong soccer players,” Keeler said. “I want them to enjoy the sport when they're done with high school, pursue college, if that's what they want to do. It's extremely important they learn that this is their sport; they can get exercise out of it to have stress relief. It's so hard these days to continue a sport that you played in high school, but soccer is one of those sports that when you're 60, you're still able to play it.”
Keeler is excited to build off what Halonen did the past few seasons with the program. He’s looking forward to the high-caliber opponents Durango has on its schedule.
bkelly@durangoherald.com
