How McKenzie multi-sport star Tate Surber manages expectations, success on baseball field

Tate Surber is never one to shy away from a challenge.

Surber, who recently wrapped up his junior season at McKenzie, has been a key factor in almost all of the athletic challenges the Rebels have faced in the last three years in football, basketball and baseball.

Three straight state championship game appearances with football, two state tournament appearances in basketball and now three state semifinal appearances in a row for baseball, including a state runner-up in 2022.

Surber excels at all three sports and has been named The Jackson Sun’s 2024 All-West Tennessee Baseball Player of the Year.

“It’s super cool,” Surber said of the honor. “Mostly just because all the work that I’ve put in, the extra work, to say that it paid off and we had a good season. It’s cool.”

Surber was excellent both on the mound and at the plate. Surber went 7-2 with a 1.40 ERA in 58 innings with 99 strikeouts, including an 18-strikeout performance in the district championship game. Surber hit .403 with 32 RBIs and three home runs and was the biggest contributor to the Rebels’ offense.

While the team made the TSSAA state tournament without a loss in the playoffs, it didn’t seem that way at the start of the season. The Rebels started 0-6 and dug out of the hole, in large part thanks to Surber and his leadership.

“He was a huge key,” McKenzie coach Chris Wall said. “Anytime we ran him out on the mound, we knew we had a chance to win every time. … He was going to do his job every time. You could just feel a little bit more emotion when Tate was on the hill.

"He did the same thing at the plate. If he got a big hit, somebody else tended to get a big hit and it got a rally going. He was a huge deal for our program this year.”

The extra work Surber said he found the time to do was bugging his coaches to get out to the field or work on different pitches after practice to work on adding a pitch to his arsenal. In practice, too, he always found the opportunity to take more ground balls, get more reps.

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It wore off on the younger guys just as the upperclassmen did when Surber was coming up. Surber looked to his brother, Jack, and teammate Jackson Cassidy as guys to emulate.

Surber has high expectations for himself and his team. He wants to win and do so at the highest level that he can. Winning state championships in whichever sport he’s playing is on the forefront of his mind.

“I set big goals for myself, and that takes away some of the pressure,” Surber said. “I expect so much for myself that I feel like I’m ready to accomplish this. I know I work hard, so I’m in a good position to do what I need to do.”

Austin Chastain is a high school sports writer covering West Tennessee. Reach him by email at achastain@gannett.com or on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @ChastainAJ.

This article originally appeared on Jackson Sun: How McKenzie multi-sport star Tate Surber manages expectations, success on baseball field