Career Highlights
Baseball
Stanley Junior High – 3-year starting catcher. Gaston County conference runner-up, 1994.
East Gaston High – 4-year starting catcher. Senior captain, 1998. MEGA 7 4A champions 1996 and co-champions 1998. Defense award, 1998.
American Legion – played / coached 12 years. Won Don Dycus Award, 1998.
Belmont Abbey College -- Starting catcher, freshman year. Co-starter, sophomore-senior. Senior year team captain. Academic All-American. Academic All-American. Carolinas Virginia Athletic Conference all-conference, four years.
Basketball
East Gaston High School – 2-year starting point guard.
Coaching
Gaston Braves American Legion team – Assisted Appalachian State Univ. head coach Kermit Smith and Belmont Abbey head coach Chris Anderson.
Stanley 10-under baseball – Head coach, won 2017 state championship; finished 3rd nationally.
Stanley 12-under baseball – State championship runners-up (year?)
Overall – coached more than 60 college signees/ professional draft picks.
Other
Graduated from Belmont Abbey 2002, Bachelor’s in Finance. Board member, North Carolina Council of Economic Education. Served on Mount Holly Recreation Commission, three years. Married to Anna Black Summerlin. Three children – Cooper, 17, Sadie 13, Maggie May 7.
Jamie Summerlin
Base Paths.
Jamie Summerlin’s baseball skills took him from playing to coaching, and catching a few summer days with the pros.
As a little kid, Jamie Summerlin threw baseballs at the walls of his house. And his grandparents’ house.
He’d watch baseball on television, then go outside and transform himself into a 5-year-old Major League superstar pitcher, determined to not break a window.
“We’d also play Wiffle ball, my brother and the kids in the neighborhood,” he says, “pretty much all day long in the summers.”
His television – this was the 1980s – got 12 channels. “We had the old dial TV, where there were only 12 dial numbers on the set and TBS just happened to be Channel 12, so that was the station for the Atlanta Braves,” he says. “So I grew up with a bad team, other than them having Dale Murphy. I’d get the newspaper and look in the sports section to see who was playing well in the majors, and we’d go outside and have fantasy leagues. We thought we were the players. If they batted a certain way, we’d try to do it their way.”
Summerlin took that childhood desire and transitioned it into successful years in youth ball, junior high and high school teams, college and coaching. For his list of accomplishments, he is a 2024 inductee in the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame.
“When I was told (about the Hall), it was kind of a surprise. I don’t really feel worthy, to be honest,” he says. “I’m just honored and humbled to be chosen. I have a close personal friend who was inducted a few years ago (basketball player Stewart Hare in 2022), so it’s an honor to be in there with him. And my wife’s grandfather (Bob Black) was inducted in the first class.”
Summerlin’s intro to organized ball was a Stanley 10-under Dixie Youth team that, when he was10, finished as state runners-up. “We were one of the first teams in Stanley to accomplish that,” he says.
He alternated playing first- and third base, and in seventh grade switched to catcher. “I’d never caught before, and the coach told the team, ‘Hey, we need a catcher,’ and I’d never caught but I thought it would be a way to get on the field,” he says. “It was rough for a while, getting used to it, and it wasn’t a whole lot of fun getting beat around, but it was a way to be on the field. Slowly but surely, by ninth grade, I had it down.”
Summerlin started at catcher three years for Stanley Junior High, then four years at East Gaston High School, where he was senior captain in 1998 when EG was MEGA 7 4A co-champion.
“Looking back, one thing I laugh about is how times have changed. Back then, we would always take the school’s 15-passenger van to away games,” he says, “and I was considered one of the more responsible guys so I would drive one of the vans, with all the players in it. It just amazes me – that would never happen today. I can’t believe I was a senior on the team and responsible for 15 other lives.”
High school summers meant American Legion ball, and Summerlin played for the Gaston Braves. He was recruited by Belmont Abbey College and a handful, he says, of smaller schools but chose to stay local.
“Fun fact is, it was an interesting transition having grown up as a Southern Baptist kid in a Southern Baptist church, and here I go off to a Catholic college with a monastery,” he says. “It opened my eyes up to a lot of new things.”
Belmont Abbey, at the time, was not a baseball powerhouse. “They were kind of a bottom-dweller,” Summerlin says. He was starting catcher his freshman season, and “we won, like, 15 games. Sophomore year, we won, like, 19. And my junior year, we won the conference and made NCAA Regionals for the first time in school history. So, we went from worst to first and won over 40 games. My senior year, I was co-captain and we were Conference Carolinas champs. I was proud to be on the teams that turned the program around.”
That senior season, the Abbey hired an assistant coach named Kermit Smith, who became the Crusaders’ head coach the following year at age 23.
“He took over, and he was, like, 22, 23 so he was a year older than the senior class,” Summerlin says. “We actually played against him (versus Pfeiffer University) in years prior. So, we learned together and I ended up coaching with Kermit for about eight years after that with the summer Legion team, the Gaston Braves, so I saw him come through the ranks and now he’s at App.”
Smith became head coach at Appalachian State University in 2017.
Summerlin spent some of his college summer days in Fort Mill, S.C., as a warm-up catcher with the Charlotte Knights. “It was a wonderful experience, because I got to go on the field and hang out with the players, kind of live the life, and warm up some of the guys,” he says. “It put money in my pocket but also helped me develop my skills, because I was catching pitchers who were really, really good.”
He also has worked with Gaston Christian’s team and for the last three years has been an assistant coach to Devon Lowery, formerly with the Kansas City Royals.
Summerlin works for a financial services firm that specializes in retirement plans and finances for ministry-based organizations and is part of the Southern Baptist Convention. He and his wife, Anna, have three children – Cooper, 17; Sadie, 13; and Maggie May, 7.
Cooper plays baseball. He’s a left-handed pitcher/ outfielder who is being looked at by a few colleges.
Cooper once played 10-under ball, like his father. “I did some Stanley rec coaching,” Summerlin says, “and it kind of came full circle. When I was 10, we lost in the championship game. When my son was 10, he played for the same recreation department, and I was head coach and we won the state championship. It was a neat little moment.”