By Mike London
Salisbury Post
GRANITE QUARRY — Life at a baseball school can be challenging for a boys basketball coach, but East Rowan’s Trey Ledbetter has learned to roll with the punches.
“Baseball is king here, has always been king here, and always will be king here,” Ledbetter said cheerfully. “Look, I understand that. So you don’t fight it. You work with it.”
East’s boys got a lot of basketball work in during the month of June, and that included a couple of the team’s key baseball/basketball players.
East’s summer of 2025 was much different from the summer of 2024 when Ledbetter knew the team would benefit more from gym time and fundamentals time more than it would by taking a beating in scrimmages.
“I believe the guys had a lot of fun this summer and I like where this team is right now,” Ledbetter said. “We’ve worked hard. We’ve gotten a lot better. We are still working to break some bad habits that had been picked up in previous years. This program was in bad bad shape a year ago, but the progress we made this summer rejuvenated me.”
East played at Catawba’s team camp, went to the Wheatmore Jamboree and even played some Charlotte teams at UNC Charlotte.
“The best thing was we had a great turnout,” Ledbetter said. “We took 25 kids (counting varsity and jayvee) to Catawba, and I don’t mean we took 25 bodies. We took 25 pretty good basketball players over there and we usually held our own.”
East played without two players this summer who had their moments last season. Brody Thomas, who was East’s leading scorer, and Corbin Krider, who was one of the Mustangs’ quickest players, are no longer with the program.
Ledbetter expects Thomas to enroll at South Rowan and Krider at Carson.
“We’ll be OK,” Ledbetter said. “We’ve still got a lot of kids who want to play basketball for East Rowan. A lot of people looked at last season (East was 2-23) like it was nothing but gloom and doom, but I didn’t. You can measure success in different ways. I know how hard our guys worked. I know how much better they got.”
East will be super-young again in 2025-26, with guard Aiden Lino expected to be the only senior on the roster.
But a lot of Mustangs are a lot better now than they were a year ago, including baseball standouts Brady Ailshie and Logan Bradley. They were able to go to Wheatmore and to Catawba with the basketball team.
“I think Brady grows 2 inches every time I see him,” Ledbetter said with a laugh. “The weight room is really important for us, and Logan got bigger and stronger. Blake Shive looks like a different guy now. He’s grown quite a bit — bigger, taller, stronger. These kids were just so young last year and a year of maturity as a teenager means a lot.
Youngsters such as rangy Augusta “AB” Brent and guard Jaden Eudy have made serious strides in the last year, Ledbetter said.
Ledbetter said there were a few players who had gotten discouraged with basketball and had give up the sport, but are contemplating a comeback. He hopes they come out.
There’s also quite a few promising athletes in the rising freshman class.
“A lot of good baseball players,” Ledbetter said. “But some of them play basketball.”
