Ex-Center Grove star wants to take baseball prowess to Purdue

Brock Koehler grew accustomed to announcers butchering his last name throughout his varsity baseball career at Center Grove.

Mistakenly, the recent graduate’s surname often is pronounced Koe-ler, with a long ‘O’ sound. The actual pronunciation is Kay-lor, which rhymes with Taylor.

“Every single time I went out on road games, and even sometimes at home games, someone messed up my last name,” said Koehler, a first baseman who made a different name for himself as an offensive leader during his senior season for the Trojans.

A member of the South Team for Saturday and Sunday’s 2012 Indiana High School North-South All-Star Series in Jasper, Koehler hit .402 with six home runs and 30 RBIs and scored 32 runs for the Trojans.

The production was good enough to draw the attention of Purdue coaches, who have invited Koehler to attempt to join the Boilermakers as a walk-on.

Koehler’s high school career, however, almost never got started.

He wasn’t particularly drawn to baseball — or to any other sport, for that matter.

“Growing up, I was so shy that I wasn’t sure I wanted to even play high school sports,” he said. “Obviously that changed. But it never was a dream of mine to play high school sports.

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