Baseball man Riser moves back into the dugout at Carolina Forest

Riser
SHEPHERDSTOWN — “Hitting instructor” has been a tag often worn by baseball “lifer” Wayne Riser.
So, after one year as the athletic director (a position in which he was not on any baseball field) at Berkeley County’s Spring Mills High School, Riser has accepted the post as head baseball coach at Carolina Forest High School in Myrtle Beach, S.C.
Riser’s baseball path might have taken a circuitous route, but it has been a successful one.
He was an outfielder and pitcher at Hedgesville High School. From there, he played collegiately at Handerson State University in Arkadelphia, Ark.
But he returned to the Eastern Panhandle to finish his college days at Shepherd University.
Upon graduation from Shepherd, Riser spent two years as an assistant coach with the Rams when they were in the WVIAC.
Then under his head coaching direction, Shepherd joined with West Virginia State University and its coach, Cal Bailey, as the two most consistent contenders for conference championships that league could produce.
At Shepherd, Riser transformed aged Fairfax Field from a place where football was practiced in the fall to a bona fide baseball facility, where the sport flourished under his direction.
He raised money for his program and plowed it back into tuition grants for his players, as well as much-needed upgrades to his playing field.
In 22 seasons at Shepherd, Riser’s teams won a collective 512 games and made him a prime candidate for the school’s Athletic Hall of Fame. He was named to the Shepherd University Athletic Hall of Fame in 2008.
During his summers, Riser was an instructor at Cal Ripken Sr.’s baseball camp in Emmitsburg, Md. at Mount St. Mary’s University. His title was “hitting instructor.”
From Shepherd, he went to coach at the University of Mary Washington, an NCAA Division III school in Fredericksburg, Va. His baseball record there was 142-117 in his seven years on that campus.
During the 2022-2023 high school year, he became the athletic director at Spring Mills High School, but did not coach baseball.
To keep his hand in baseball, Riser served as the hitting coach for the Johnson City Doughboys for the last two summers. The Doughboys are in a summer collegiate league that has previously placed teams in the now-defunct professional Appalachian League.
And now, the latest turn on the baseball path of Wayne Riser takes him to the sandy southern shores of South Carolina and Myrtle Beach’s Carolina Forest High School.
Along with being in Shepherd’s Athletic Hall of Fame, he’s in the Hedgesville High School Athletic Hall of Fame.
At Carolina Forest, he just might see Jefferson High School and coach John Lowery in the annual high school baseball tournament that wraps around the Spring Break-Easter vacation the Cougars get.
Jefferson once played the Panthers in that event, defeating the Carolinians, 13-5.
Wayne Riser will be back on a baseball diamond — where he has never been far removed since going on a travel agent’s around-the-baseball-globe venture that has carried him from Hedgesville to Arkadelphia to Shepherdstown to Fredericksburg to Oklahoma as an assistant college coach for one season and back to Berkeley County.
The “lifer” is back in a familiar place — guiding a baseball team and thinking about hitting.