SIMSBURY, Conn. – Dusty Shimkus has plenty of great memories from his baseball days at Metro-East Lutheran, especially during the Knights’ run to a 27-12 record and a second-place finish in the Class 2A state tournament in 2009.
But when it comes to Metro’s influence on his life and his career, one snapshot, in particular, stands out.
“My freshman year with Metro, I was playing third base, but I had a wild arm, and I made an error on a ground ball and threw it four rows deep into the bleachers,” Shimkus said. “I went to the pitcher and said, ‘my bad,’ but coach (Scott) Downing called a timeout and brought the infield in.
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“He acted like he was talking to the pitcher, but he was talking to me. He told me when you make an error, don’t say ‘my bad’ because we all mess up. Just move on to the next pitch. That’s a censored version of how he put it, but it’s something I take with me to this day.”
Shimkus, 31, is an associate in Raytheon’s Leader Development Program, specifically for Operations and Supply Chain, and lives in Simsbury, Connecticut, which is outside of Hartford.
As a senior at MELHS in 2009, he earned first-team All-State honors as a third baseman.
“I’ve had different experiences in such as military training and college and I’m in my 30s now, but I still fall back on lessons I learned in baseball,” said Shimkus, who spent eight years in the Army after graduating from Norwich University. “There’s a cliché in baseball that you fail more than you succeed, but it’s all about how you respond and how you move on from it.”
Shimkus is the nephew of former Congressman John Shimkus, who served as the U.S. representative for Illinois’ 15th Congressional District from 1997 to 2021.
Shimkus’ mother, Dorothy Joyce, is a teacher at Renfro Elementary School in Collinsville.
“My dad has lived in Europe my whole life and he’s a contractor for the Army and I have a relationship with him now, but he wasn’t around when I was growing up,” said Shimkus, who is a Collinsville native. “My grandfather, Gene Shimkus, was kind of a father figure for me.
“He and my grandmother (Kathleen Shimkus) both passed away in the last year and my grandfather died of COVID. When I was at Metro, they were known for being at every single game and every single practice.”
Despite growing up in basketball-crazy Collinsville, baseball was always the No. 1 sport for Shimkus.
“In grade school, I played baseball and basketball, but when I got to high school, I focused on baseball,” Shimkus said. “I ran cross country for one year as a sophomore at Metro, but the only reason I did it was that coach Downing said I had to get faster.
“I went to Holy Cross Lutheran in Collinsville, which is one of the elementary feeder schools for Metro. I always knew I was going to go there, so it was never really an option for me to go to Collinsville High School.”
As a freshman at MELHS, Shimkus got a taste of success in baseball right away.
In 2006, the Knights were 30-6 and claimed a Class A regional title with a 5-3 win over Hillsboro. Their season ended with an 11-1 loss to Columbia in the first round of the sectional.
It was the first of three regional championship teams that Shimkus played for at Metro.
He earned a starting role at third base and batted .304 with 25 RBIs.
“The guys who were the seniors on that team weren’t around when we got to the state tournament three years later, but they laid the foundation for us,” Shimkus said. “I have to give a shout out to them.”
MELHS claimed another Class A regional title in Shimkus’ sophomore season in 2007 with a 3-2 victory over Hardin Calhoun. The Knights fell 4-1 to Hillsboro in the sectional semifinals and finished 19-8-1 overall.
Shimkus, who split time at second base and the outfield, batted .270 with 23 RBIs and 15 stolen bases.
During his junior season in 2008, both Shimkus and the team fell short of their goals.
The Knights posted a 15-12 record, losing 6-3 to Gibault in the first round of a Class 2A regional in the first year of the four-class format for baseball.
Shimkus moved back to third base and had a solid season, batting .293 with 15 RBIs.
But he wasn’t satisfied and vowed that both he and his team would be better the next year.
In 2009, MELHS won 10 in a row after a 17-11 start and claimed the first sectional championship in program history with a 14-3 win over Du Quoin.
Metro beat Herrin 7-3 to win the super-sectional at GCS Ballpark and advanced to the state finals with a 7-5 victory over Morrison in a semifinal game at Route 66 Stadium in Joliet.
“The Morrison game was probably the most fun baseball game I’ve played in my life,” Shimkus said. “We matched up well and it was back and forth, but we got the winning runs in the top of the seventh on a two-run single by Taylor Judge.
“It was tied 5-5 and I led off the inning with a triple. Joe McCall reached on an error and stole second base before Taylor got the hit.”
The victory sent the Knights to the state championship game, where they lost 8-1 to defending champion Stanford Olympia.
Shimkus, meanwhile, earned All-State honors by batting .483 with four home runs, 37 RBIs and 16 stolen bases.
“At the beginning of the season, making it to the state championship game was never on our radar,” Shimkus said. “We just wanted that regional championship and anything after was playing with house money.”
Shimkus credits Downing, who had a 136-58 record during a six-year span from 2004 to 2009, for much of the team’s success.
“Coach Downing was a very demanding coach, but I don’t think I would have gotten through Norwich without playing for him,” Shimkus said. “It could be hard playing for him, but he built a sense of responsibility and a demand for excellence into his players.”
After graduating from MELHS, Shimkus continued his baseball career at Norwich University, a private military college in Northfield, Vermont.
“My uncle John is a West Point graduate, but with Norwich being a Division III program, I knew I could play baseball in college,” Shimkus said. “The other thing was that I wanted to get out of my uncle’s shadow. I didn’t want to go to West Point and have people say I only got in because he was a Congressman.
“I knew I wanted to go to a military school and Norwich was a military school that gave me a chance to play baseball.”
While Shimkus benefited from the strong academics at Norwich, his baseball experience was frustrating at times due to the program’s lack of success.
“Norwich had a reputation for being good at everything except baseball, so it was definitely a different environment than Metro,” Shimkus said. “I had some personal success there and broke a few records and earned some accolades, but I missed being part of a winning team.”
In 2013, Shimkus graduated from Norwich with a bachelor’s degree in history.
From there, he went straight into the Army as a transportation officer.
His first duty station was at Fort Eustis in Virginia, where he served from May 2013 to April 2017. He then served from April 2017 to October 2017 at Fort Lee in Virginia before spending three and a half years (October 2017 to May 2021) at Fort Bliss in Texas.
While stationed at Fort Bliss, he did a 10-month deployment to South Korea with the 1st Armored Division from October 2018 to July 2019.
“Last July I decided to get out of the military and put down roots somewhere and now I’m in the Army Reserve and living in Connecticut,” Shimkus said. “I married a New England girl, and she became Lutheran for me, so I let her decide where we were going to live,” Shimkus said, laughing. “We targeted Connecticut because it’s a good balance between and a good corporate base and a relatively reasonable cost of living.
“Raytheon is a defense contractor, and it has four subsidiaries and the one I work for is Collins Aerospace. They do everything on planes except for the body and the place where I work specifically does air management systems, which is cabin pressure and air conditioning and things like that.”
Shimkus and his wife, Erin, have three children – daughter Harper, 4; and sons Easton, 3; and Cooper, 8 months.
Between the COVID-19 pandemic and living on the East Coast, Shimkus doesn’t get back to the Edwardsville area as much as he would like. But he keeps in touch with several people from MELHS.
“I still talk to coach Downing and Mr. (Jon) Giordano quite a bit, as well as some of my baseball teammates,” Shimkus said. “Taylor Judge and I went to school together all the way from preschool through our senior year at Metro, so I can go for a year without talking to him and when I see him, it’s like we saw each other yesterday.”
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WHERE ARE THEY NOW?: Shimkus played key role in lifting Knights to state finals - The Edwardsville Intelligencer
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