At the age of 23, Ryan Byrd has seen his dream come true. He’s been a baseball player since he was old enough to play T-ball, but even before that he was pitching stones in the creek with his grandfather at Cassidy Park, working on his pitches at the age of 2.

But on June 23 his dream of pitching in the College World Series became a reality. “Being a senior, it meant so much to me just to have the coach come and ask me if I wanted to pitch.” Although not his best performance ever, Byrd did what he had to do to keep the Tigers in, what turned out to be, a losing effort.

But on the following day, his dream of winning a national championship came true. “(Game One) was the best game I’ve ever been a part of,” he said. But what was really special to Byrd is “to be a part of LSU history.” When the final out was called in Game Three, “It was huge adrenalin rush. I realized, ‘This is going to happen,’” he said. Heady stuff for a kid from Bogalusa.

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All right, he lived here just a few months after his birth before moving to Denham Springs, but he’s a Bogalusa boy, says his father, Keith Byrd, and he enjoys coming to Bogalusa to visit relatives and friends.

Today he’s in town to ride in the Fourth of July parade, along with another Ryan and fellow teammate, Ryan Schimpf. They will face many adoring fans along the parade route. Tiger fans are in plentiful supply in this neck of the woods.

Byrd has now graduated from LSU and is “not 100% sure” about his plans for the future. But, said Byrd, “I’d like “give back to Louisiana and everyone who helped support me.” That, of course, is a very large number of people, including his uncle, the late Alan Byrd, who coached at Bogalusa High School for 33 years before his death in 2007. “He was a big influence on me,” said Byrd, “and he was one of my biggest fans. I know he was with me.”

Ryan Schimpf. a junior at LSU, had a big part in the Tigers winning a national title. With 22 home runs and 70 RBIs, his hot bat helped pave the way for their success all season long, up to and including the third game of the CWS.

But it was that final game and the final out that brought it all home for Schimpf. When Louis Coleman got that final out, Schimpf said he was “caught up in the moment. It was surreal. We had talked about it all season and we did it. It was hard to grasp.”.

Growing up watching LSU baseball and the teams that won championships in the ‘90s, Schimpf was also very proud “just to know our team will be a part of LSU history.”

Now he’s got a decision to make: Having been drafted in the fifth round by the Toronto Blue Jays, will he come back for his senior year or begin his professional career?

For Schimpf, it seems pretty simple. “I came out this year to win a national championship and we did that. So why not go out on top?”

Why not, indeed. He’ll find out in the next few days just what kind of deal he’ll be offered by the Blue Jays and where he will be playing his first season of professional baseball.

Wherever that is, he’s ready to go.