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MAYODAN -- Mike Dalton isn't shocked that his McMichael baseball team is getting set for the school's first state final appearance today against Morganton Patton.

In fact, the first-year head coach has seen this one in the making for years.

"Yeah, I knew it was coming," Dalton said. "I projected it when I interviewed for the (coaching) job, when coach (John) Hall got it six years ago, seven, that I had a group coming that I that knew if they stayed together ... "

As a longtime middle school coach, Dalton saw and even coached this current group of seniors as they made their way up the ladder from Little League all the way to high school. Eight of nine players in the starting lineup are seniors (really nine of 10 because Dalton uses the designated hitter), and most have been playing together all the way through.

"Ever since middle school or whatever and then to now, it's just easy to play together almost because &ellipses; somebody messes up you can tell them without them thinking something about you or whatever," center fielder Ethan Satterfield said.

And as Dalton puts it: "Yeah, sometimes they hate each other, but they always love each other."

Not surprisingly, a team with such continuity has some well-defined roles.

There's Joseph Hughes, the East Carolina signee who will start today's opener in the best-of-three series and enters the game with a 1.08 ERA. Corey Shelton, who assistant coach Bob Casto calls "the glue of the whole team," has had the fun task of catching Hughes' 90-mph fastball with an injured left thumb.

Satterfield supplies the speed, and Casto said the only reason he doesn't have more stolen bases than his total of 20 is because of his 21 extra-base hits (10 doubles, four triples and seven homers).

"(Dalton) pretty much just tells me just go whenever I want to," Satterfield said.

Shortstop Craig Erskine, the North State 2-A Conference's player of the year, has been the other key cog in the Phoenix lineup, with nine homers, 32 RBIs and a .391 batting average.

After hitting .263 last year -- Dalton said he thought Erskine tried to carry the team -- he got his swing back on track playing in a college prospect league this past fall with former major league pitcher Scott Bankhead's baseball academy.

"Dropping my shoulder, hitting pop-ups," Erskine said were some of the issues. "Now I'm lining out and getting it out of the ballpark a little more often."

He's also walking. A lot.

Erskine has 39 bases on balls and an unworldly .617 on-base percentage.

"He's got a very good strike zone," Dalton said. "And that's the only thing sometimes that he's going to have to realize in college (Western Carolina) is he still thinks the umpire should have his strike zone."

Erskine has also been a steady reliever for the Phoenix, and Dalton mentioned him as a possibility for Game 3 on Saturday (if necessary) after Steven Trant pitches the second game.

"Craig's mainly our reliever, but if we need him for the third game, he's always available because Craig wants the ball," Dalton said. "When the game's on the line, he wants the ball, and that's all you can ask."

But one of the reasons McMichael is in the state final series to begin with is that no one player has had to carry the load all year. Casto emphasized the bottom of the lineup coming through in the semifinal series against Fairmont, and the team approach was never more evident than in the round, when Trant, a senior, hit his first two homers of the season -- the second a walk-off shot to send the Phoenix to the semis.

And perhaps it's fitting that with a team so defined by group effort and long-term development, the community support has been nothing short of monumental.

"We've had more fans than every road team, and that includes the one we just played three hours away," Casto said. "We outnumbered them."

After Casto's wife started a project last Saturday to make T-shirts for the state finals, there were 325 pre-orders by Monday and about 360 through Wednesday.

So it's a safe bet there'll be a few McMichael supporters in Raleigh this weekend.

"It's just amazing what the community has done to support these kids," Dalton said.

Contact Jesse Baumgartner at 373-7091 or jesse.baumgartner@news-record.com