Prep insider: Toffey has helped Winchendon become baseball factory

Nick Pappas spent four years at Boston Latin before enrolling at The Winchendon School. (Courtesy photo)

The first time John Toffey walked onto the Winchendon School campus in late 2018, he knew right away there was much work to be done. Toffey came to this Central Mass. community, which hugs the New Hampshire border, with a highly regarded reputation of coaching excellence. He was looking to bring that same kind of success here.

In his previous stops at Salisbury School and Cheshire Academy, Toffey engineered both programs into fine-tuned baseball machines. At Winchendon, some felt the idea of him turning this lackluster program into something identical seemed like a bit of a reach. Prior to his arrival, Winchendon was perceived more as being a junior varsity level program, playing a limited number of games, with no fall season and no preseason trips. In essence, you could say everything was against Toffey. Yet Toffey thought otherwise.

Orchestrated with careful precision and well-planned objectives on how things needed to be done, Toffey immediately went to work. From the outset, he cast zero doubts that he could achieve a comparable scenario here to the ones he left at Salisbury and Cheshire.