Whiteoak High School coaching legend Chris Veidt was officially inducted into the Ohio High School Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame Friday afternoon at the Columbus Hilton in Easton.

The induction for the 49th class of the OHSBCA Hall of Fame was held during the organization’s annual state clinic.

Veidt played baseball at Wilmington College in 1985 and 1986 and then coached for the Quakers. He was an assistant to Brooks Lawrence, former Cincinnati Reds pitcher, who was manager for Wilmington College baseball from 1988 to 1992.

While at WC, Veidt also served as the coach of the Post 129 American Legion baseball team in Hillsboro and led the team to the state tournament in 1998.

In 1992, Veidt was hired as Whiteoak’s baseball coach. In 32 seasons, he has a 462-346 record. His Wildcat baseball teams have been state ranked 10 times, finishing as the poll champion in 2018.

Veidt has won 12 Southern Hills Athletic Conference championships, 16 sectional titles, four district championships and a regional title.

In 2018, Veidt and the Wildcats advanced to the state final four.

Veidt has been the SHAC Coach of the Year five times, the Southeast District Coach of the Year nine times and Mizuno and Augusta State Coach of the Year twice.

When Veidt came to Whiteoak in 1992, both the school’s softball and baseball teams played on the same field with no grass and no pitcher’s mound that wasn’t tiled for drainage. Since then, the school has put in a new drainage system, grass, a press box, permanent seating, a fence and permanent diamond. The school has a separate diamond for softball now also built a new indoor training facility behind the field.

The baseball complex at Whiteoak, during Veidt’s tenure, has been the Southeast District Field of the Year 20 times and the the first Mar-Co Clay State Field of the Year in 2017.

Veidt was inducted into the Southeast District Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 2014. He served on the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games training site staff in Atlanta, Georgia.

Veidt is a 1982 graduate of Logan High School and a 2023 inductee into the Logan High School Athletic Hall of Fame.

His mentors he credits for much of his success include his high school coach Ron Janey and Janey’s assistant, Ted McCormick; Cincinnati Reds Hall of Famer Brooks Lawrence, who Veidt coached with at Wilmington College; Dick Shaffer, who ran Shaffer Park in Hillsboro and was the longtime American Legion baseball coach; Dean Schuler, a former coach at Lucasville Valley High School in Scioto County and Dennis Haggerty, a former coach at Northwest High School in Scioto County.

“This will be year 33, but as long as my health holds out, and as long as they’ll have me, I plan on staying,” said Veidt.

Veidt and his wife, Kelli, live in Wilmington. Their daughter, Olivia, is a senior softball player at Lander University in Greenwood, South Carolina.