2A Baseball: Bearcats Survive Tense Regional Tests to Reach Semifinals

It sounds simple enough: Show up as the favorite. Win two games. Advance to the state semifinals.

In regional baseball, though, business as usual is usually unusual, which is why W.F. West spent the last 10 weeks preparing for Saturday.

“We’ve told our guys that this is the hardest day in high school baseball. It’s going to be a grind,” Bearcat coach Bryan Bullock said. “All season long, even when the game was a little lopsided, we remind our guys afterwards that it’s not going to be like this all season.”

And Saturday, indeed, was unlike the majority of the Bearcats’ season: The pitchers gave up hits and the offense had to play catch-up, particularly in a back-and-forth regional finale.

After a 5-2 win over Ephrata and then a tense 8-6 win over North Kitsap, though, the Bearcats could appreciate the dramatics.

“We’re good at making them interesting,” senior first baseman Nole Wollan said. “These are tough. … You lose, you’re done, so it’s a lot more intense. There’s a lot more on the line than just a league game.”

And now, finally, the Bearcats can talk about next weekend, their return trip to the State 2A tournament, and improving on last year’s runner-up finish.

“I think the kids have understood the expectations before the season,” Bullock said. “We haven’t talked about getting back to Yakima, but I couldn’t be more proud of these guys for living up to the expectations that were placed before them.”

The Bearcats improved to 22-2 with Saturday’s wins and ran their winning streak to 22 games. They haven’t lost since a March 10 twinbill in Anacortes, just a week after a big portion of the roster was playing for a state basketball championship.

“Since Day 1, when we went to Anacortes, we’ve been preparing for this,” Wollan said. “You just don’t know until you’ve been here, and we’ve just been mentally preparing for these tough games for the whole year.”

And, as the dust settled at Ed Wheeler Field and assistant coach Jason Kelley shook off his Gatorade-cooler drenching, the Bearcats learned their opponent for Friday’s state semifinals: defending champion Ellensburg.

“We got Ellensburg? Good. I’m so tired of those guys,” Wollan said, laughing and adding that his teams have never beat the Bulldogs. “It’s time to change that. You’ve got to beat the best to be the best.”

Ellensburg beat W.F. West 5-1 in last year’s state title game.

“I think we’re going to have a little chip on our shoulder, definitely,” Bearcat pitcher Brock Jones said. “We’re going to be ready to go, and we’re looking for that state championship ring.”

W.F. West and Ellensburg face off at 10 a.m. in the State 2A semifinals in Yakima’s County Stadium.

Regional Finals: W.F. West 8, North Kitsap 6

The Bearcats had a 3-0 lead just six minutes after the first pitch, but it didn’t stay simple for long.

North Kitsap’s bats made sure of it.

The Vikings took advantage of seven walks and three hit batters, and worked in nine hits, to take a brief lead and keep things close throughout.

“We played two really good teams, and we competed all over the place,” Bullock said. “We competed on the mound, we competed at the plate, and every time somebody got ahead of us, we answered right back, which is a great sign for us.”

Tyson Guerrero started for the Bearcats and struck out six in four innings, with five walks and two hit batters. Brock Jones closed things out, fanning four in three innings and getting a fly-out to center and a strikeout to end the game with a runner on second.

“I gave up more hits than I would have liked, but I had run support from the hitters, so I could live with that,” Jones said. “We got the win, and that’s all that matters.”

Dakota Hawkins and Jones each hit RBI singles in the first inning and Leandre Gaines knocked in a run with a ground ball to put the Bearcats up 3-0.

The Vikings then tied things up in the fourth, loading the bases on two walks and a hit batter before Ryan Hecker’s sacrifice fly and Tucker Gowin’s RBI double tied things up. An error on a ground ball let the Vikings take a 4-3 lead.

“It was definitely some pretty tough teams,” Jones said of Saturday’s action. “Even though we’re, like, really good, they still came up and chipped away. But we came up and chipped away a little more.”

Guerrero and Lane Douglass opened the fifth with singles. A ground ball from Wollan was mishandled to let a run score, and Hawkins hit a sac fly to put W.F. West back in front at 5-4.

Douglass hit a sacrifice fly in the sixth. Freshman Drew Reynolds singled in a run in the seventh, and Max Miller’s sacrifice fly wrapped the Bearcats’ scoring one batter later.

At that point all the Bearcats had to do was hold on. Kyle Green doubled in a run to cut the lead to 8-6 before Jones closed out the win.

“It had to be a team effort. It couldn’t be just one player, like it had been in the past,” Jones said. “Everybody came through. There were some clutch hits, some clutch plays, and we just grinded it out.”

Guerrero, Douglass, Hawkins and Reynolds each had two hits for W.F. West.

Notes: North Kitsap finished the season with a 13-7 record. Gowin went 2 for 4 and Peter Klos and Max Larsen were each 2 for 3 for the Vikings. … W.F. West struck out just twice against North Kitsap.

Guerrero’s Homer Helps Bearcats Beat Ephrata

Tyson Guerrero did just the right thing at just the right time.

The Bearcat senior homered to right field in the bottom of the fifth inning, breaking a 2-2 tie and helping W.F. West beat Ephrata, 5-2, in a first-round 2A regional baseball game Saturday at Ed Wheeler Field.

Up to that point, though, it was anything but easy for the Bearcats.

Ephrata managed eight hits off of W.F. West ace Brandon White, stringing together a pair of singles for a run in the first inning and getting an RBI double from Zach Berryman for a run in the third.

The Bearcats, meanwhile, had scored twice in the second frame on an RBI double from Leandre Gaines and a booted groundball from Max Miller that scored Gaines.

Josiah Johnson led off the fifth inning with a single and scored on Guerrero’s homer, which came on the first pitch of the at-bat.

Gaines was hit by a pitch in the fifth and came around to score on a passed ball from W.F. West’s fifth run.

White worked six innings, striking out nine without issuing a walk. Brock Jones took over in the seventh and walked a batter before getting a strikeout and a double play to end the game.

Ephrata starter Gunnar Falstad pitched five innings, striking out three with six hits and three earned runs without a walk.

Berryman was 3 for 3 for the Tigers, who finished the season with a 17-8 record.

North Kitsap Coasts to an 11-1 Win to End Tigers’ Season

A slow start was too much for Centralia to overcome — particularly against stiff pitching from North Kitsap starter Ryan Hecker.

Hecker retired the first six batters he faced, and in that short span the Vikings gave him a 9-0 cushion. That was more than enough offense in an 11-1 win in the first round of the 2A regional playoffs on Saturday at Ed Wheeler Field.

The loss brought the season to a close for Centralia, while North Kitsap advanced to the regional finals.

Hecker, a senior righthander bound for the University of San Francisco, got through the first two innings on 21 pitches without allowing a ball out of the outfield.

“We knew that, from every report we got on him, that he would be tough, and that he would give us some problems,” Centralia coach Rex Ashmore said. “Obviously he was everything that we though, and then when we feel behind we knew it would be tough to come back against that.”

The Tigers, though, didn’t do themselves any favors early on. North Kitsap used a leadoff single, an error, a walk, a fielder’s choice and a grounder back to the pitcher to score two runs in the first inning, and pushed across seven in the second on five hits, two errors and two walks.

Centralia managed a run in the fourth on a single from Jerod Frias and an RBI ground ball from Broc Selstrom, but the Vikings held a double-figure lead by that point.

Conner Wasson, Cameron Erickson, Kolby Sharp and Derek Beairsto all added hits for the Tigers.

Still, Ashmore noted, the Tigers (15-10) will be able to reflect on the season as a success. Centralia was picked to finish fourth in the Evergreen 2A Conference, but took second and qualified for regionals with a third-place finish.

“Right now it sucks, but we’re going to, especially our seniors, they’re going to look back and over the season and think about how much we grew,” Ashmore said. “To make regionals the way we did says a lot about the character of our kids.”

It was the final game for Centralia seniors Frias, Selstrom, Sharp, Nolan Miller, Mason Titus and Nick Stulken.

“I couldn’t be more proud of our kids and our coaches,” Ashmore said. “We made good strides this year, and our senior class, those kids will be missed.”

Notes: Hecker pitched 2 2/3 innings, striking out four and allowing one hit without a walk. He was pulled after 34 pitches to keep his eligibility intact for the afternoon regional game. … Isaac Richardson was 3 for 3 and Tucker Gowin was 2 for 3 for North Kitsap.