Lightning, flooding and more. Tri-Cities Prep found a way to clinch WA 2B championship

Baseball can be such a mental game.

Doesn’t matter if you can hit the ball, pitch it or throw it. If you don’t have the right frame of mind to overcome hurdles, you won’t win.

Jason Jarrett’s Tri-Cities Prep Jaguars overcame all sorts of problems a few weekends ago to win another Class 2B state baseball championship that started in Ephrata and ended up 90 miles away in Yakima.

The Jaguars finished the season with a 23-4 record with a team batting average of .358, and a pitching earned run average of 1.62 a game. But it was a battle to get there.

“I knew there was something special about these guys going into the season,” said Jarrett. “But do we have the grit? Are we mentally tough? Talent-wise, we are really good.”

Prep’s pitching this season, as Jarrett said, has been “phenomenal. Our top four guys could get the job done (on the mound). And 5 through 8 are pretty good.”

Hitting was good, “especially when we started emphasizing hitting the off-speed stuff.”

Defense? Outside of some questionable throwing errors, sufficed.

But a doubleheader split with Warden — no offense to the Cougars, but Prep had never lost a game to Warden — had Jarrett thinking of ways for his guys to use their heads.

“We had to try to get these guys to wake up,” said Jarrett, who was always looking for ways to get his players’ attention.

After all, Jarrett once asked an eye doctor to speak to his team about leaving their cell phones alone before a game so that the eye strain wouldn’t affect their at-bats.

Time to focus

This time, it was Jags assistant coach Mark Nelson who suggested getting Gabe Boruff — an Ephrata friend, who played in the Kansas City Royals organization — to talk to the Jaguars.

What was expected to be a 20-minute talk ended up being for almost 2 hours, and he talked about what the players thought their team identity was. To think team first and sacrifice for their teammates.

Whatever Boruff said, it worked.

“It was a different total buy-in,” Jarrett said.

The Jaguars — who lost the Eastern Washington Athletic Conference East Division regular-season title to rival River View — started to hunker down and made play after play.

In the district tournament, Prep went 3-0, and beat River View 8-6 in the title game.

At the state tournament, the Jaguars beat River View 2-0 in the quarterfinals before taking down top-seeded Brewster 6-4 (in 8 innings) in the semifinals, and then edging Adna 5-4 for the title.

That’s impressive enough. But it was how Prep got it done that was amazing.

Start with the semifinals in Ephrata that lasted so long on Friday night of Memorial Day weekend.

“There was a WIAA Zoom meeting with the state-tournament coaches,” said Jarrett. “We talked about lightning, and how there would be a 30-minute delay when anyone saw a strike.”

In the 1B games beforehand, there were two 30-minute delays, and it put everything an hour behind.

What didn’t come up was the distance of that lightning strike.

“During our Brewster game, there was a lightning strike, but it was in Coulee City, 40 miles away,” said Jarrett. “We were down by one run, and it put us on a 30-minute delay. We couldn’t do anything about it, because the state never talked about distance lightning strikes.”

The Jags hung in there and beat Brewster in 8 innings. But it was late.

“It was 11:30 p.m.,” said Jarrett, who had his team staying at the Best Western in Ephrata. “So we need to get something to eat, get in bed and lights out at 1 a.m.”

Weather trouble

Jarrett and his staff planned to let the guys sleep in, have a late checkout. They’d go down to the river, where some batting cages were, have lunch.

Prep’s title game against Adna wasn’t until 7 p.m. that night.

Here’s where things get interesting: the weather wasn’t cooperating.

Flash floods in Ephrata created unplayable field conditions.

Tournament officials, hoping the weather would break, finally asked the 1B teams if they could go north to Wenatchee and play their games at Recreation Park.

Meanwhile, officials told the 2B squads they needed to head south 90 minutes away in Yakima. That was at 6:45 p.m., just 15 minutes before the game was supposed to be played in Ephrata.

Adna’s team left in their vans, while the Jags boarded a bus.

By the time the Jaguars got to Parker Field on the Yakima Valley Community College campus, Adna’s players had plenty of time to warm up.

“We had no time to warm up, and the game was set to begin at 9:15 p.m.,” said Jarrett. “I hate being rushed. We didn’t get to hit before the game.”

What’s more, with the uncertain conditions, many Prep fans drove home from Ephrata back to the Tri-Cities.

Adna, on the other hand, had the school’s softball team in Yakima already. So they had more fans at the game.

‘No quit in them’

Despite all of that, Tri-Cities Prep found a way to win.

“Prep guys are grinders. They have no quit in them,” said Jarrett.

Owen Janke’s RBI single in the bottom of the seventh was the game-winner walk-off.

“He’s a sophomore, he’s a diehard Tri-Cities Prep guy,” said Jarrett. “Janke worked a 3-2 count. I closed my eyes, and said a prayer. It was so cool. That kid has worked so hard this year.”

This is Prep’s second state title. The Jaguars won their first in 2018.

But there could be more on the way. Jarrett loses just one senior to graduation.

In addition, Jarrett coaches most of these guys during the summer with the Tri-City Badgers, an independent team that gets in about 35 games.

“It absolutely 100 percent is a big key for us,” said Jarrett. “It’s the biggest success to keeping these guys together. We already have 12 committed freshmen for next year, and seven of those kids are playing summer ball with us.”

It’s why the future is so bright for Tri-Cities Prep baseball.

Prep team members are: Will Balcom, Kasen Clements, Henry Douglas, Jameson Elliott, Jarrett Garza, Sol Ham, Ethan Hedgpeth, Owen Janke, Aiden McCabe, Michael McCabe, Josh Nolan, Carsten Seeliger, Ethan Seeliger, Caleb Sherfey, Evan Sherfey, and Jacob Sherfey.

Jarrett’s assistant coaches are David Price, Mark Nelson, Brady Ritala and Kobe Domuo.

Boys soccer

Four athletes from Sunnyside were named to the Columbia Basin Big Nine Conference boys soccer first-team all-conference recently.

Junior Daniel Farias, senior Oscar Gurrola, junior Kevin Hernandez, and senior David Ochoa were all voted to the first team by the conference coaches.

Jeff Morrow is former sports editor for the Tri-City Herald.