Band of brothers: Mount Si baseball’s big season grows on lifelong, family bonds

Published 12:06 pm Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Senior brothers Trevor and Robb Lane talk about cars, girls and, occasionally, grades at home. But the major passion in the Lane household is sports, with baseball top of the list.

“We talk about baseball all the time,” said Trevor, a first baseman and pitcher on the Mount Si squad where his brother is a catcher and fielder.

“Growing up, it was baseball, basketball, football,” said Robb. “Even soccer, when we were little.”

But “you need to pick, eventually,” Trevor said, and for the Lane brothers, the diamond called.

“It’s unlike any other sport,” Robb said.

They played on the same Little League teams, played year-round honing their game, then split up to face off. Robb plays on the Washington A’s, Trevor on the Washington Brewers select team. Robb jokes about how he broke a bat on a brotherly pitch, but still got the RBI.

“He’s more ‘power,’ I’m more ‘on-base percentage,'” Robb said. “I’m more to get on base, he’s more to hit me in.”

The Lane brothers are among a crop of Mount Si seniors who have played together, some for more than a decade. Many of these teens already found diamond glory in state Little League runs.

Head coach Elliott Cribby purposefully loaded the team with seniors because of that deep team dynamic.

“It’s a mature team,” Trevor said. “We’ve been together since we were 12…”

“…since All Stars, playing at the complex over behind Les Schwab, age 7,” adds Robb.

“You want that closeness on the team,” Trevor said. “We have to be close. We live together.”

Seniors Dustin Breshears and Tim Proudfoot have played on every single youth baseball team together. Their journey won’t end this spring. The two plan to attend Bellevue College and play next year.

“Everyone’s bonded like a family,” Proudfoot said. “We know how everyone reacts to certain situations. It makes it easier to have success out on the field.”

In the boys’ 15-2 season, “we’ve had good team chemistry,” Breshears said. “We’ve lost a few, but everyone’s been able to pick each other up and learn from it.”

The boys knew coming in this year that they had something special.

“This is the same all-star team, the same crop of kids” that made state two years in a row as middle schoolers, Proudfoot said.

“We knew it would be senior year when we all came together again,” he said.

“When we were younger, we made mistakes we didn’t know how to correct,” Breshears said. “Now, we know our swings, we can correct ourselves.”

Breshears and Proudfoot advise younger players to practice toward perfection.

“You’ve got to work on the weakest thing,” Proudfoot said.

“Baseball is a game of highs and lows,” Breshears said. “You’ve just got to stay positive.”

Nail-biting finish

Team dynamics helped Mount Si overcome Interlake in a home nail-biter.

The game was scoreless until the fifth, when the Saints’ Kamana Adriano came home on an error by Lane. Then, Ari Kira scored on an error by the second baseman.

Mount Si countered in the sixth when Proudfoot got on base with help from a shortstop error, advanced to second on a wild pitch to Max Brown, who walked. Proudfoot and Brown came home on a Justin Henak hit.

A scoreless seventh sent the game into extra innings. Pitcher Hudson Luxich and the defense held off the Saints, and Proudfoot, first on the plate for Mount Si, whacked a home run to end the game.

At the plate, he didn’t dare to hope for a dinger. But with a strike and a ball, Proudfoot predicted a curve ball from pitcher Ari Kira.

“Sure enough, he threw it,” he said.

Proudfoot slammed it over left field to cheers from the crowd. One younger boy in the stands hiked around to track down the game ball and return it to the senior.

Mount Si has walked off the field three times before Wednesday, “but not on a dinger,” coach Cribby said, “nothing in that fashion.”

Pitching and defense were constant, a theme that Cribby’s pushed all year. While hitting is tough, “we’re not going to make excuses,” the coach said. “We put a lot of runners on early and didn’t execute.” He credited Interlake’s strong mound, while noting that “we were the victor today.”

“We just played hard and battled,” he said. “We didn’t worry about them, we worried about the game, kept focus.”

In the last home game for the senior class, “we wanted to come out on top,” senior pitcher Hudson Luxich said. “It was really tense in the dugout.”

“I was just trying to pound the strikes and stay focused,” he said.

Luxich didn’t display any nervousness, but the senior had a surprise in store after the game. He and his teammates hoisted signs reading “KIM PROM with ME?” following the conclusion. Kim Anderson, a sophomore, answered in the affirmative.

“A bunch of my buddies wanted to help me out,” he said. “It was a good way to go out on the this field.

Coming off a nail-biting win on the mound, Luxich was already stoked.

“That put it over the top right there,” he said.