Despite lack of home-field, ‘Cats expected to do well

Published 11:03 pm Thursday, October 2, 2008

SNOQUALMIE – The Mount Si Wildcats baseball team had a 2004 season that they would rather forget. A team that was picked to finish high in the Kingco 3A failed to make the playoffs last season. Despite the potential difficulty of having no home field in 2005, the team looks to improve.

Construction on Mount Si High School’s new athletic complex has forced the Wildcats to play their home games at opposing team’s sites this season. Wildcat coach Gary McGregor isn’t worried about any distractions resulting from the lack of home field advantage.

“I don’t think high-school baseball home field advantage is an issue. For football, yes, for basketball, yes, there’s crowd noise, excitement involved, but with high-school baseball, in the past, we’ve had a real good parent support at away games as well as home games. I mean there’s places we go where we have more fans than they do, so I don’t think that’s going to be an issue,” McGregor said.

McGregor returns for his sixth year at the helm of the Wildcats baseball program. His team finished a disappointing 7-13 last season. McGregor welcomes back a core of six seniors that will be critical to the team’s success this season. Led by college-bound Adam Dentz and Brandon Sales, the list also includes Zach Bowen, Chris Brown, Tyler Starkel and Craig Weber. Five additional seniors are new to varsity this season, including Andrew Pass, Blaine Sutton, Kenny Casem, Marc Donnell and Aaron McLemore.

Juniors Erik Alexander and Remo Castagno, along with sophomore Ian Atkinson, are projected to round out the varsity roster this spring.

Wherever they play this spring, McGregor said fans have a lot to look for.

“My philosophy according to how I play baseball, how I run the program, doesn’t change. We still play little ball. We still want to play the game the way it’s supposed to be played. We want to hit and run, and steal bases,” McGregor said. “We don’t have any big boppers. We’ve got kids that can hit the ball. We’ve got four of the top six hitters back from last year. We have our top returning pitcher, Adam Dentz, coming back, who had an exceptional summer, and made the Mariners Area Code team last summer.”

Dentz has signed with Washington State University to play college ball next spring with the Cougars.

As for Sales, he has verbally committed to play college ball next spring at Pacific Lutheran University. A large reason for this is family-related; his sister, Stephanie, has starred on the Lute volleyball team the last three years and will be a senior there this fall.

“Oh, yeah. She was a big part of why I decided to go there. For the past three years since she’s been there, I’ve been able to spend a lot of time down there and it’s just a great atmosphere. I’m excited to go with Coach (Geoff) Loomis down there and make a big difference in their program right when I get there my first year,” Sales said.

Team chemistry this year may be the biggest key to success.

“I thought this may work in our favor, with all the bus trips and everything,” said McGregor. “We don’t have a lot of kids that ride home with mom and dad. I know I’ve been in this program since ’94,’95, and in the early years, it would be [then-coach Kurt] Wagner and I and a couple of kids on the bus ride home…It’s changed.”

Mount Si looks to make the postseason, but Sammamish, Issaquah and Newport are the teams to beat.

“If we finish in the top six in what I consider a very competitive league, I think that will be a good year for us,” said McGregor.

Dentz is not worried about the lack of home-field. He said that he was disappointed, but said that Mount Si really “wasn’t a good field as it was, so I think I’d rather be playing at Bannerwood and BCC than Mount Si anyway, so I don’t think it should be really a problem.”