Colville heads to state tournament as the fifth seed

COLVILLE – Colville baseball qualified for state with two wins this week, first the Crimson Hawks muscled their way past the Lakeside Eagles 12- 2 in the NEA semifinal round before a 7- 4 loss to Deer Park in the league championship game sent Colville to the second place game against Medical Lake where the Crimson Hawks came away with a thrilling 5- 4 victory.

Tuesday’s semi- final win over Lakeside ( 11- 12, 6- 5) saw Colville break a scoreless tie open with a five run third and took control with three more runs in the fourth before walking the game off in the bottom of the sixth with four more runs. Chris Nussbaum pitched well, giving up one run in five innings and going 2 for 3 at the plate with 3 RBI, Fox Bateman also went 2 for 3 with 2 RBI of his own. In all Colville totaled 12 runs on 11 hits and made no errors, Lakeside had 2 runs on 5 hits and made 2 errors.

Saturday’s league championship was played at Avista Stadium in Spokane against Deer Park ( 18- 4, 9- 2). Colville came out a little flat, finding themselves trailing 1- 0 early on and were down 6- 0 in the third before a four- run rally of their own cut the deficit to 6- 4. The Crimson Hawks couldn’t get any closer and the Stags tacked on an insurance run in the top of the seventh to head into state with a 7- 4 win. Kris Nussbaum took the loss on the mound and Fox Bateman pitched well in relief, giving up one run in four innings. Offensively Nussbaum added a 2 run double and Emmet Marshall tripled, but other than the third inning scoring threats were hard to come by for Colville. Deer Park scored 7 runs on 7 hits and made 1 error, while Colville had 4 runs on 5 hits and 2 errors.

Colville got a second bite at the apple though as they played the NEA’s second place game against Medical Lake ( 15- 7, 7- 4) for the league’s second seed to the state tournament. Medical Lake jumped out to a 4- 0 lead through three innings, but in the bottom of the fourth Colville got on the board and in the bottom of the fifth the Crimson Hawks scored four runs to take a 5- 4 lead. The four run fifth was kickstarted by a three- run little league home run by Colbie McEvoy. With two runners on McEvoy singled to right and the ball got past the right fielder, allowing both runners to score and advancing McEvoy to third, the throw home got past everybody, and McEvoy came home to tie the game. Later in the inning a Fox Bateman RBI gave Colville the lead and his four shutout innings of relief earned him the win. Bateman went 2 for 3 with a pair of RBI and six strikeouts on the mound in relief of starter Luke Anderson.

The stage is a big one and caused some early issues for the Crimson Hawks said head coach Blake Sjordal “We had some verbal communication issues and ran ourselves out of inning one and we had a tough time recovering the momentum. We continued to make mistake after mistake and in those type of games you can’t do that. We had a lot of jitters and a lot of first time players on that big stage, but that’s to be expected on a young team. I hope we got that out of our system and can get back to what’s got us to this point, clean defense and timely offense.”

Fox Bateman had a great day, two hits and two RBI at the plate, and 8 innings pitched over two games, giving up 1 unearned run and 6 strikeouts on 102 pitches. Coach Sjordal had nothing but praise for Bateman’s effort, “He had a fantastic day, he really kept us in both games. He really competed he did an awesome job when everything was going wrong for us.”

Colville heads into the state tournament as the fifth seed and will face 12th seed University Prep (Seattle) ( 13- 8) at Ferris High School on Saturday at 10 AM. The other regional game at Ferris is # 4 seed Deer Park vs Overlake-Bear Creek ( 14- 9) at 1 PM and the winners will play in the third game of the day for a trip to Yakima while the losing teams are done for the season.

Coach Sjordal feels the Crimson Hawks will be ready for University Prep, “They have a couple of good quality pitchers and we have to play well, and if we can limit the mistakes we should compete well in the round of 16 and round of 8.”