Reaping the benefits

Newport’s baseball team has figured out the key to success. It turned out to be a relatively simple recipe, really. Take a few talented kids, preferably about 11 years old, get a coach with a little foresight, throw in a strong commitment from the parents, and play. And play. And play some more.

That, and a willingness to withstand a few growing pains, will give you a team that has lost just once since 2004. In fact, the Grizzlies, who sit on top of the Northeast A League with an 8-0 record (15-0 overall), were undefeated last season until the State 1A final – a 5-0 loss to Brewster.

A nice run of success, sure. But it becomes a remarkable one when you take into account where Newport and its seven seniors started.

When Grizzlies coach Rusty Hargrove coached his oldest son, Cody, in a Little League all-star tournament 10 years ago, his team was beaten badly. That same year he helped umpire a 12-year-old tournament in Cusick with teams from all over the Inland Northwest.

“It really opened my eyes,” said Hargrove, from Beaumont, Texas, who spent time in Louisiana and then moved to Newport 17 years ago when Ponderay Newsprint opened a mill in Usk. “I was blown away with how good the kids were.”

So Hargrove went to work. He found a group of 11-year-olds who wanted to play and whose parents were willing to make the necessary sacrifices, monetarily and otherwise, to improve the team.

And then they got in their cars.

“I found 10, 11 parents who were willing to travel, and that’s really the commitment, getting the parents who really want to go do it,” Hargrove said in his still detectable southern drawl. “Two nights a week we played in Spokane. Tuesday and Thursday nights we’d get off from school, load up and head to Spokane to go play ball. We’d do our homework in the cars coming home.”

Initially, the team hit a few bumps.

“That first year was a big learning curve for us. We got better, and after that first year we started winning,” he said.

By the time the kids reached their freshman year of high school, Hargrove was in his second season as Newport’s coach. The kids had won back-to-back Pony League titles, and as 14-year-olds finished third in the state. The seven that moved into high school ball all became immediate varsity contributors.

That first year in high school, with seven freshmen on the varsity, they were already a .500 team, and the summer afterward, as 15-year-olds, they joined Sandpoint’s Babe Ruth system, winning the league.

The key to that development, Hargrove said, was parents who were willing to get their kids onto the field. Over and over again.

“Going out and playing is the big thing,” he said, adding that the kids would play upward of 60 to 65 games a summer. “The commitment from the parents is the big thing. We had some kids who were pretty good athletes, and they recognized the only way they were going to find greatness, or better than the local deal, is to play ball in Spokane, and to travel.”

Playing so many games occasionally leaves Hargrove in a bind.

During the high school season, Hargrove, who works 12-hour rotating shifts at the paper mill, estimates he uses about a dozen days of vacation time just to make sure he can make games and practices. And when rainouts force rescheduling games, Hargrove’s co-workers and bosses often rearrange a schedule or two to make sure he can make the games.

But it isn’t just commitment from the parents or coaching staff or employers that accounts for Newport’s success. The players had to buy into it as well, a choice made easier since, in the words of Rusty’s son, Chance, this is a group of baseball junkies.

“If I could say one thing, it would be the dedication to baseball,” said Chance Hargrove, the team’s catcher and unofficial captain. “Lifting weights, doing speed work to get better; we’re dedicated to the sport, to doing things to get better at the sport.”

Growing up in a small town and playing on the same team for a number of years also helps build camaraderie, something the Grizzlies have in abundance.

“All the success we’ve had is because we’ve been together forever,” said Nick Collison, the team’s pitching ace (6-0, 1.69 ERA, 37 strikeouts) and leading hitter (.638 batting average, 34 RBIs, 1.234 slugging percentage). “We have trust on the field. It’s hard to explain – we know what everybody has, so we work off that.”

Echoed Chance Hargrove, “We’ve been playing together and going to school together forever. We grew up together and we trust each other.”

That trust has led to victories. The Grizzlies haven’t lost a game in the Northeast A since moving down from 2A in 2005. The last time Newport lost in the regular season was 2004, when the team was in the Great Northern League.

This year Newport has beaten Deer Park, Chewelah and Medical Lake, all 2A schools and former GNL rivals, and Lake City, a 5A school in Coeur d’Alene.

All seven seniors will be playing college ball next fall, and all will be on scholarship. Collison and Chance Hargrove are heading to Everett Community College, while the other five – A.J. Miltner, Erik Betz, Zach Green, Chad Hunt and Josh Tiede – will attend Grays Harbor College in Aberdeen, Wash.

“Winning a state title is huge,” Rusty Hargrove said. “But I have seven kids going to college on scholarship. That’s what it’s all about.”