College baseball: CCS controls destiny

They started the season by losing six of their first 10 games and have yet to string together more than four straight wins against Northwest Athletic Association of Community Colleges opponents.

Yet the Community Colleges of Spokane Sasquatch have quietly and methodically played themselves into first place in the NWAACC East Region standings and into prime position to capture the No. 1 seed in the four-team regional playoffs that will be hosted May 18-19 by the regular-season region champion.

With four games remaining, CCS (25-17 overall, 15-9 in the NWAACC) finds itself tied with Columbia Basin (31-13, 15-9) for the East lead and one-half game ahead of third-place Walla Walla (27-13, 14-9).

But because they were 2-1 against those other top two contenders during the regular season, the Sasquatch hold the tiebreaker advantage over both, which means they control their postseason destiny.

“It’s an exciting time around here,” said 11th-year CCS coach Dave Keller, whose sophomore-dominated team plays a doubleheader at Wenatchee Valley this afternoon before returning home to close out the regular season with a noon doubleheader against Treasure Valley on Saturday. “We’ve had a lot of confidence in our guys all year. They’ve worked hard at getting better and they’re pretty fired up about the opportunity.”

Keller figured this year’s team would hit, and it has.

Heading into today’s doubleheader in Wenatchee, the Sasquatch are hitting .304 and averaging almost seven runs per game. Cody Brubaker, from Post Falls, leads the team in hitting at .391, while Cole Janini is hitting .346 and leading the NWAACC in home runs with eight.

Shortstop and leadoff hitter Brian Yardley is batting .367 with 29 runs batted in.

“When we won the region in 2005, we hit the ball well,” Keller said, “but we didn’t hit it like this team is hitting. Our defense was shaky early in the season and we were giving teams too many extra outs, but we cleaned that up and managed to stay pretty consistent offensively.”

The Sasquatch have found just enough pitching to get by.

“We’re not real deep there,” Keller said. “We’re running, basically, with four starters and two relievers, but you can do that – especially when you get into tournament play where you only need two or three starters.”

The top two finishers in each of the NWAACC’s four regional playoffs will advance to the NWAACC championships May 24-28 at Lower Columbia College in Longview, Wash., to determine an overall champion. Keller, despite his team’s lack of an eye-popping resume, isn’t ruling out the possibility of that title falling on his Sasquatch.

“We’re obviously in a good position,” he said. “Now, if we can just put it together for another couple of weeks and hang a banner in our gym and a pennant on our press box out there, it’ll all be in the history books for these kids.”

Zags look to break Waves

Gonzaga University heads to Malibu, Calif., this weekend needing to win two of three games against No. 17 Pepperdine to secure a spot against No. 6 San Diego in the best-of-3 West Coast Conference championship series May 25-27 at the home of the regular-season conference champion.

San Diego (38-14 overall, 16-2 in the WCC), with three WCC games remaining, has clinched at least a share of the conference title and its first berth in the championship series since 2003. GU (30-21, 13-5), which also has three WCC games left, is three games ahead of Pepperdine (31-16, 10-5) in the battle for the second championship series berth, but the Waves still have to play a three-game series against Portland next weekend.

GU could win the regular-season title, but its chances are slim. The Bulldogs would need to sweep Pepperdine this weekend and USD would have to lose its remaining three WCC games at Santa Clara.

If such an unlikely scenario plays out, the Zags would claim the No. 1 seed in the championship series and host the three-game event, because they would hold the tiebreaker advantage over USD, a team they beat twice during a three-game series at Washington Trust Field in late March.

If they win two out of three against Pepperdine, they would also have the tiebreaker edge over the Waves, which would make next weekend’s Pepperdine-Portland series meaningless.

Pepperdine has appeared in every WCC championship series since the event was initiated in 1999. GU’s only one was in 2001.

Quick hits

Gonzaga’s sweep of Loyola Marymount last weekend gave the Bulldogs their first 30-win season since 1990. … UCLA, which holds a one-game lead over Arizona State in the Pacific-10 Conference standings, will travel to Tempe, Ariz., for a crucial three-game series against the Sun Devils this weekend. … The Pac-10 boasts four teams – No. 10 ASU, No. 14 Arizona, No. 15 Oregon State and No. 21 UCLA – in this week’s Baseball America rankings. … OSU’s Jason Ogata became the first player in the history of Washington’s Husky Ballpark to hit an inside-the-park home run when he did it in a loss to UW Saturday.