“I think everyone has their own journey in this game.”
Jarrod Molnaa’s college baseball career started off at Walla Walla Community College, but it didn’t start when it was supposed too.
“One day at Walla Walla, we were throwing in practice and I made a pitch and there was a big loud pop, and really sharp pain down my arm,” said Molnaa. “So me and the coaches kind of knew something was wrong.”
Molnaa says the injury was really hard to stomach because he had never been hurt.
“There were a lot of expectations going into that season, we had a really good team that year and once we figured out it was going to be Tommy John surgery I just was already familiar with the kind of time it was going to take, over a year maybe. So, I mean it hit me pretty hard to know I was going to be sitting for that long.”
Molnaa played the last two years at Walla Walla, pitching against Aaron Sutton, who was the head coach for Treasure Valley at the time. Now, he’s the head coach for the Jackets.
“He’s a tough guy to forget,” said Molnaa. “He has his ways, he has a reputation in any league he’s ever in. People around him, he knows what he’s talking about, he knows how to run a program. Even before I was playing for him, and I was just playing against him, you could just tell the way his teams operate and the way they go about their business, what he instills into them.”
“We had some good battles back when I was at Treasure Valley at Walla Walla,” said Sutton. “Those are two very good junior college programs. Mutual respect for one another, and always great games. We compete very hard, and he was a good arm.”
Eventually Molnaa made his way to the NAIA playing for Belevue. While he enjoyed the school and loved his teammates, he needed a fresh start. One thing led to another, now he’s in the Magic City.
“I’ve actually got a couple of teammates that we played together in Walla Walla that transferred here when I transferred to Bellevue. It wasn’t scheduled, it was nothing. We were just talking as friends over Facetime at the end of last year, and they just kind of sprung it on me, like hey we’ll tell coach Sutton, I woke up the next morning with texts from them saying hey he thinks he’s got something figured out.”
“That’s how it kind of connected, some of his former teammates, he obviously knew who we were from junior college. I had actually recruited him out of junior college but it didn’t work out as far as the terms he had left. So, it just happened to happen he went to an NAIA school so it opened up enough terms for him to come to an NCAA school and here he is with us now.”
