After juggling around the first and second place spot all year long, the Warriors baseball team was shocked and disappointed to learn that it will not be going to the state playoffs.
Key losses during the season haunted the Warriors (27-15-1), but none was bigger than the loss Thursday to Harbor College, 10-3.
With the Warriors needing a win to wrap up the South Coast Conference championship, the men lost their poise and committed too many critical errors en route to a heartbreaking defeat.
“It hurts a lot, I don’t even have the words to describe how it feels right now,” sophomore centerfielder Joe Morgan said. “We just got hosed by Harbor, nothing else to be said. It’s disappointing because we had to win every game this week and we lost the most important one.”
Freshman outfielder Dylan Stephenson said the offense is what ruined the Warrior’s postseason chances. A problem that they thought they had solved, Stephenson said he believes the Warriors got a little tight as the game progressed.
Stephenson also said he believes that the Warriors had a bad habit of beating themselves instead of the other team beating them.
“We screw ourselves all the time,” Stephenson said. “The errors that we make at crucial times killed us a lot and we just didn’t execute and make smart decisions.”
“We couldn’t hit the ball and we made terrible decisions offensively just as we have been the whole year,” Stephenson said. “It’s sad to know that we are not going because we are such a talented team to not make the playoffs.”
The Warriors pride themselves in playing hard and not making excuses for the games that they lost earlier in the season.
Sophomore pitcher Tim Salazar couldn’t help but reflect on the six-game losing streak they had earlier in the season and also losing two critical games against conference opponents Cerritos and Long Beach.
“It just shows that if we had won at least one of those games during that long losing streak, we would have been in the playoffs,” Salazar said.
“We just couldn’t correct some of our mistakes offensively.”
Coach Nate Fernley said he believes that everything went wrong for the Warriors in their final week of play. Although they finished with a better record than Cerritos and Long Beach, they failed to make the playoffs because of the state rankings and other point totals that went against them.
“There was a perfect storm thrown at us in this final week of the season,” Fernley said. “We lost the tiebreaker and were behind in points against some of the other teams, so it really cost us. As a coach, it hurts because I definitely think that we have one of the more talented teams out there and I also think that we would have made a lot of noise in the postseason.”
Fernley said he believes the Warriors have nobody to blame but themselves because of poor offensive execution and bad decision-making during some of the games they lost.
“I thought we fixed the issue of our poise and maturity,” Fernley said. “But in that loss on Thursday, a game that we had to win, we made poor decisions offensively down the stretch. That’s not the only game where we executed like that.”
Even though the Warriors missed the playoffs by losing the tiebreaker along with some key games, Fernley said he believes that the Warriors should have grabbed the opportunity and chances that other teams gave them.
“A lot of our conference opponents lost some key games as well and we didn’t take advantage of their losses to move up the standings or gain some cushion between them,” Fernley said. “Everything just went sour for us.”
Fernley said he is still happy with the effort the Warriors gave this season and is looking forward to next season.
Fernley said he is very proud of his team although the players are very upset at not making the playoffs.
“Overall, I’m happy with what we have accomplished,” Fernley said.
“Standings wise, we should have made the playoffs, but the tiebreaker didn’t go our way,” Fernley said.
“Next season we’ll just fix the problems we had as a team so we can make the playoffs without having to worry about what other teams are doing.
“A lot of teams are lucky we didn’t make the playoffs because we would have caused a lot of damage.”