By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Sports Editor
After a hard loss in the opening game of the state Little League championship series in Ketchikan last week, the Sitka Junior All Star baseball team rallied Thursday to claim the state title.
Sitka’s Caleb Calhoun pitches against Ketchikan in the Junior League state baseball championship last week in Ketchikan. Sitka won the title. Calhoun hit three out of the park home runs in the four-game series. (Photo provided by Heather Gluth)
Sitka got off to a rocky start Tuesday with an 8-3 loss to the home team, but followed that by winning the next three games – 21-1, 10-1 and 7-2 – to seal the championship in the best-of-five series.
For longtime Sitka player Mason McCloud, last week’s victory wasn’t a first, but it still felt good.
“It’s our third year going as state champs – we just kept it going,” McCloud said after the title game. “It felt pretty good to win after that first loss, and we came back.”
Many of the players on the Sitka 13- and 14-year-old Junior League squad were on the 11-12 Major League team that took the state title in that division in 2019.
Sitka’s Trey Johnson was glad for the chance to keep playing baseball when the team advances to the Western Region tournament in Bend, Oregon, this week.
“It felt super good that we were going to go to Oregon and keep playing baseball all summer,” Johnson told the Sentinel.
His teammate Caleb Calhoun recalled intense emotions at the moment Sitka clinched another title.
“Everybody was jumping, screaming,” Calhoun said.
Calhoun, Johnson and McCloud were players on the 2019 team, coach Rich McAlpin noted.
“After that 2019 season, COVID wiped out 2020. In my opinion, they would have repeated again the state championship but that was taken away. To have this season, this opportunity, is really special,” the coach said.
But Sitka’s championship last week was far from preordained.
In the series opener, the team struggled in more ways than one.
“Defense was very sloppy and pitching just gave out at the end of the game,” Calhoun recalled.
Johnson mentioned the team’s lackluster hitting in the team’s tournament opener.
“After the game, I think that we all looked back like it was one of the worst games that we’ve ever played before,” he said. “We could not hit at all.”
Johnson said the team went into Game One overconfident.
“We went into the first game thinking, ‘Oh, we beat Ketchikan every time, it would be the exact same thing.’ And then they ended up winning,” he said.
“So then we knew that we’d actually have to try a lot harder and start hitting better and fielding better.”
In the opening minutes of Game Two, Sitka’s bats got hot.
“We had more hits in the first inning of Game Two than we did in the whole first game – our pitching was super good and they couldn’t do much about it,” McCloud said. “They couldn’t get any hits and our defense was on top of it.”
After trampling Ketchikan in the second game of the tournament 21-1, Sitka rolled on to claim the championship title. The Western Region championship games begin Wednesday and continue until August 12.
Sitka’s coach was happy his team pulled together at the right time.
“It was just really fun to watch them play and play to their ability, have fun and pull together with three wins,” McAlpin said.
Looking forward to the Oregon trip, McCloud said, he’s glad to have more time with his friends on the ballfield, and also for the chance to face new teams.
“There’s probably going to be some good competition down there and we’ll try our hardest and see how it goes,” he said. “Being with the team, having fun, however long we’re down there, two weeks, it’ll be a fun time.”
For Calhoun, baseball is the pinnacle of summer.
“Baseball is pretty much everything, nothing else to do in the summer. I love what I do.”
