*****
Early mornings, late nights, inside jokes, hurt feelings, college choices, position changes, coaches’ decisions, walk-off wins, rally caps, eye black, superstitions, history in the making. A look into the life of a high school baseball team.
Stories by Emily Werchadlo
Photos by Sean DuFrene
Anthony Nutter, the Cougars’ highly touted senior pitcher, also demands perfection.
“I like winning,” he says. “If we’re not going to win, that’s all that really matters.”
Anthony is the picture of achievement. He is valedictorian of the Class of 2007 and will attend Harvard in the fall. His guidance counselor thinks his 4.77 grade-point average might be the highest of any student ever at EHS.
But Anthony’s smarts aren’t necessarily appreciated by his teammates on the baseball field. Afenir calls him “eccentric,” and he isn’t considered one of the “cool kids” on the Cougars team.
“(The team) is a tight-knit group,” Anthony says. “They go out on Friday nights and they ask me if I can come. A lot of the times it’s a ‘no’ because I have to study for a test.”
It’s a social risk he is prepared to take.
“I live a life a lot different than everyone else,” he says. “Not only am I an athlete, I’m the top student in my class. If I went back, I’d do the same thing. If I was all about the social life, I wouldn’t be where I am. I have no regrets.”
The Cougars’ first game March 6 involves a long, warm trip to El Capitan in Lakeside. As the staff ace of the Cougars, Anthony gets the ball.
By the second inning, the game is out of hand.
Murphy’s Law has taken full effect, as any ball sharply hit is loosely played. Even though the defense behind Anthony isn’t helping (the Cougars rack up nine errors), the senior can’t stop the bleeding as Escondido falls behind early and loses an embarrassing 17-4 game.
The poor start doesn’t help Anthony’s perplexing persona, and it doesn’t take long for Afenir to lose his patience.
“(Anthony), that’s pathetic,” he bellows in the postgame huddle. “I put you up as one of the best pitchers in North County.
“The way we’re playing is directly related to the way you’ve practiced in the last two weeks,” he continues to the rest of the group. “You need to be humbled. Everyone thinks they’re so good.”
Afenir is particularly aggravated by his team’s on-field attitude. Despite nine errors, nobody assumes responsibility for the loss, choosing instead to point fingers at each other.
“I’ll put up with errors, but I won’t put up with players yelling at each other on the field,” he says. “Unless you can walk on water and rise after you’re dead, I don’t want to hear it.”
Escondido center fielder Jarrett Sisler bobbles a pop fly, costing the Cougars a run against Vista High School.
For Afenir, the junior is half-dream, half-nightmare. The dream: Jarrett is the team’s closest thing to a five-tool player. He has blazing speed around the bases and a sweet stroke that hits for a high average and home run power. He is the player who gets the most buzz from scouts.
The nightmare is that some of his tools still need a great deal of sharpening. His play in the outfield is always an adventure, as is his running on the base paths.
“Jarrett is the definition of the word ‘enigma,’ ” Afenir says. “On any given day, I don’t know whether he’ll be Mickey Mantle or Mickey Mouse.”
But if Jarrett had it his way, he wouldn’t be playing baseball. When he was younger, he played hockey, but his parents decided the off-season was too long and Jarrett spent too much time in front of the TV. So a change was made when he was 9 to baseball, a yearlong sport in San Diego.
“I cried for the first week (I played baseball), because I didn’t want to play,” Jarrett says. “Now I never miss a week.”
Jarrett knows he can be a bit of a disaster in the outfield, but he figures he’s overcome worse before.
“I’m most worried about my fielding ability and my arm,” he says. “But last year, I was worried about hitting a curveball.”
As a junior with college on the horizon, fortifying his baseball skills has become even more important to him.
“It’s been my goal to make it to college,” he says. “My family can’t afford to send me. So I have to use baseball to get there.”
******
It doesn’t take long for Jarrett to encounter danger on the base paths. In the Cougars’ second game — another lopsided 17-4 loss — Jarrett is waved home in a misguided attempt at a meaningless late-inning run. He’s pounded at the plate by the Hilltop catcher and buckles over, grimacing and clutching his foot while the Cougars hold their breath.
He sits out the next game against Rancho Bernardo (a 7-0 loss) but gets the start in the team’s following contest against Mission Bay. He attempts to be a spark plug for the winless team by speaking out in the pregame huddle.
“We need energy,” Jarrett tells the group. “Let’s have a quick first inning.”
But after a fly ball sails over his head and he crashes into the outfield fence, it’s apparent to everyone he’s still not at full strength.
Afenir pulls Jarrett, telling him, “I need you for the season.” As the limping center fielder trots to the dugout he mutters under his breath, “That sucked.”
******
By the fourth game of the season, another loss, almost everyone on the team is in the doghouse. Everyone except Anthony, who picked up his team with a pinch-hit, two-RBI single while pitching well in relief.
Afenir offers some unorthodox praise for the Harvard-bound pitcher.
“I give Nutter a lot of crap,” he says in the postgame cluster. “And he’s a freak — no offense,” he says directly to Anthony, “you’re a freak. But he’s 100 percent focused. I’m looking for eight more freaks.”
Aside from Anthony, the coach is hard-pressed to find positive things to say about his team. He sends out a call for leaders.
“Somebody step up and do something,” Afenir says. “Everyone is waiting for someone else to do something.”
The message falls on deaf ears. Nobody steps up in the next game, the no-hitter at the hands of Fallbrook. Afenir knows something has to change.
“I knew we’d struggle early. It’s hard to stay positive,” he says. “But I can’t let them know it’s OK to lose to better teams. Their skins have to get tough.”
So he proposes the game against the junior varsity squad. He makes it legit so his team knows he is serious. Umpires are hired to officiate, and even with the harsh ultimatum of losing their varsity spots, the Cougars’ play is lackadaisical and they barely scrape by with a win.
Afenir will have to wait and see whether his attempt to motivate his team was successful.
******
Through the first five games of the season, Escondido’s stats are cringe-worthy: a .194 batting average to complement a .294 on-base percentage. The pitching staff can’t get off the hook, either: They’ve posted a 7.64 ERA and a 16-to-29 strikeout-to-walk ratio.
So with only one way to go, the sixth contest of the season presents the first presumably winnable game for Escondido. The El Camino baseball team visits Pete Coscarart Field with similar early-season struggles.
With an 8-2 win, the monkey is lifted. The highlights include a back-to-form Jarrett, who tallies a home run, a single and three RBIs.
Meanwhile, the brainy Anthony starts to fit in with his teammates, giving up just one run in six innings in the win.
“I was real comfortable when the season started,” Anthony says. “But then I got nervous that I wouldn’t be as good as people expected. Without it ever being said, everyone kind of looked at me to get the job done.”
The early-season failures were torture to a perfectionist such as Anthony.
“That’s one of my problems,” he says. “I get way too intense about things. I try too hard to be perfect all the time. My goal is to never fail at anything.”
So does that make him a freak, as his coach suggested?
“I think he exaggerated a little bit, but he got the point across,” Anthony says. “(My teammates) have all been cool with me. It’s a matter of respect. Once I do better, there is a lot more respect.”
Soft-spoken senior captain Brett Hartman has been playing baseball and going to school with Anthony for four years, yet he struggles to categorize his teammate.
“Nutter’s just … Nutter,” Brett sighs. “I don’t know if it’s because he’s so smart, but when he pitches, he brings a lot of intensity.”
Anthony is a two-year member of the varsity team, and it’s taken all that time for Afenir to adjust to the pitcher. He’s not all the way there yet.
“I told Nutter, ‘I like you better every year I coach you. If you were here for two more years, I might actually like you,’ ” he says, teasing the senior.
After the relieving win over El Camino, the Cougars go 2-2 over their next four games, improving to 3-7 entering the highly competitive Lions Tournament.
Escondido High head baseball coach Steve Afenir talks to his squad after its 6-5 loss to Whittier during Lions Tournament play.
Escondido High catcher Doug Peters looks dejected after Langley, Va., scores in the top of the seventh during the Cougars’ Lions Tournament game on April 3.
Stories by Emily Werchadlo
Photos by Sean DuFrene
Friday, June 28, 2007
A frustrating start
Steve Afenir is a player’s coach.
As the head of the Escondido High School varsity baseball program, Afenir has duties that go beyond setting lineups and forming game strategies. With 18 high school boys under his care, he has to be prepared for all the fragile teenage psyche has to offer.
“With kids this age, you have to be part coach, part baby sitter and part child psychologist,” he says. “At this age, you deal with everything.”
Today, the problems are all baseball related. It’s Thursday, March 15, and according to the zeroes on the scoreboard, the Cougars are about to be no-hit by Fallbrook pitcher Josh Peters for their fifth loss in a row to start the year.
The defeat will be a new low in a season already full of them. The dugout is filled with bruised egos, unsettled feelings about playing time and anxieties about fitting in and finding a college. The Cougars are a mess of emotions, an unfocused, self-interested bunch that hasn’t learned yet that success comes with playing as a team.
As the last Cougar goes down in a final hitless at-bat, the frustrated 44-year-old coach contemplates how to motivate his underachieving team. Afenir knows that at this rate there is no chance Escondido will make it to the playoffs, the measure of success for any high school Division I team. So he crafts an ultimatum and delivers it stoically to the players.
“I don’t want to end this week without a win,” Afenir tells the red-faced, head-hanging Cougars in the postgame huddle. “I’ve scheduled a game with the junior varsity team tomorrow. Whoever wins wears the varsity uniforms on Tuesday.”
Nobody thinks he is kidding. Under the glaring late-afternoon sun, no one can escape the heat.
A frustrating start
Steve Afenir is a player’s coach.
As the head of the Escondido High School varsity baseball program, Afenir has duties that go beyond setting lineups and forming game strategies. With 18 high school boys under his care, he has to be prepared for all the fragile teenage psyche has to offer.
“With kids this age, you have to be part coach, part baby sitter and part child psychologist,” he says. “At this age, you deal with everything.”
Today, the problems are all baseball related. It’s Thursday, March 15, and according to the zeroes on the scoreboard, the Cougars are about to be no-hit by Fallbrook pitcher Josh Peters for their fifth loss in a row to start the year.
The defeat will be a new low in a season already full of them. The dugout is filled with bruised egos, unsettled feelings about playing time and anxieties about fitting in and finding a college. The Cougars are a mess of emotions, an unfocused, self-interested bunch that hasn’t learned yet that success comes with playing as a team.
As the last Cougar goes down in a final hitless at-bat, the frustrated 44-year-old coach contemplates how to motivate his underachieving team. Afenir knows that at this rate there is no chance Escondido will make it to the playoffs, the measure of success for any high school Division I team. So he crafts an ultimatum and delivers it stoically to the players.
“I don’t want to end this week without a win,” Afenir tells the red-faced, head-hanging Cougars in the postgame huddle. “I’ve scheduled a game with the junior varsity team tomorrow. Whoever wins wears the varsity uniforms on Tuesday.”
Nobody thinks he is kidding. Under the glaring late-afternoon sun, no one can escape the heat.
******
Escondido High head coach Steve Afenir was a star third baseman for the Cougars in the late 1970s. He went on to play at Palomar College and the University of Wyoming, before coming back to coach the Cougars.
Escondido High head coach Steve Afenir was a star third baseman for the Cougars in the late 1970s. He went on to play at Palomar College and the University of Wyoming, before coming back to coach the Cougars.
If Afenir knows anything, it’s baseball. And Escondido High School baseball is his specialty.
Afenir starred for the Cougars as a third baseman in the late 1970s. He moved on to Palomar College, and then the University of Wyoming, before coming back to be an assistant and then head coach of the Cougars.
Steve isn’t the only Afenir who knows baseball. His brother Tom, a straight-faced assistant coach nicknamed “Bit,” followed in his brother’s footsteps at Escondido and Palomar before taking his career one step further into the minor leagues, where arm injuries forced an early retirement. Steve’s brother Troy also helps coach the Cougars. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, Troy played in 45 major league games with Houston, Oakland and Cincinnati and caught big names such as Nolan Ryan.
It doesn’t end there. Steve’s son Buck, a former CIF San Diego Section Division II player of the year and current University of Kansas Jayhawk, hopes to draw future draft interest by playing in an Alaskan League this summer.
Audie (Troy’s son) and Evan (Steve’s son) Afenir, in ninth and seventh grades, respectively, figure to be stars on varsity for EHS someday.
“There’s a lot of baseball in the Afenir family,” Steve says. “My father loved baseball. Our folks said we could do one thing, Pop Warner, Boy Scouts, Little League. So we just decided to play Little League, and we fell in love with it.”
With all his baseball expertise, Steve Afenir knows the 2007 baseball season has the potential to be a struggle. Coming off a disappointing 2006 campaign in which the Cougars finished sixth in the Valley League, Afenir figures big success is still a few years away. Case in point: Of nearly 70 players on The San Diego Union-Tribune’s “Players to Watch” list, not one Cougar made the cut. Most prognosticators pick them to finish second to Ramona in the league race.
“We’re not a baseball powerhouse like Rancho Bernardo, Torrey Pines or Poway,” the coach says at the end of February during the team’s first practice. “I have to get these kids to overachieve for us to be good.”
As a coach, Afenir’s style is clearly old-school. He’s a stickler for execution and his players respect him for it.
“The Afenirs have been around Escondido forever,” says junior Jarrett Sisler. “They make it hard and instructive at the same time.”
Looking out at his team on that first day, Afenir predicts Escondido might start the season 0-10. It’s not that he’s an overly pessimistic person; it’s that the Cougars’ tough nonleague schedule features 11 of 13 games against eventual playoff-bound teams. Afenir figures it to be one of the 10 toughest schedules in all of California.
But is it too tough?
Afenir starred for the Cougars as a third baseman in the late 1970s. He moved on to Palomar College, and then the University of Wyoming, before coming back to be an assistant and then head coach of the Cougars.
Steve isn’t the only Afenir who knows baseball. His brother Tom, a straight-faced assistant coach nicknamed “Bit,” followed in his brother’s footsteps at Escondido and Palomar before taking his career one step further into the minor leagues, where arm injuries forced an early retirement. Steve’s brother Troy also helps coach the Cougars. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, Troy played in 45 major league games with Houston, Oakland and Cincinnati and caught big names such as Nolan Ryan.
It doesn’t end there. Steve’s son Buck, a former CIF San Diego Section Division II player of the year and current University of Kansas Jayhawk, hopes to draw future draft interest by playing in an Alaskan League this summer.
Audie (Troy’s son) and Evan (Steve’s son) Afenir, in ninth and seventh grades, respectively, figure to be stars on varsity for EHS someday.
“There’s a lot of baseball in the Afenir family,” Steve says. “My father loved baseball. Our folks said we could do one thing, Pop Warner, Boy Scouts, Little League. So we just decided to play Little League, and we fell in love with it.”
With all his baseball expertise, Steve Afenir knows the 2007 baseball season has the potential to be a struggle. Coming off a disappointing 2006 campaign in which the Cougars finished sixth in the Valley League, Afenir figures big success is still a few years away. Case in point: Of nearly 70 players on The San Diego Union-Tribune’s “Players to Watch” list, not one Cougar made the cut. Most prognosticators pick them to finish second to Ramona in the league race.
“We’re not a baseball powerhouse like Rancho Bernardo, Torrey Pines or Poway,” the coach says at the end of February during the team’s first practice. “I have to get these kids to overachieve for us to be good.”
As a coach, Afenir’s style is clearly old-school. He’s a stickler for execution and his players respect him for it.
“The Afenirs have been around Escondido forever,” says junior Jarrett Sisler. “They make it hard and instructive at the same time.”
Looking out at his team on that first day, Afenir predicts Escondido might start the season 0-10. It’s not that he’s an overly pessimistic person; it’s that the Cougars’ tough nonleague schedule features 11 of 13 games against eventual playoff-bound teams. Afenir figures it to be one of the 10 toughest schedules in all of California.
But is it too tough?
******
Escondido High pitcher Anthony Nutter walks out of the clubhouse with a focused demeanor as he prepares for his start against Valley Center on May 10.
Escondido High pitcher Anthony Nutter walks out of the clubhouse with a focused demeanor as he prepares for his start against Valley Center on May 10.
Anthony Nutter, the Cougars’ highly touted senior pitcher, also demands perfection.
“I like winning,” he says. “If we’re not going to win, that’s all that really matters.”
Anthony is the picture of achievement. He is valedictorian of the Class of 2007 and will attend Harvard in the fall. His guidance counselor thinks his 4.77 grade-point average might be the highest of any student ever at EHS.
But Anthony’s smarts aren’t necessarily appreciated by his teammates on the baseball field. Afenir calls him “eccentric,” and he isn’t considered one of the “cool kids” on the Cougars team.
“(The team) is a tight-knit group,” Anthony says. “They go out on Friday nights and they ask me if I can come. A lot of the times it’s a ‘no’ because I have to study for a test.”
It’s a social risk he is prepared to take.
“I live a life a lot different than everyone else,” he says. “Not only am I an athlete, I’m the top student in my class. If I went back, I’d do the same thing. If I was all about the social life, I wouldn’t be where I am. I have no regrets.”
The Cougars’ first game March 6 involves a long, warm trip to El Capitan in Lakeside. As the staff ace of the Cougars, Anthony gets the ball.
By the second inning, the game is out of hand.
Murphy’s Law has taken full effect, as any ball sharply hit is loosely played. Even though the defense behind Anthony isn’t helping (the Cougars rack up nine errors), the senior can’t stop the bleeding as Escondido falls behind early and loses an embarrassing 17-4 game.
The poor start doesn’t help Anthony’s perplexing persona, and it doesn’t take long for Afenir to lose his patience.
“(Anthony), that’s pathetic,” he bellows in the postgame huddle. “I put you up as one of the best pitchers in North County.
“The way we’re playing is directly related to the way you’ve practiced in the last two weeks,” he continues to the rest of the group. “You need to be humbled. Everyone thinks they’re so good.”
Afenir is particularly aggravated by his team’s on-field attitude. Despite nine errors, nobody assumes responsibility for the loss, choosing instead to point fingers at each other.
“I’ll put up with errors, but I won’t put up with players yelling at each other on the field,” he says. “Unless you can walk on water and rise after you’re dead, I don’t want to hear it.”
*****
Escondido center fielder Jarrett Sisler bobbles a pop fly, costing the Cougars a run against Vista High School.If there’s one player on the team who continually tests his coach’s patience, it’s center fielder Jarrett Sisler.
For Afenir, the junior is half-dream, half-nightmare. The dream: Jarrett is the team’s closest thing to a five-tool player. He has blazing speed around the bases and a sweet stroke that hits for a high average and home run power. He is the player who gets the most buzz from scouts.
The nightmare is that some of his tools still need a great deal of sharpening. His play in the outfield is always an adventure, as is his running on the base paths.
“Jarrett is the definition of the word ‘enigma,’ ” Afenir says. “On any given day, I don’t know whether he’ll be Mickey Mantle or Mickey Mouse.”
But if Jarrett had it his way, he wouldn’t be playing baseball. When he was younger, he played hockey, but his parents decided the off-season was too long and Jarrett spent too much time in front of the TV. So a change was made when he was 9 to baseball, a yearlong sport in San Diego.
“I cried for the first week (I played baseball), because I didn’t want to play,” Jarrett says. “Now I never miss a week.”
Jarrett knows he can be a bit of a disaster in the outfield, but he figures he’s overcome worse before.
“I’m most worried about my fielding ability and my arm,” he says. “But last year, I was worried about hitting a curveball.”
As a junior with college on the horizon, fortifying his baseball skills has become even more important to him.
“It’s been my goal to make it to college,” he says. “My family can’t afford to send me. So I have to use baseball to get there.”
******
It doesn’t take long for Jarrett to encounter danger on the base paths. In the Cougars’ second game — another lopsided 17-4 loss — Jarrett is waved home in a misguided attempt at a meaningless late-inning run. He’s pounded at the plate by the Hilltop catcher and buckles over, grimacing and clutching his foot while the Cougars hold their breath.
He sits out the next game against Rancho Bernardo (a 7-0 loss) but gets the start in the team’s following contest against Mission Bay. He attempts to be a spark plug for the winless team by speaking out in the pregame huddle.
“We need energy,” Jarrett tells the group. “Let’s have a quick first inning.”
But after a fly ball sails over his head and he crashes into the outfield fence, it’s apparent to everyone he’s still not at full strength.
Afenir pulls Jarrett, telling him, “I need you for the season.” As the limping center fielder trots to the dugout he mutters under his breath, “That sucked.”
******
By the fourth game of the season, another loss, almost everyone on the team is in the doghouse. Everyone except Anthony, who picked up his team with a pinch-hit, two-RBI single while pitching well in relief.
Afenir offers some unorthodox praise for the Harvard-bound pitcher.
“I give Nutter a lot of crap,” he says in the postgame cluster. “And he’s a freak — no offense,” he says directly to Anthony, “you’re a freak. But he’s 100 percent focused. I’m looking for eight more freaks.”
Aside from Anthony, the coach is hard-pressed to find positive things to say about his team. He sends out a call for leaders.
“Somebody step up and do something,” Afenir says. “Everyone is waiting for someone else to do something.”
The message falls on deaf ears. Nobody steps up in the next game, the no-hitter at the hands of Fallbrook. Afenir knows something has to change.
“I knew we’d struggle early. It’s hard to stay positive,” he says. “But I can’t let them know it’s OK to lose to better teams. Their skins have to get tough.”
So he proposes the game against the junior varsity squad. He makes it legit so his team knows he is serious. Umpires are hired to officiate, and even with the harsh ultimatum of losing their varsity spots, the Cougars’ play is lackadaisical and they barely scrape by with a win.
Afenir will have to wait and see whether his attempt to motivate his team was successful.
******
Through the first five games of the season, Escondido’s stats are cringe-worthy: a .194 batting average to complement a .294 on-base percentage. The pitching staff can’t get off the hook, either: They’ve posted a 7.64 ERA and a 16-to-29 strikeout-to-walk ratio.
So with only one way to go, the sixth contest of the season presents the first presumably winnable game for Escondido. The El Camino baseball team visits Pete Coscarart Field with similar early-season struggles.
With an 8-2 win, the monkey is lifted. The highlights include a back-to-form Jarrett, who tallies a home run, a single and three RBIs.
Meanwhile, the brainy Anthony starts to fit in with his teammates, giving up just one run in six innings in the win.
“I was real comfortable when the season started,” Anthony says. “But then I got nervous that I wouldn’t be as good as people expected. Without it ever being said, everyone kind of looked at me to get the job done.”
The early-season failures were torture to a perfectionist such as Anthony.
“That’s one of my problems,” he says. “I get way too intense about things. I try too hard to be perfect all the time. My goal is to never fail at anything.”
So does that make him a freak, as his coach suggested?
“I think he exaggerated a little bit, but he got the point across,” Anthony says. “(My teammates) have all been cool with me. It’s a matter of respect. Once I do better, there is a lot more respect.”
Soft-spoken senior captain Brett Hartman has been playing baseball and going to school with Anthony for four years, yet he struggles to categorize his teammate.
“Nutter’s just … Nutter,” Brett sighs. “I don’t know if it’s because he’s so smart, but when he pitches, he brings a lot of intensity.”
Anthony is a two-year member of the varsity team, and it’s taken all that time for Afenir to adjust to the pitcher. He’s not all the way there yet.
“I told Nutter, ‘I like you better every year I coach you. If you were here for two more years, I might actually like you,’ ” he says, teasing the senior.
After the relieving win over El Camino, the Cougars go 2-2 over their next four games, improving to 3-7 entering the highly competitive Lions Tournament.
Escondido High head baseball coach Steve Afenir talks to his squad after its 6-5 loss to Whittier during Lions Tournament play.
Teams from all over California flock to Pete Coscarart Field for the Lions Tournament. The field, named after the EHS graduate and former All-Star who played nine seasons in the major leagues in the 1930s and ’40s, is meticulously cared for by the team. Veteran prep reporter John Maffei declared it the fifth-best field in North County, deeming it “most improved.”
Now it’s one of the featured home fields in the Lions Tournament — a five-decade-old competition that displays baseball talent from up and down the West Coast and from as far away as Langley, Va.
Afenir knows how hard it is to make the field look good for big events, and his players know it, too. They are fiercely protective of it, and Afenir says they often have chased local hoodlums off the grounds if they sneak in after hours.
What makes Escondido’s baseball complex stand out is its clubhouse, a rarity for a high school baseball team.
“The clubhouse is a buffer between the parking lot and the field,” Afenir explains. “When they are in school, they belong to the teachers. When they are on the field, they belong to me. In the clubhouse, they can decompress their day. The clubhouse is theirs.”
Despite having access to that outlet and playing on their home field, the Cougars can’t win any of their three Lions Tournament games, blowing leads and stumbling against weaker teams.
After another brutal loss, Afenir is ready to blow. Standing alone, the 6-foot-1 head coach scores a 10 for intensity. Flanked by his brothers, Troy and Tom, he’s downright scary.
“It doesn’t matter what we do, you guys are going to cough up runs like a bass coughing up a worm,” Afenir says. He kicks a bucket in frustration and later admits the clubhouse took the brunt of the beating.
It’s not just that Afenir hates losing. It’s that he knows his team is better than what it has showcased.
But heading into league play with a 3-10 record, he is losing his will to motivate.
“I’m out of magic tricks,” he tells the team. “I’m out of Vince Lombardi speeches.”
Fortunately for the Cougars, nothing they did in the previous 13 games will matter if they can capture first place in the Valley League. But Escondido must change the way it plays if it expects to take down league front-runner Ramona and advance to the playoffs.
The Cougars will start league play on April 9, giving them five days to regroup from a March disaster.
Now it’s one of the featured home fields in the Lions Tournament — a five-decade-old competition that displays baseball talent from up and down the West Coast and from as far away as Langley, Va.
Afenir knows how hard it is to make the field look good for big events, and his players know it, too. They are fiercely protective of it, and Afenir says they often have chased local hoodlums off the grounds if they sneak in after hours.
What makes Escondido’s baseball complex stand out is its clubhouse, a rarity for a high school baseball team.
“The clubhouse is a buffer between the parking lot and the field,” Afenir explains. “When they are in school, they belong to the teachers. When they are on the field, they belong to me. In the clubhouse, they can decompress their day. The clubhouse is theirs.”
Despite having access to that outlet and playing on their home field, the Cougars can’t win any of their three Lions Tournament games, blowing leads and stumbling against weaker teams.
After another brutal loss, Afenir is ready to blow. Standing alone, the 6-foot-1 head coach scores a 10 for intensity. Flanked by his brothers, Troy and Tom, he’s downright scary.
“It doesn’t matter what we do, you guys are going to cough up runs like a bass coughing up a worm,” Afenir says. He kicks a bucket in frustration and later admits the clubhouse took the brunt of the beating.
It’s not just that Afenir hates losing. It’s that he knows his team is better than what it has showcased.
But heading into league play with a 3-10 record, he is losing his will to motivate.
“I’m out of magic tricks,” he tells the team. “I’m out of Vince Lombardi speeches.”
Fortunately for the Cougars, nothing they did in the previous 13 games will matter if they can capture first place in the Valley League. But Escondido must change the way it plays if it expects to take down league front-runner Ramona and advance to the playoffs.
The Cougars will start league play on April 9, giving them five days to regroup from a March disaster.
.jpg)
8 comments:
I liked this story better the first time... when it was called 12 Angry Men!
It's a good story. Can't argue with that. Maybe in 10 years you could do a where are they now?
Coach Afenir is coaching.
Nutter is a brain surgeon.
Emily Werchadlo won Miss Teen USA.
Miss Teen USA? Erm... Thanks, babe
I really don't understand Steve Afenir's coaching style. I'll let his record speak for itself. Out of eight seasons at EHS he has six losing seasons!
Steve Afenir just completed his ninth season as EHS Varsity Baseball coach. He has had seven losing seasons. Obviously things are not working out HIS way. He needs to change his coaching ways or retire.
Steve Afenir just completed his tenth season at EHS as Varsity Baseball Coach. This was his seventh straight losing season! After ten years his winning percentage is at .400. Obviously HIS way is still not working!
The North County Times reported today that Steve Afenir resigned as EHS Varsity Baseball Coach.
EHS Varsity Baseball team just completed its 2013 season with a 15-13-1 record. This was their first winning season in eight years! A new Head Coach, a new attitude!
Post a Comment