At the start of the 2018 season, Camp Verde High School head baseball coach Will Davis expected his team, with zero seniors and three juniors, to go out and compete every day and build for the future.
With one game left in the regular season, the Cowboys [10-7, 5-2 Central Region] were in the driver’s seat to winning a second straight Central Region title after defeating first place Paradise Honors High School 7-6 on Friday, April 20.
“It’s been an up and down year, and lately it’s been a lot of down just to be honest, since we lost to [Paradise Honors on April 3] …. We just haven’t been able to find our rhythm. I’m hoping today’s game would do that,” Cowboys head coach Will Davis said. “I mean honestly at the beginning of the year, I’d have been real happy with a .500 team, and I’d have been real happy with a team that just went out and competed and played hard, regardless of record or score.”
In the seventh inning, Camp Verde trailed 6-5 before junior starting pitcher Dominiq Bruno scored on a pair of errors, starting with a botched pickoff attempt to first base. Then Cowboys freshman third baseman Peyton Kelley’s ground ball scored sophomore second baseman Coke Bast for the walkoff win.
It was not only noteworthy that the Cowboys managed to put themselves in position to win a region championship and earn a berth to the Conference 2A state tournament, but it was the manner in which they did it.
The young team, which starts six underclassmen, has struggled to fight back from deficits. After going 3-1 through the first round of region play, the team suffered tough back-to-back losses.
Against No. 10 Scottsdale Christian Academy on April 14, the Cowboys led 4-1 before giving up a 13-run fifth inning and lost 14-4. Then on Tuesday, April 17, they trailed early and never came back in an 11-2 loss to Sedona Red Rock High School after winning 10-1 the first time out. It was their first loss to the Scorpions since 2015.
“We came to the [Sedona] game thinking, ‘We freaking run-ruled them last time, and now we’re going to run rule them again.’ Then they come in and run-ruled us,” Cowboys freshman shortstop Mason Rayburn said. “Thinking more about Paradise Honors than Sedona, and we should’ve been thinking about the first game.”
Against Paradise Honors, Camp Verde fought back from two deficits, at 2-0 and 6-5. It even took the lead at 4-2 on Bruno’s second-inning RBI triple, and then at 5-2 in the third when Rayburn scored on a passed ball.
“It’s a lot of growing. They’ve grown a lot all year. There’s been games where, being young, we don’t show up at all, and some where we lose it sometime during the game, but they’re starting to understand what it takes to win at this level,” Davis said.
Rayburn went three for three and drew a walk in the victory. Bruno went the distance, giving up 11 hits and three earned runs with five strikeouts and zero walks.
A win at Northland Preparatory Academy on Tuesday, April 24, would seal the region title for the Cowboys, but results were unavailable at press time. Having thrown 94 pitches on Friday, Bruno, the team’s ace, was not available. Neither was junior Dakota Battise, who is out for the remainder of the season.
In the April 17 game against the Scorpions, Camp Verde faced a deficit from the start. In each of the first four innings, Camp Verde got its leadoff batter on base, but it failed to manufacture a run on three of those occasions.
As the game wore on, the deficit continued to grow while the Cowboys could not string hits together.
“As soon as they got the first run it’s ‘Oh it’s only one run,’ and then we thought ‘OK, we’re still going to win,’ and then we couldn’t put up a run or anything, and it just went downhill,” Rayburn said.
