Posted by Irvine Sign Company
Posted by Irvine Business Sign Company
TORRANCE — The El Camino College baseball team was supposed to meet at 11 a.m. on Friday, April 19. A game against Taft would follow.
Nate Fernley, the coach, sent out a text that moved the meeting to 9:30. Only a few knew why.
Ty Conrad was uneasy because Sladen Mohl was his roommate, a guy who always was where he was supposed to be, when he was supposed to be there. But Mohl never came home the previous night.
Ian Brady knew because his dad, a police officer, had told him.
Assistant coach Grant Palmer had gotten a call from officials at the Alaska Summer League, where the Warriors’ staff had first seen Mohl.
The rest would hear it from Fernley, who never had been asked to crush so many souls before, and knew there wasn’t an instructional video.
The day before, Mohl was standing on a traffic island at the intersection of Sepulveda and Hawthorne. A 16-year-old driver, apparently under the influence, crashed into Mohl and then two cars.
“He was here one day and the next day he was gone,” Fernley said Monday, in his office behind home plate.
“All of that was such a blur. I got a bunch of texts from his mom at about 6:30 a.m., and then from a buddy of mine who’s in the police department. Everything was a whirlwind.”
Fernley explained what happened, watched their distress. Some players said they wanted to play that day anyway. Too many others were in pieces.
“There was no chance,” Fernley said. The game was canceled.
The parents, Kelly Holter and Michael Mohl, flew down from Alaska. On Easter Sunday the team attended a church service in San Pedro, actually in a restaurant, conducted by a friend of the team’s.
Monday brought the memorial service, where Fernley heard his freshmen and sophomores say “phenomenal things, all the perfect words.” He took Mohl’s parents to the airport last weekend, as the Warriors played again.
They beat L.A. Harbor three times. They are 32-6. The No. 2 seed in the Southern California Regional, they next play a best-of-three series against an undetermined opponent, on the first of three weekends that stand between them and a berth in the four-team state championships on May 25-27 in Fresno.
Dealing with death is a universal passage. This one, however, was ridiculously cruel. “I hope the guys saw what the ramifications can be from a horrible decision,” Fernley said.
This horrible decision robbed Mohl of his future and denied everyone else the chance to say goodbye. Community college teams only spend two years together, except for redshirts. Ties aren’t bound, not automatically.
“We’ll see a guy develop as a sophomore and we’ll be so happy and then we realize he’s going to leave,” Fernley said. “We feel that if this is the last place that he plays, then we’ve failed. I know nobody grows up in the backyard dreaming about playing for El Camino. I get it. But I think we’ve built a foundation here.
“Sometimes a guy will be disappointed that he’s here, that he isn’t in Division I, and he’s saying, ‘Well, I’ll go there and kill it.’ And then he looks at the other players and says, ‘Uh-oh.’ It’s pretty high-caliber.”
Until April 19, El Camino’s story was its pitchers. They’re all really good and really different.
Freshman Jimmy Galicia (9-2, 1.82 ERA) got through seven innings in 55 pitches the other day and has given up 61 hits in 89 innings.
Sophomore Max Pappas (7-1, 2.39) is 5-foot-11 and 165 pounds, and was the Warriors’ bridge reliever last year during a playoff run.
Sophomore Aaron Orozco (10-1, 2.27) led the conference in strikeouts, with 88 in 83⅓ innings and is also the DH. He has the best velocity, in the low 90s, but needed an extra year to square away his bookwork. Not many guys agree to redshirt, on the JC level, but he did.
Sophomore Spencer Long was a starter last year and plays second base. As the closer, he has given up one earned run in 21 games, with eight saves. He has a full tank for the playoffs.
“Jimmy might be having the best year of anybody I’ve coached,” Fernley said. “Max doesn’t throw hard but he’s that super-competitive guy you can count on. Aaron was talented enough to go to Division I. He gets emotional, and he’s better that way. And Spencer could be the best of the bunch.”
There’s a time to mourn and a time to play, the longer the better. Fernley sat at his desk and said he thought the blur had passed.
He also said, “I do worry about them, when the season’s over.”
In a world that they know is out of their control, at least they can decide that.
[Read More ...]
Posted by Irvine Sign Maker
For Free Sign Estimate Visit: Lighted Channel Letters Irvine ca
Posted by https://goo.gl/TXzGV5
No comments:
Post a Comment