MARCH 18, 2016, KEIZERTIMES, PAGE B3
Celt baseball team ready for sunshine
By ERIC A. HOWALD
Of the Keizertimes
In 2015, the McNary High School varsity
baseball team made it all the way to the second
round of the state playoffs before getting ousted
by Sheldon High School.
Repeating that feat will mean the Celtics
will have to answer one big question early on:
who will be the go-to players on the mound?
“The pitching is our biggest question mark.
We have lots of kids that pitch, but we don’t
have the experience factor with a lot of var-
sity innings,” said Larry Keeker, McNary head
coach.
Josiah Gilbert, a 6-foot-3 junior, will be the
Celitc’s No. 1, but it remains to be seen who
will step up behind him.
“The problem is we don’t know how the
kids are going to respond to a live game situa-
tion yet,” Keeker said.
Making matters worse is that the team has
had limited opportunity to play on an actual
fi eld in the weeks leading up to the start of
the season. Drenching rains have kept the team
mostly confi ned to the gym for practices.
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“We’re defi nitely ready to see some sun,”
said Celt Collin Young, a senior fi rst baseman.
“But we’ve really focused on the fundamentals
in the gym, breaking each step of every action
down from swings to throws, but everything
changes in a live game.”
The Celts were scheduled to face Cleveland
High School in their fi rst game of the season
Monday, March 14, but it was postponed due
to downpours.
The team’s fi rst home game after returning
from spring break will be Wednesday, March
30, vs. Oregon City High School.
While the preseason games are, in part, a
time to shake off the dust, they can also become
a factor late in the season when rankings dictate
which teams face each other and where.
“We defi nitely want to win those games, but
we need to keep everyone healthy because it’s
a long season,” said senior shortstop Matt Agui-
lar. Aguilar is already committed to continuing
his baseball career at Lane Community College
next fall.
In addition to Young and Aguilar, senior re-
turners include Evan Alger, Davis Kaiser, Tan-
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Celt Josiah Gilbert will return for his junior season as the Celtic’s No. 1 pitcher on the mound.
McNary fi nished second in the Greater Valley Conference in 2015.
ner Gordon, Isaiah Holt, Trevor Gilbert, Matt
Koopman, and Trent Van Cleave, who is return-
ing to the sport after two seasons away.
“It’s a solid group of seniors and we’ve got
some good talent in the junior class along with
a couple of players from the sophomore class,”
Keeker said.
Taking the temperature of the team on de-
fense has been diffi cult in gym practices, but
Keeker said the team’s offense was holding its
own.
“We’ll have some speed at the top of the
line-up and some good hitters in the middle,”
he said.
While the Celtics have fi nished among the
top teams in the Greater Valley Conference in
recent seasons, Aguilar said the team was gun-
ning for a league championship this year.
“We haven’t won the conference since 1999
and we want to hang another banner,” he said.
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