Success can be fleeting at the ASAA baseball state championships.<\/p>\n
Hopes of winning it all are quickly dashed if you don’t come to play. Lose in Thursday’s opening round, and you’ll finish no higher than fourth.<\/p>\n
Juneau-Douglas High School fell into that fate last season when South Anchorage handed them a tournament-opening 12-2 loss, forcing the Crimson Bears to settle for fourth place.<\/p>\n
Thus, JDHS’ Southeast Conference championship win on Saturday carried considerable importance. It awarded the Crimson Bears the conference’s top seed and ensured they would be playing the No. 2 seed in either the Cook Inlet, Southcentral or Mid Alaska conference.<\/p>\n
They drew the Mid Alaska conference in the first round, and play the North Pole Patriots at 1 p.m. Thursday in Anchorage’s Mulcahy Stadium.<\/p>\n
“Everything helps and we’re coming together finally,” JDHS coach Chad Bentz said. “All the cylinders are starting to go off … I’m excited to see what these guys can do. We’re a pretty good team and we’ll see if we can bring home some hardware.”<\/p>\n
The Crimson Bears haven’t won a state championship since 2012. At that time, Kasey Watts and the rest of the senior class were still a few years from joining the team.<\/p>\n
“Ever since Little League, our goal was, ‘I want to win a state championship for baseball,’ ‘I want to get that ring,’” Watts said. “That was one of my goals coming into high school: I just want to win one state championship. I didn’t care what (sport) it is. I just want to be part of the team and I just want to win it. Now that I know this is my last shot to do it at all, I think it’s real huge.”<\/p>\n
While Watts doesn’t have a high school state championship to his name, he was part of the Juneau Post 25 team that claimed state supremacy in American Legion Baseball last summer.<\/p>\n
Watts said his team has less room for error in this tournament. The American Legion tournament is double elimination, the high school one is single.<\/p>\n
“Now it’s, ‘All right, no messing around this tournament,’” he said. “There’s no make-up game. … If you lose one, you’re out. So I think we know that every game counts and every team we play we can’t take lightly. We have to go full throttle no matter what.”<\/p>\n
Thursday games<\/strong> <\/ins><\/p>\n 10 a.m.: West Valley vs. Ketchikan <\/ins><\/p>\n 1 p.m.: JDHS vs. North Pole <\/ins><\/p>\n