2016 Perfect Game High School Preview Index
This is an extremely busy time of year for four returning starters from last year’s West Linn (Ore.) High School baseball team, an outfit that finished as runner-up in the Oregon Schools Activities Association (OSAA) Class 6A state tournament.
The heavy workload taken on by senior corner-infielder/right-handed pitcher Will Matthiessen, senior first baseman Tate Hoffman, senior outfielder/right-hander Jake Perkins and junior outfielder/right-hander Tim Tawa is the direct result of their status as two-sport standouts at West Linn, an Oregon athletic powerhouse sitting about 15 miles south of downtown Portland.
In addition to the key roles they play in the success of the baseball team, those four are also members of the WLHS basketball team, which is in the process of making a run towards a fourth straight OSAA Class 6A state championship. The Lions hoopsters took a 22-3 record and No. 1 state ranking into a second-round state playoff game on Saturday.
While the basketball team brings to a conclusion what has already been another successful season, the baseball team is just getting its 2016 season started under third-year head coach Joe Monahan. The program held tryouts early last week to get their varsity, junior varsity and freshman rosters set in an effort to improve on last year’s 23-8 record and state runner-up finish, even if right now they’re doing it without some key components.
Matthiessen recalled last year’s chain of events vividly. The day after winning the state basketball championship he played in an all-day baseball jamboree, a series of “mini” games all strung together.
“It was tough,” he said. “I jumped right into facing live pitching without much practice or anything. “I feel like I’m more prepared this year – I’m hitting when I can, I’m throwing bullpens when I can – but it’s definitely quite an adjustment coming from basketball season straight into baseball season with no break. But we do what we can.”
In the third year of the Monahan regime, West Linn has once again positioned itself as one of the top programs in Oregon, rivaling those at Sheldon (Eugene), Westview (Portland) and Jesuit (Portland), and also one of the top programs in the Perfect Game High School Northwest Region (Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Wyoming and Washington). No school from the Northwest Region cracked PG’s Preseason National High School Top 50 Rankings this year.
That is of no concern to anyone involved with the West Linn program. A guy like Monahan, who has been involved in the Portland youth baseball scene for more than 25 years, knows how many good teams and players populate that part of the country. He sounded especially upbeat when he spoke with PG last week at the conclusion of the three-day tryouts.
“This has been the best start that we’ve had in these last three years,” Monahan said. “Our kids are very focused and I think they feel like they have a lot of unfinished business. At the same time, we’ve made a couple of adjustments with our coaching staff that I think is going to help us eventually, just in how we reach our kids. We have good personalities to build on both with our coaching staff and our players.”
Monahan loves the coaching staff he has assembled. It’s a group of guys that has been around Portland-area baseball most of their lives and were with Monahan at some of his previous stops. His right-hand man – or more accurately, his left-hand man – is Kevin Gunderson, a Portland Central Catholic High School grad and a star on the Oregon State team that won the 2006 College World Series. Gunderson, a left-handed pitcher, was selected by the Braves in the fifth-round of the 2006 MLB June Amateur Draft and pitched four seasons in the minor leagues.
“When I got this job, Coach Gunderson was the first one I went out to recruit,” Monahan said. “He’s not only a talented player but he’s 100 percent committed to just being a great pitching coach and developing young arms; he does it the right way. … We don’t over-pitch kids, we really just try to them developed and maximize their potential, and he does a fantastic job of that.”
The coaching staff will be working with a senior-dominated team that hopes to make some history this spring. A West Linn baseball team has not won an OSAA state championship since 1982 and the school’s appearance in the 6A state championship game last spring was its first in 10 years. The Lions graduated only a handful of impact players from that team, although one was right-hander Karsen Lindell, Milwaukee’s ninth-round pick in last year’s MLB June Amateur Draft who is now a Brewers’ farmhand.
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LAST YEAR’S JUNIORS THAT ARE RETURNING FOR THEIR SENIOR SEASONS THIS SPRING give the varsity roster a sturdy and reliable core. The group is led by Matthiessen, Hoffman, Perkins, right-hander Daniel Ferrario, middle-infielder Brayden Penne and right-hander/outfielder Trevor Wells.
The 6-foot-3, 215-pound Ferrario is the No. 357-ranked over prospect nationally (No. 3 Oregon) and signed with Oregon State. Matthiessen (top-500/6) has signed with Stanford and Pene (t-500/9) has signed with Oregon State.
“Senior leadership at the high school level is paramount. If you have good senior leadership a lot of great things happen for teams,” Monahan said. “If you have some holes that in that leadership it can make it a struggle and I think our senior leadership this year is fantastic. I’m really excited about our seniors.”
Tawa is the top junior, another Stanford recruit who is ranked No. 399 nationally and No. 1 in Oregon (class of 2017). Junior right-hander Garrison Ritter has caught the eye of PG scouts with his play and will be expected to contribute, as have a pair of sophomores, catcher Micah Gibson and outfielder Drew Vannaman.
Thanks to all the years Monahan spent working with players at the youth and high school levels, he couldn’t help but develop a good rapport with and the respect of college coaches from across the Northwest. He advocates for the players he comes to know and will speak candidly regarding their character, what they accomplish in the classroom and their actions away from the field.
“Baseball mirrors the game of life. There’s a lot of adversity and a lot of challenges,” Monahan said before referencing a couple of his previous stops. “Whether it was at Southridge or Horizon Christian or even West Linn many years ago, I believe baseball and our program is all about building men. When you’re building men for the game of life and using baseball as the vehicle, they learn how to overcome adversity, how to be stronger mentally and how to put the team before themselves individually.”
Like most of the country’s top baseball high schools, West Linn not only sends it graduates to Oregon State, Stanford and other NCAA Division-I programs, but also to D-II, D-III and junior colleges. They’re the players a lot of people don’t always hear about but they may be the ones Monahan is proudest of because in some instances they weren’t starters when they were at West Linn.
“We take a lot of pride in making sure our guys get placed, and also making sure that when our program is deep in talent like it currently is (nobody) is forgotten and they’re not any less of a player and they can still have a chance to go on and play at the college level,” he said. “… We have some talent and we’ve got some players that aren’t as well known, but we take a lot of pride in helping our players continue their careers after high school if they get the opportunity.”
Added Matthiessen: “It’s also cool because me, Tim, Brayden, Daniel and a bunch of the other guys that are on the team have played together since fourth or fifth grade,” he said. “It’s been cool to be together and kind of see each other grow and now we’re thinking how Tim and I will be facing Brayden and Daniel in a few years when we’re all off to college. It’s fun to joke around about it and look back and see how far we’ve all come.”
These seniors were sophomores when Monahan first took over in 2014, and after winning a combined four Three Rivers League games during the 2012-13 seasons, the Lions shared the league championship with Clackamas and Lake Oswego that first year, all with 10-5 records (the Lions finished 17-12 overall after a loss in the second-round of the 6A playoffs).
That set the stage for last spring when they won their first four playoff games –including a 1-0 victory over McMinnville in the semifinals – before dropping a 2-1 decision to Sheldon on a seventh-inning error in the championship game. “We just kept rolling and kept rolling. Our defense was playing great, our pitching was great, and going into the finals we thought we had a real shot. It was a really good game … and we’re hoping to get back there this year,” Matthiessen said of the run to the championship game.
Added Monahan: “When (the coaching staff) came back we had to change the mindset to get the program back to where it once was, and we turned that around quickly. Last year I was very proud that our kids built on (the 2014 success) and they were not complacent, and they continued to build on what we started the first year. A lot of those kids got a lot of experience as freshmen and sophomores on varsity during a couple of lean years, and that paid-off last year, too.”
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MONAHAN IS THE OWNER AND OPERATOR OF A WEST LINN SPORTING GOODS COMPANY called Hometown Sports. A native of San Diego, he first endeared himself to the West Linn baseball community by serving on the West Linn Youth Baseball Board of Directors for 15 years while also actively coaching many of the city’s youth teams.
He served as an assistant coach at West Linn from 2000-09 before leaving to help resurrect the baseball program at Horizon Christian High School, an OSAA Class 3A school in nearby Tualatin, where he stayed from 2010-12. Monahan’s youngest son, Shane, attended HCHS and was a junior on the 2011 team that won the OSAA Class 3A state championship.
OSAA Class 6A Southridge High School in Beaverton was Monahan’s next stop in 2013, and for the first time he was officially hired as the head coach. In his first – and what turned out to be his only – season at Southridge, Monahan guided the Skyhawks to the 6A state tournament where they reached the semifinals before losing to Clackamas by a 5-4 count. Clackamas ultimately finished as state runner-up after losing in the championship game to Sheldon, a team Monahan would see in the 6A championship game two years later.
West Linn found itself looking for a new head coach before the 2014 season after second-year coach Kevin Mills resigned to become the high school’s athletic director (he is now the school’s principal). Monahan had planned on staying at Southridge for many years but with a daughter attending WLHS and his other strong ties to the community, the opportunity was too great to pass up.
“It was very hard to leave my boys over at Southridge,” Monahan told Matt Singledecker from the Beaverton Valley Times at the time of his resignation. “I felt like I was all-in from day one and the players went all-in, as well. … I was welcomed into the Southridge program by the players, parents and administration; I was settling in nicely there.”
Monahan wasted little time in getting settled back in at West Linn: “These last two years have been really great,” Matthiessen said. “(Monahan is) a great coach – the players like him a lot – he’s very precise about what he wants done and how he wants it done, and all the players respect that and try to do it the way he wants it. His practices are very sharp and I just feel like he makes the right calls at the right times and really helps us win.”
And now Monahan is facing the task of getting his players ready for a difficult schedule that kicks off on March 14 with singles games against Jesuit and Lincoln high schools, both at Jesuit.
Three Rivers League play won’t begin in earnest until early April and once it starts there will be no relief. While West Linn has several of the league’s top pitchers with Ferrario, Matthiessen and Wells, among others, the Lions also could be facing Lake Oswego senior right-hander Mitchell Verburg (No. 274; Oregon State), Sherwood senior right-hander Adley Rutschman (No. 452; Oregon State) and Canby senior left-hander Nico Tellache (t-500, Oregon) in league play.
“There’s not a day-off in our league,” Monahan said “It’s like the SEC in football right here in Portland; the Three Rivers League is a bloodbath. Then you start adding in teams from the south like Sheldon and North Medford and teams from the Metro (League) – Westview, Jesuit – there’s just some really good teams. But I’m proud of Oregon baseball simply because of the number of next-level players we’re turning out.”
After spending the last few spring breaks traveling to Phoenix for the PG Coach Bob Invitational, the Lions will head to the prestigious Lions Baseball Tournament in San Diego March 22-24. WLHS will play games against Montgomery (Calif.) HS, El Capitain (Calif.) HS and Cathedral Catholic HS (San Diego), the latter which just happens to be Monahan’s alma mater. Monahan also played football and baseball at the University of San Diego.
Matthiessen’s voice was flush with unbridled enthusiasm when he spoke with PG last week. That wasn’t surprising considering the 6-foot-5, 195-pound 18-year-old was just putting the capper on what he hoped would be another championship season on the hardwood while just starting what he hopes will be a championship season on the diamond. He talked about the camaraderie that has developed with his teammates on both squads and especially, perhaps, with his baseball mates.
“Everyone on the baseball team, we get along great,” he said. “On the weekends we hang out and we do stuff together, and there’s never any tension between people. We all like to play together, we have out on the field, we cheer for each other, so it’s pretty cool to be a part of it all.”
Monahan recalled an old saying he had heard somewhere along the road to where he is now: “If you’re green, you grow; if you’re ripe, you rot.” Its message is to always keep evolving, never get stagnant, and Monahan said he and his coaching staff spent the offseason carefully examining the ways this team could get better while also helping the young players elevate their games to a higher level. It’s the devil in the details that will lead to that long sought-after OSAA Class 6A state championship.
“I believe we’ve been successful in accomplishing our basic message,” Monahan said. “Obviously, it helps to have good athletes – that always makes you look better, as well. But when you have good young men on and off the field it really makes it worthwhile, and that’s what we do.
“Kids these days need to be motivated in different ways from maybe when we were young, but at the same time at the end of the day they have a lot more fun when they’re competing and competing well than they do when they’re struggling and not being successful on the field.”