It's been a busy month for former Yavapai County residents now making their respective marks elsewhere - internationally speaking.
Starting with soccer ...
Roger Espinoza somehow missed out on a national championship during his two-year tenure with the Yavapai College men's soccer team from 2005-06. The Roughriders won it all in 2002, 2003 and 2007. Don't feel too badly for Espinoza, though. He's been winning ever since.
After a post-Yavapai career that included a First Team All-Big Ten selection at Ohio State University, Espinoza, now 22, suited up for his native Honduras in this month's UNCAF Nations Cup, the Central American tournament held in Panama City.
Espinoza - who's also on roster as a midfielder with the Kansas City Wizards of the MLS - made three appearances for the Honduran National Team and scored in a 1-0 win over El Salvador to clinch third place for his countrymen and qualify the national team for the Gold Cup. The Gold Cup will determine which teams qualify for the biggest stage of all, the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.
On to baseball ...
Did you see this month when Venezuela's Tigres de Aragua won the Caribbean World Series? Did you also see what role the pitching staff played in Venezuela's seventh Caribbean title? Did you further see who the team's pitching coach is?
If you answered yes, yes and no, then you overlooked Tom Pratt. The former Chino Valley High School coach and athletic director groomed and organized the Venezuelan staff for the 51st Caribbean World Series in Mexicali, Mexico.
In the clinching game, the Tigres needed a nine-inning effort from their bullpen after starter Jeff Farnsworth was a pregame scratch due to a finger injury - just one day after the staff went five relievers deep for seven two-hit innings to beat the Dominican Republic. The team as a whole consisted entirely of journeymen and minor-leaguers, mostly Venezuleans with a handful of American pitchers.
A lifetime ago, in 1990, Pratt started the baseball program at Chino Valley. The Cougars played in the state championship game three times under Pratt, once at the 2A level and twice at 3A. He left a decade later to become pitching coach in the Chicago Cubs' lower level Class A chain in Eugene, Ore., before moving up to the high level Class A team in Daytona soon after.
Speaking of Chino Valley baseball ... you may have seen when the high school campus baseball field this past week hosted a college doubleheader pitting Yavapai against Thompson Rivers, a visiting team from British Columbia, Canada.
In an odd twist, Thompson Rivers' first baseman was already well acquainted with the field which hosts a number of Class 3A AIA teams each spring. Dillon Morgan suited up for the WolfPack following a prep career that included four years with the Camp Verde High School baseball team, a regular Cougars' opponent on the Chino diamond.
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Sad to hear the news last week that at least one familiar voice, maybe the loudest and certainly one of the most distinguished, won't be back on the local sports scene.
Word came down that Greg "Boomer" Wry won't return to the announcer's booth at Yavapai Downs at Prescott Valley when the summer racing season begins in May. Anyone who visited the track on race day got a sense of his nickname. And a bigger horse racing fan you won't find.
Tracey Barker will reportedly step in behind the mic.
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Happy anniversary to some memorable sports moments in local history. Would you believe a near-wrestling bear sighting in Prescott? (Could I make that up?)
We start with a game from the why-don't-they-do-stuff-like-that-anymore? file. On March 1, 1968, the Prescott Junior High freshman basketball team beat the PJHS faculty 61-47 in front of more than 1,000 spectators who turned up for the afternoon tip. Mike Boyd scored 16 points to lead the 9th graders, who trailed 13-11 after one quarter. But the Pups erupted for 18 points in the third to take a 46-42 lead into the fourth quarter where the faculty ran out of gas against the kids, closing with an underwhelming five points in the last period. Cal Cordes scored 12 for the faculty.
The atmosphere was just as electric on Feb. 21, 1975, when the Yavapai College men's basketball team clinched a second-place tie in the ACCAC with a 62-55 win down at Glendale. Fans showered the environment with, as one writer at the game noted, "a battle of the garbage can bands in the balcony." Then the officials got involved. When YC went into a stall to draw out Glendale's zone, the Gauchos were warned by the officials to come out and meet the ball or else draw a technical. An inadvertent whistle only added to the confusion. "I don't know what was really going on part of the time," Yavapai head coach Dave Brown admitted afterward. "There was a problem at the scoring table, some of the fans on both sides were really on edge. It was a very tense situation."
No February/early March event, however, will ever top Feb. 25, 1955.
The City of Prescott hosted its second wrestling show of the winter at the senior high school gymnasium, co-sponsored by Ernest A. Love Post No. 6 of the American Legion. Not only did the event feature four "outstanding women grapplers" (including a one-armed wrestler who went by "Hillbilly Kate"), the event promised a bout pitting Mike, a 490-pound wrestling bear, against Nature Boy, a 230-pound man. Mike would wear a muzzle and gloves to safeguard the suddenly-nature-challenged Nature Boy. But when fans showed up, there was no bear. Before the program started, officials announced that because Mike the bear had injured Nature Boy so badly in a recent match, Nature Boy had backed out and canceled the bout. Refunds were available on site.
