The core of the 2010 Bulldogs team will include most of the players who went to the Little League Western Region Championship game in 2005 as members of the Tracy National All-Stars. The team won the Northern California championship and made it to the final game of the Western Region tournament.
Eight of the 13 players from the 2005 Tracy National team took to the field for the first week of practice at Tracy High last week. Most of them are juniors at Tracy High, and Bulldogs coach Vic Alkire said his challenge will be to find out where they fit in with a group of returning seniors.
Three of those eight players already have experience on the varsity team. Six are juniors, and two are seniors.
Senior Jacob Valdez is in his third year as a varsity player. He played second base last year and batted .370. Valdez has already signed a letter of intent to attend San Jose State University in the NCAA’s Division I.
Valdez figures the all-star team’s strength in 2005 will translate well to this year’s varsity team.
“We had a lot of talent. We basically had that team every year since we were about 7, so we had good chemistry and had grown up together,” he said.
“Now that they’re coming back this year, it should be the same thing. We have a lot of confidence with each other. Just knowing each others’ skills and how much we love the game, we know how good we can be.”
Two other members of the Tracy National team who will return as part of the Bulldogs varsity are senior Alex Flores and junior Kyle Moses. Moses stood out as a varsity pitcher during his freshman year and played shortstop and batted leadoff last year. Flores joined the varsity team in his junior year and was one of the team’s leading pitchers last year, a role he will repeat.
Flores said the team’s strength includes the work ethic he and the others learned playing high school ball.
“Watching the older guys on varsity when I was a freshman, I saw how they approached the game,” he said. “They didn’t take it as just a game. It was work to them. They had to work to get better. I admired that, and it made me want to do that, too.”
Moses added that even from his freshman year, he feels like he has grown.
“Mentally, I’m stronger. The varsity coaches helped me out with that,” he said. “Physically, I’ve just kind of grown up.”
Juniors from the 2005 Tracy National All-Stars moving up to the Bulldogs varsity this year are Dominic D’Souza, Tyler Sanfilippo, Tyler Trew, Joshua Wesely and Casey Wichman.
Sanfilippo said that they’ve all played together since 2005, either on travel teams or on the Tracy freshman and sophomore teams, but this year it’s the most players on the same team since that championship season.
“This should be fun, because we all had a blast that summer,” he said. “I think everyone from our team has improved since then.”
Another member of the 2005 team, Jacob Lopez, is the only member of that squad to go to West High. He is a junior and joins the Wolf Pack varsity as an infielder and pitcher.
Former Tracy National player Mike Hager plays at St. Mary’s High in Stockton, and Brock Blades plays for Foothill High in Pleasanton. Two other players, Casey Anklam and Jeramee Campbell, attend Tracy High and are involved with other sports.
Emmett Lee, a retired Tracy High physical-education teacher, coached the 2005 Tracy National team, which was ultimately defeated 7-2 by the Southern California champions from Rancho Buena Vista.
Lee, whose property on Lammers Road includes a couple of practice fields and a batting cage where he still trains young players, said the 2005 boys at the ages of 11 and 12 already had a strong work ethic, even if they didn’t realize it at the time.
“We would have two-hour practice, and I told the kids that any of you guys who want to come out early, take some batting practice, you’re welcome,” Lee said.
“Practice would start at 6, and they’d start coming out at 5:30, and then they’d get there at 5, and then they were starting to get there at 4:30. First thing you know, I was throwing two hours of batting practice before practice even started. They were loving every second of it.”
Lee added that these players already had extraordinary talent.
“They’re like million-dollar players,” he said. “Casey Wichman hit .600 and hit eight home runs in 15 games that we played in all-stars. How much would that be worth in the major leagues?”
Lee added that even after facing the best teams in the Western U.S., his players still had room to grow.
“They were really good players, but none of them had reached their potential, so they’re all growing, getting bigger, developing,” he said.
Alkire said that the experience of his new players counts for a lot, but he still will put them all through practices, tryouts and scrimmages before he decides who gets the starting roles on the team.
Among the other returning players, Ricky Diaz, last year’s Most Valuable Player in the San Joaquin Athletic Association, played third base, catcher and pitcher. Brandon Jossey, Robert Emerson and Tanner Turner proved to be proficient outfielders last year.
The positions where Tracy leaned heavily on seniors last year were first base and catcher. Alkire added that even though those are the most obvious open positions, he will take a close look at everybody during scrimmages, including today’s game against Galt and Saturday’s alumni game.
He added that he and his coaches pay attention to who does well in the local Little League and Babe Ruth, and try to anticipate which kids will come to Tracy High. Rarely do this many players from one all-star team end up together again on a high school varsity team, he said.
“You can’t project a 12-year-old five years ahead for varsity, because some of them disappear, and some of them don’t improve a whole lot,” he said. “We knew they were here, but we were anxious to see how they were going to progress. The big majority of them just got better and better as they moved up.”
• Contact Bob Brownne at 830-4227 or brownne@tracypress.com.
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