LAKE COUNTY >> Clear Lake High School’s Shaynne Chapin graduates tonight, but the senior probably won’t mind putting in a little overtime Saturday when the Cardinals travel across the hill to play rival Cloverdale in the quarterfinal round of the North Coast Section Division V softball playoffs.
First pitch is 4 p.m. at Daly Field.
Clear Lake-Cloverdale is one of five quarterfinal-round games involving Lake County teams Friday and Saturday, three of them taking place right here in Lake County.
In Friday action involving Division IV schools, the Middletown baseball team is home against St. Patrick/St. Vincent of Vallejo at 5 p.m. while the Lower Lake softball team heads to Crescent City to play Del Norte at 5 p.m.
In other Saturday action, Division IV baseball and softball teams from Kelseyville are both home for 1 p.m. games — softball against Justin-Siena of Napa and baseball against Del Norte.
The bumper crop of quarterfinalists is a tribute to the success of the county’s softball and baseball programs in 2017. Both Kelseyville teams won North Central League I championships, Middletown was a runner-up while Lower Lake and Clear Lake placed third and fourth, respectively, in the softball league standings. All five were seeded in the top half of their respective brackets – Kelseyville No. 2 and Middletown No. 5 in baseball, and Kelseyville No. 3, Clear Lake No. 6 and Lower Lake No. 7 in softball.
Of the five teams headed into quarterfinal action this weekend, four already have a playoff win under their belts. The exception is Kelseyville softball, which had a first-round bye.
Going strictly by the seedings, both Kelseyville teams and Middletown are the favorites to win their respective quarterfinal games. Clear Lake and Lower are underdogs, but not prohibitively so. Clear Lake faces a No. 3 seed in Cloverdale and while the Eagles won both league meetings, the final one was an 8-7 decision in eight innings at Cloverdale. As for Lower Lake, the Trojans and No. 2 seed Del Norte had no common opponents during the regular season and are pretty much strangers to each other going in, scouting reports aside.
There are no shortage of great storylines for Lake County’s five quarterfinalists. Among them:
— Kelseyville baseball is 23-1-1, a winner of 22 straight, and is coming off a second straight undefeated league championship. The team’s ace, Logan Barrick, is 12-0, his second straight 12-win season after going 12-2 last year to tie former Kelseyville star Gary Burns (1988) for the most single-season wins in county history. If Barrick wins one more time, he’ll hold that record all by himself. If Barrick can go undefeated this season, he’ll tie for the best single-season winning percentage for a starting pitcher with at least 10 decisions. Jordan Chana went 10-0 for Clear Lake in 2015. The Knights last won a section championship in 1981.
— Kelseyville softball is 16-3 and is gunning for its first section title since 2000, that after winning its first league title since 1998. The Knights’ were well-rewarded for their breakthrough season at the recent All-League selection meeting (results coming soon).
— Middletown baseball opened the season with nine straight losses but has since won 13 of 16, including 11 of 14 league games. With its 7-6 first-round playoff win over Swett on Wednesday, the Mustangs (13-12) are above .500 for the first time this season. Middletown has never won a sectional title although the Mustangs did reach the Class A finals in 1992 under former longtime coach Wes Martin (for whom their field is named after), losing 13-1 to University (San Francisco) in the championship game, that after stunning No. 1 seed Fort Bragg 4-2 in the semifinals..
— Lower Lake softball (17-7) is trying to reach the Division IV semifinals for the first time after another successful regular-season run. In his sixth season as head coach, Chris Emberson, a former standout athlete at Middletown, has compiled a 103-46 record (.691) with six straight winning seasons. Lower Lake’s last section title came in 1990.
— Clear Lake softball (13-11) secured a 23rd straight winning season with its 20-0 first-round playoff victory over University on Wednesday in San Francisco. Second-year head coach Doug Wingler has only one senior — Chapin — on his roster, which means the Cardinals are pretty well set for the next couple of seasons. A perennial playoff team, Clear Lake won the Division V section title in 2015, head coach Gary Pickle’s final season. The Cardinals also won a league championship in 2016 under Wingler.
