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It’s been about seven weeks since the Granada High baseball team finished the season 32-1 and the California Interscholastic Federation Northern California Division I champions with a 6-4 win over St. Mary’s of Stockton in the finals.
But the fallout from the season hardly ended with the last out on June 1. On June 28, Granada coach Corrigan Willis was feted on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives by local Congressman Eric Swalwell for being picked as the Cal-High Sports 2024 California Coach of the Year.
The 2024 season was a far cry from the end of the 2023 campaign, when the Matadors entered the North Coast Section playoffs as the No. 5 seed and with a lot of expectations. Those ended in the first round with an 8-4 loss to No. 12 Pittsburg.
But while there were some big-time players lost to graduation, the cupboard was hardly bare as Granada was returning a lot of talent with a big group of juniors coming in.
There was a buzz around the East Bay Athletic League, but Willis shrugged it off.
“To be honest you hear it every year about how good of a class you have coming in,” Willis said. “You take it with a grain of salt. But this year, it came to fruition.”
Indeed. And it wasn’t just the varsity, as the freshman team had 60 players try out for the frosh group.
“There were some tough decisions to make,” Willis said. “We ended up with four juniors that have varsity-quality arms pitching for our JV team.”
When the dust settled for picking the team, Willis and his staff felt confident — but the games still had to be played.
“We knew we were going to be good,” Willis said. “But 32-1 good? You never expect something like that.”
A strong group of seniors helped the big group of juniors seamlessly fit right in.
Players like Parker Warner, Nate Brown, Riley Winchell, A.J. Hattaway, A.J. Martinez, Quinn Boyd and Luke Palma to name a few were key seniors.
“The senior leadership and the chemistry with the entire team made the difference,” Willis explained. “No one on this team cared about personal accolades — they just wanted to win. That was the attitude of the team the whole season.”
The wins just kept coming, with the only blemish being a 5-2 loss to Amador Valley on April 10. No team ever wants to lose a game, but at 16-0 and just about in the middle of the season, the loss may have been a blessing.
“I think it may have helped,” Willis said. “It was like, you’re not invincible. From then on, you could feel it in the team every time they came to the yard.”
Maybe the Mats weren’t invincible, but they came close.
After winning the EBAL, the Mats rolled into the North Coast Section playoffs, reaching the finals against EBAL rival De La Salle, a team that averaged 20 runs a game over a five-game stretch.
This time the pitching dominated the game, with Granada grabbing a 1-0 win in the 14th inning.
It was a crazy game that took two days, starting on a Friday at Monte Vista High in Danville, then stopped after 10 innings for darkness, then resumed the next day at Granada for the final four innings.
“That has to likely be one of the greatest NCS playoff games in history,” said Willis, who admitted to getting maybe 90 minutes of sleep Friday night. “It was an epic game — the amount of juice — I have never been a part of a high school baseball game with that type of crowd interaction.”
After the NCS title, the rest of the season was just icing on the cake.
“Granada had never won an NCS (baseball) title,” Willis said. “We had a monkey on our back, and this year we kicked it off. After that, it was just, go out and play.”
And they did in the CIF NorCal D-I playoffs, beating Clovis West 2-1 in the first round, De La Salle 5-0 in the NorCal semifinals, then St. Mary’s-Stockton 6-4 in the championship game.
Editor’s note: Dennis Miller is a contributing sports writer for Embarcadero Media Foundation’s East Bay Division. To contact him about his Pleasanton Preps column, email acesmag@aol.com.
