Laguna Beach baseball wins tight game at Newport Harbor in Wave League opener
Laguna Beach High School catcher Noah Neufeld has known Nick Bonn – Friday’s starting pitcher – since he was 6 years old.
Their connection is so close, he claims, that they can communicate without speaking.
Between putting down the right signs and coming up with the big hit, there was nothing that Neufeld could not do to help his battery mate in the Wave League opener.
Neufeld went two for three, breaking a tie with a two-out single in the fifth inning, as Laguna Beach earned a 2-1 win over Newport Harbor on the road.
Laguna Beach (7-5), ranked 10th in the CIF Southern Section Division 4 poll, had received back-to-back singles from Griffin Naess and Noah Liao to open the fifth inning, but a pair of groundouts left the Breakers on the verge of a missed opportunity.
As he had done in the previous inning, Neufeld lined a single to the opposite field in right, bringing home Naess as the go-ahead run.
“This was huge for our team morale,” Neufeld said. “This was giant. We needed this win. We got it. We got exactly what we were looking for. It was huge, absolutely huge.”
Bonn was lights out on the mound, recording 10 strikeouts in a four-hit complete game performance. The senior right-hander stranded a runner at third base in the fourth and sixth innings, and he struck out the side in the seventh.
“They’re a great team,” Bonn said of Newport Harbor. “Every inning was a competition. It’s really hard to compete against them. They were constantly putting pressure on me, and there was never an inning off. They’re a great team. I just made sure to bear down and just hit my spots, or try to, at least.”
Trent Liolios saw the ball well against Bonn, picking up a pair of doubles and a run batted in. The second double dropped inside the left field line with the Breakers playing him in the gap in the sixth, but the outfielder got close enough to the ball that the Sailors were unable to score a runner from second on the play.
With two runners in scoring position and no outs, Bonn struck out the next two. Then Troy Christensen put a good swing on a pitch, shooting it deep to the right-center gap, but Naess, the center fielder, was able to track it down before the wall.
Liolios held the Breakers to one run on three hits over four innings in getting the start for Newport Harbor (9-4), the No. 2-ranked team in Division 3.
“I think the kids have done a good job buying in,” Newport Harbor coach Josh Lee said. “We’ve played a lot of close games. Maybe there’s a part of them that this could be a good little wakeup call for them that if they sit back and don’t take it from the other team, they’re not destined to win every single close game.
“I think we were very fortunate early in the year, and the last couple of games, we’ve had opportunities to go take it. We had it kind of tailor made for us in the sixth, and that’s baseball. We’ll bounce back, and the kids will bounce back, and they’ll learn from it, and all will be well in the future.”
As a program, Laguna Beach has dedicated its season to Jeff Sears, who died unexpectedly just before the season. Jairo Ochoa, who had served as the pitching coach on Sears’ staff, took over the reins, providing in-house stability for a baseball program in mourning.
“We’ve dedicated this season to Coach [Sears], and not so much with wins and losses, but just being able to go out and play Laguna Beach baseball,” Ochoa said. “It’s everything that he’s worked for. For the last 15 years, Coach Sears has built the program from the ground up. Laguna Beach baseball is Jeff Sears.
“For us, the only way to be able to go honor that is just to go out there and play the game that he would have wanted us to, and that’s to go out and play hard and play it the right way.”
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