LAKEWOOD — Arvada West is two wins away from proving time is a circle with red seams.
The No. 1-seeded Wildcats cruised through the first two games of the on Friday at All-Star Park, beating Chatfield 7-1 in the opening round and then topping Pine Creek 9-2 in the second round.
The victories pushed Arvada West into Saturday afternoon’s semifinal, as the Wildcats continue to play with parallels to the program’s lone state title team, the 1994 squad featuring National Baseball Hall of Famer Roy Halladay. While Halladay was the headliner then, pitcher/shortstop Cooper Vais — a Texas commit who is the top-ranked junior in Colorado — is the Wildcats’ headliner now.
But the Wildcats of ’94 and ’26 are both much more than their respective superstars.
“People forget that Halladay was the starting pitcher in the state semifinal game against Greeley Central, who had (Rockies pitcher) Shawn Chacón,” Arvada West head coach Danny Vais said. “And then they were able to run out (Zach Keiter) to start the state championship game.
“… There’s lots of similarities between the depth that team had behind Halladay, and the depth this year’s team has, because you can’t win a title off one really good player alone.”
While the ’94 team had the likes of shortstop Brad Madden (now the head coach at Ralston Valley), catcher Chad Sigg, second baseman Eric McMaster and center fielder , the current Wildcats are also loaded. Hence their , no losses in state, a 22-game win streak and 9.75-run average margin of victory.
Beyond Vais, Arvada West is led by senior catcher/right-hander Brayden Reiner (Newman College commit), senior left-hander Cole Eisenreich (Colorado Christian), senior right fielder/right-hander Beau Friesen and junior left fielder Jeramiah Gonzales. That quintet is part of a seven-player contingent that has played together since their Little League days. Danny Vais started coaching his team, Elite Baseball, when Cooper was 7 and this year’s current seniors were 8.
That longevity to keep kids on the same team, under the same coach, is rare in the current climate of competitive youth baseball, where travel teams constantly re-jigger their rosters from year to year. It’s also a similar thread to the ’94 title team, which then made it back to the championship game in ’95 before losing to a Cherry Creek squad that featured multiple future big leaguers.
The entire starting lineup for those ’94 Wildcats had played together since elementary school on a team known as the Arvada A’s. The chemistry developed over a decade of playing together — during which Sigg says the group lost less than 10 total games from the age of eight through their senior season — was critical in the ’94 title game, when Arvada West rallied for three runs in the bottom of the seventh to beat Smoky Hill 6-5.
“The relationships we had with each other were critical, and everyone knew their role on the team and played it really, really well,” Sigg said. “I know it’s been special for this current team, with how much they’ve played together and for Danny, and it’s going to be a big factor for them over these next couple weekends like it was for us.”
On Friday, sophomore Holden Goodrich led the way with two homers against Chatfield, while Eisenreich (1 1/3 innings) and Reiner (5 2/3) combined to limit the Chargers to one run on five hits.
In the second game, Pine Creek took a 2-0 lead in the top of the first, but the Wildcats responded with three runs in the bottom of the frame and then didn’t look back from there as Cooper Vais settled in on the mound. Reiner had a double and a triple with two RBIs, while Vais threw a complete game with 11 strikeouts.
On the other side of the 5A bracket, Legend beat Broomfield 6-3 and Regis Jesuit beat Mountain Vista 3-2 in the opening round. Regis Jesuit then topped Legend 8-3 in the second round, setting up a showdown against Arvada West in Saturday’s 2:30 p.m. semifinal at All-Star Park. The winner of that game will be in the driver’s seat heading into next weekend, with two chances to win one game and clinch the title.
